Sony's been on my "do not buy" list since the rootkit debacle. They're missing out on sales of video games, cameras, and other consumer electronics (not to mention music and movies) for their misbehavior. And I know I'm not the only one who remembers.

That's good for you, and I fully support your decision, but I wish to posit an argument about Sony and their numerous "debacles" over the past decade starting from the CD Rootkit.

Do you remember when Sony went after GeoHot, George Hotz, and fail0verflow for his and their reverse engineering of the PS3 and the outrage and virtual pitchforks that were raised with others touting that they too would never purchase a SCEA/SCEI product again?

Remember even more outrage that was raised after PSN went down and it was revealed just how incompetent their internal network security was and how they allegedly stored unencrypted user information and used significantly insecure and broken cryptographic hashing algorithms?

In both instances, people said that they were done with Sony. Yet, the Xbox One has had significantly less adoption than the Sony PS4. Please note, I'm not going to argue that the people that said that they were no longer purchasing Sony products are the very same people that bought a PS4 over an Xbox One, but I am arguing that these people had a minuscule to nonexistent effect on the overall repercussions against Sony as to not matter.

Searching for "Xbox One PS4 Sales" brings up hundreds of articles ranging from just after launch up to this very day with month-by-month numbers landing from a 1.4 million unit difference in January of 2014, to a 1.7 million difference between the PS4 and Xbox One in the second quarter of 2014, and estimates at that time of 9 million PS4s sold globally versus 5 million for the Xbox One. An article from October of 2014 pegs the PS4 at a 40% lead over the Xbox One. This is a significant difference. Apparently, no one else cares how draconian or insecure a company treats their data, because only a few people remember the short term disasters over the long term entertainment value they receive from the products produced by these companies.

> Please note, I'm not going to argue that the people that said that they were no longer purchasing Sony products are the very same people that bought a PS4 over an Xbox One

Given the "currently playing" lists on e.g. Steam after a boycotted game releases? I'm going to make that argument. It seems most simply don't have the willpower to maintain a boycott until even, say, the first sale for a single game - nevermind a whole company long term. It's easily 90% noise. Talk is cheap.

> but I am arguing that these people had a minuscule to nonexistent effect on the overall repercussions against Sony as to not matter.

[citation needed]

While I'd be inclined to believe you're right based on the mentioned ancedata, that doesn't necessarily mean they'll have a minuscule effect on other companies, if consumers are ever sufficiently incensed enough to follow through on their word. Or avoid purchasing from them without making big fuss about it, as I'm currently doing with Lenovo for at least my next purchase.

I'd also note that laptops are a bit more "fungible" than consoles and gaming networks, in the sense that you can easily find similar laptops with similar specs for anything you might want from Lenovo's lineup. You'll hear gamers talk about how they "need" the latest COD, or a PS4, but they're more likely to pun about "Hell" (if only out of amusement) than talk about how they "need" another Dell. Or Lenovo. Better chance of making a difference?

...that said, I'm not seeing any kind of significant dip in Lenovo's stock price around the Superfish debacle. Superfish doesn't appear to be publicly traded, although their placeholdered homepage is a good sign for bad things having happened to them.

You are not the only one.

Absolutely not true. I control purchasing for my company, and have caused to be purchased a bunch of Lenovo's. No more, though.

What will you switch to? I lost faith in almost all other laptop manufacturers due to poor quality.

I bought a Dell Precision M3800 for personal use a few weeks ago. It's available without a Windows license which was a plus (I live in Ubuntu-land). Only drawbacks so far have been a) the available Linux drivers for the Broadcom wireless seem a bit wonky and b) a lot of apps have issues with the high DPI display.

Macbook Pros and run Windows in a VM (VMware). With the SSDs on my Mac, it's literally faster than the beefy machine with spinning disks I had running Windows 7.

With Mac's Spaces, I can switch to another screen running Windows with Control-Rightarrow (using a non-Mac keyboard here). It's really seemless and I've never found a single drawback to it.

I've got a Dell e7440 which is a really nice compromise between portability and power. It's built out of something metal and has survived me taking it everywhere so far. 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD and an i7 does the job.

Were you buying their consumer line?

Sometimes. It's been about 6 months since the last one and I don't remember the model, though. We've been moving to Macbook Pros, mostly, with the odd Dell thrown in here and there. I don't like the Dells, though. The wifi on them always sucks and we need to get USB wifi dongles to make wifi reliable.

I will continue to order as many Lenovo machines as I need. It is more important to me that the vendor serves my needs than what HN thinks about them. I'm not buying something crappy for my purposes because HN is mad.

This is a strange comment. Most people I see on HN like Lenovo because of the quality of their machines. Where I can see a purchasing manager or head of IT against them at the moment is because they surreptitiously installed software which caused a security risk.

If you're fine with your company's data possibly being compromised in the future then continue your ordering from Lenovo.

I will still buy from them because I always make it a habit to do a clean install whenever I get a new computer just because of all the crap every vendor adds to consumer PCs.

From what I know (admittedly not a ton), many IT people have custom OS images they install on bulk PC purchases. If this is the case, then any malware that ships with Lenovo would be a non-issue, especially because this was the consumer line of Lenovos, not the business line.

However I could be wrong, and perhaps there are companies that feel betrayed. Custom images may be a thing only large companies do.

As a consumer, I still view Lenovo as the best PC hardware and would buy again but would probably be suspicious of any new purchase (as in, wipe the HD and install a store-bought copy of Windows myself). That said, I use the Thinkpad line which was unaffected by Superfish from what I know.

What makes it a strange comment? Aren't the two of you saying the same thing?

Not really. The 'just because HN is mad' makes it sound like all the people here are boycotting Lenovo for irrational reasons. I don't think HN is 'mad' at the company, they just have some legitimate concerns.

Ah, I think it's possible HN to be rationally mad, but I still wouldn't weight that factor. I thought all pekk was saying is "I evaulate my needs, not HN's needs".

You are correct, but apparently this opinion is not okay to express on HN while it is always okay to say "I will never buy from Lenovo," even though the statements are mirror images of each other. There is a "right" opinion and a "wrong" one here.

I consider what Lenovo did a breach of trust. That's enough for me to turn away from them.

people who actually cared about the superfish incident will remember this, and thats where it counts and where it will hurt. Everyday joe couldn't care less about superfish.

Lenovo doesn't care that your individual security minded person had an issue with it, Lenovo cares that their volume purchasers continue to purchase in volume. They weren't impacted and they don't care.

There are basically no long term downsides to Lenovo for doing what they did.

And you know that how? News articles in the normal media titled "Lenovo spreading Spyware" reach exactly those normal customers, and it is quite possible that this has an effect. And further, those users interested in the stuff are the ones recommending laptops to others.

We simply don't know the effect because we know no sale figures, or do we?

It's a relevant question whether enough people care. The Sony rootkit scandal was (almost) as bad as this, yet it didn't make a dent in their computer sales and the Playstation sold better than ever.

As someone who hasn't bought a Sony labelled product since the rootkit scandal, not sure how much I agree... they definitely would have gotten far more from me when I've bought a couple large TVs, and two stereo systems since then... I even held out on a Bluray player for a long time (I didn't buy sony labelled at least).

Though it's akin to avoiding Bank America Corp in practice, they have their hands in every pot.

Any yet their e-reader business failed. And they don't seem to have done so well on mp3 players (they were big money for other companies a few years ago). Their phone sales are weak compared to other companies with a similar product.

The thing these companies miss is that non-tech people ask their tech friends/family before purchasing new things... So piss off a few 100,000 of the techy people and that can translate over the next few years to millions of lost sales.