Lenovo says 80% of its devices will be user repairable by 2025

[Shawn Knight]

Forward-looking: One of the world's leading PC manufacturers has publicly committed to the right to repair movement. During a recent speaking engagement at the Canalys EMEA Forum 2023, Luca Rossi, SVP and president of the intelligent devices group at Lenovo, said more than 80 percent of their devices will be repairable by 2025 – either by the customer directly or "by the channel" – thanks to new designs focused on serviceability.

What's more, four out of five repair parts will be repairable themselves as part of an effort to reduce the company's overall impact on the environment.

Clarifying further, Rossi said the change means that components like batteries and SSDs will no longer be sealed within devices, and will be swappable on site.

As The Register highlights, Lenovo is not exactly the worst offender when it comes to ease of repair, but there is certainly room for improvement. While perhaps not the most lucrative business model, having product lines that are easy to service will no doubt extend the life of many devices and lead to less e-waste in landfills. Lenovo also stands to benefit from the additional revenue stream created by its replacement parts business (albeit at the expense of some new device sales that might have otherwise occurred).

Sustainable Computing: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. But... Is It Really That Simple?

Again, as the publication correctly points out, most PC makers are not getting into the repairability game by choice. Right to repair movements are gaining momentum worldwide, and companies like Lenovo are wise to proactively hop on the bandwagon before they are forced to do so by regulators. Of course, you will not hear any corporate voices saying as much outright. Instead, they will play up the environmental angle and pretend that serviceable devices will not cannibalize new device sales.

Asked about this very scenario, Rossi said you cannot look at it in such a way. The executive said there are so many potential opportunities on the table that he is not worried about damaging their business "by doing what is right for the planet."

Image credit: Heliberto Arias

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https://www.techspot.com/news/100415-lenovo-80-devices-user-repairable-2025.html

 

[antiproduct]

Yeah.... as someone who just got 1000 Lenovo laptops and within 2 months had over 10% hardware failure, I guess that's good. Probably just means they'd rather pass the repair of their crappy laptops on to the end user.

 

[yRaz]

Yeah.... as someone who just got 1000 Lenovo laptops and within 2 months had over 10% hardware failure, I guess that's good. Probably just means they'd rather pass the repair of their crappy laptops on to the end user.

You probably bought them in bulk from a recycler who kept the good ones to sell themselves and sold you the questionable ones at a discount.

I'm curious, what was the most common point of failure in the laptops?

 

[antiproduct]

You probably bought them in bulk from a recycler who kept the good ones to sell themselves and sold you the questionable ones at a discount.

I'm curious, what was the most common point of failure in the laptops?

Nope, bought them brand new directly from Lenovo. Most common failure is that one of the memory slots goes bad, if it has a stick in the bad slot, then it won't boot. Aside from that one, had about 2% of the overall deployment hardware failures have been a number of weird issues, more than I ever had with the previous fleet of Dell laptops. My work is a living nightmare fixing these pieces of crap all day instead of doing all the other stuff I need to be working on.
Edit: Still stressing this is a 10%+ failure rate with only owning the machines for 2 months!

 

[yRaz]

Nope, bought them brand new directly from Lenovo. Most common failure is that one of the memory slots goes bad, if it has a stick in the bad slot, then it won't boot. Aside from that one, had about 2% of the overall deployment hardware failures have been a number of weird issues, more than I ever had with the previous fleet of Dell laptops. My work is a living nightmare fixing these pieces of crap all day instead of doing all the other stuff I need to be working on.
Edit: Still stressing this is a 10%+ failure rate with only owning the machines for 2 months!

Is it the same slot or is it a nearly even split? I'm legitimately curious. Also, it's been my experience that the majority of products that will fail, fail in the first 90 days so you're probably going to see the failure rate drop off soon if that makes you feel any better.

Just something that I noticed over the years, just because the memory slot stops working does not mean it's that memory slot that is bad. I've seen memory slot issues caused by a poorly seated CPU. These are probably soldered but board flex from over heating could cause cause memory channel issues. It might save you some headaches in the long run if you make sure people aren't using them on their laps and blocking the cooling. I try to run my laptop on a cooling stand whenever possible but that's mostly because it gives me a more comfortable typing angle.

 

[antiproduct]

Is it the same slot or is it a nearly even split? I'm legitimately curious. Also, it's been my experience that the majority of products that will fail, fail in the first 90 days so you're probably going to see the failure rate drop off soon if that makes you feel any better.

Just something that I noticed over the years, just because the memory slot stops working does not mean it's that memory slot that is bad. I've seen memory slot issues caused by a poorly seated CPU. These are probably soldered but board flex from over heating could cause cause memory channel issues. It might save you some headaches in the long run if you make sure people aren't using them on their laps and blocking the cooling. I try to run my laptop on a cooling stand whenever possible but that's mostly because it gives me a more comfortable typing angle.

The majority of the failures are with one specific slot, but not exclusive to that slot. Yes, I know most failures happen within the first couple months, but not this many. Like if I had maybe 5% failure rate by now, sure... okay, bad, but recoverable. I'm having a steady stream of at least one or two hardware failures a day, it doesn't seem like there's any slowdown. Now that I've passed 10% failure, I really have lost confidence with Lenovo. With the previous fleet of Dell laptops, it was maybe 1 failure a month, so its exponentially different. Also, stumbled upon a reddit thread of someone who had a slightly older model of Lenovo Thinkpad who claimed a 50% failure rate after 6 months. They stated a lot was the webcam, which is bad, but at least it's still functional.

As for the memory slot being bad... yeah, sure it could be something else, it is a soldered in CPU, like all other laptops. But the symptom is always the same. I've been working with Lenovo to resolve the issue and right now I just have stacks and stacks of these failed laptops waiting for a resolution. They've sent samples to manufacturing to figure out the problem and address it. As for the surface it's used on, I can't easily enforce users to put them on a solid surface, but I believe most of them are used on a desk. Still, not an excuse for such an easy failure even if they were using a LAPtop on their lap. Also, should point out that about 8 or so of these were DOA right out of the box with these issues.

 

[VaRmeNsI]

Will they also drop the part BIOS whitelisting as well that artificially restricts upgrades?

 

[OortCloud]

Wonder if Apple will ever bow to this pressure and stop being a morally bankrupt environmental ****-storm? Given their recent track record, while Tim Cook is in charge it seems unlikely.

 

[Karlos95]

As a techie, I can tell you right now, if you want your sales to boost, make your devices easy to repair. If it takes 10 screws just to take the back chassis off a laptop, or a poorly engineered desktop chassis that makes it difficult to work on simple components, or even "hidden" screws, your devices won't be recommended to the masses by computer techs...

For example, if I work on a device and think damn this is a breeze, I'll be recommending said device to every client I have so that if they have a problem in the future, I can easily repair it. Less headaches all around.

And from that, I will never recommend a HP or Microsoft device.

 

[jpvalverde85]

Being one, we techies would recommend easy to service (but not so easy to keep alien fingers out!), easy to maintain-fix-replace parts (yeah ultrabooks are fine for devices to carry on with you, but big work laptops beyond 14" can have a better balance with standard parts, socketed processors, mxm gpu upgrades, etc, also standard parts are a great thing (I'm looking at you Apple), no hidden screws and or latches (this an actual reason to stay away of HP cheap-o notebooks series).
But I dont buy their comments, only Thinkpads T and L series are worthy of the repairable moniker, most of the rest are very integrated disposable units. They made repairable systems in the past and have forgoten (on purpose) how to engineer and build them.