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Lenovo Saying Goodbye To Bloatware
An anonymous reader writes: "Lenovo today announced that it has had enough of bloatware. The world's largest PC vendor says that by the time Windows 10 comes out, it will get rid of bloatware from its computer lineups. The announcement comes a week after the company was caught for shipping Superfish adware with its computers. The Chinese PC manufacturer has since released a public apology, Superfish removal tool, and instructions to help out users. At the sidelines, the company also announced that it is giving away 6-month free subscription to McAfee LiveSafe for all Superfish-affected users.
You are overestimating the "value" of the bloatware by an order of magnitude. That $350 computer will now be $385, not $700.
We are starting immediately, and by the time we launch our Windows 10 products, our standard image will only include the operating system and related software, software required to make hardware work well (for example, when we include unique hardware in our devices, like a 3D camera), security software and Lenovo applications.
So, you're still going to be shipping it with trial versions of bloatware McAfee or bloatware Norton or whatever, plus your Lenovo-branded applications (which are really just re-branded bloatware ad-servers disguised as "handy applications for running your 3D camera!"). In other words, it'll be "bloatware-free" except for all the bloatware you're still going to pre-load onto it. Thanks, Lenovo!
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
What a set of terrible and mis-guided ideas
1. TPM was there for a while, got removed because nobody wanted to use it. Nothing has changed since so nobody will bring it back. Also see point 3.
2. Whatever, customers don't understand and want encryption. Vendors don't care about that. Vendors don't have skills to do that. Vendors love incompatible differentiation factors.
3. Extra hardware costs money. What will really happen is that the bios will be hacked to fake two disks making the internal SSD impossible to replace, bricking the machine if linux boots and bypasses bios or becoming a vector for installing persistent malware after some bugs are found.
4. NIC firewall? It will be a proprietary, half-baked solution that will be broken quickly and the vendor will never ever patch this. Unless you run 10Gb ethernet on a netbook nobody needs a co-CPU for packet filtering.
Or Lenovo realizes a couple of things.
1) People who buy Lenovo aren't the price-sensitive type, or
2) People who buy Lenovo are corporate clients who wipe the PCs anyways.
Basically, Lenovo's not really catering to the price-sensitive consumer - someone who will spend no more than $500 for a new computer (laptop or desktop). Plenty of companies to fulfill that market segment.
Instead, Lenovo realizes that people buy it for the legacy and thus will pay more for it. So even if the lack of shovelware causes Lenovo PCs to cost $100 more, their customers are such that they will pay for that benefit.
Either that, or they're corporate clients who wipe the PCs anyways.
You want cheap PCs? You're gonna get shovelware. You willing to pay for quality? Less to none.
To the contrary, I love bloatware because it means other people are subsidizing my PC that I'm going to be installing a fresh OS upon receiving anyway.