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Lenovo's Chairman Says Worst is Over For PC Giant (scmp.com)
It has taken almost four years but China's Lenovo Group has begun to see some rewards from the multibillion dollar acquisitions of IBM's commodity server business and Google's Motorola Mobility smartphone unit, with the company recently regaining the crown from HP as the world's biggest personal computer (PC) maker.
From a report: The company in November posted a third, straight quarter of profit growth as its Motorola business broke even operationally and as its data centre unit posted much-reduced losses of US$3 million, allowing it to say it was on track to be a "sustainable, profitable growth engine." Chairman and chief executive Yang Yuanqing believes the worst is over for Lenovo, which has spent the past few years refocusing on mobile and smart devices, as well as its data centre services, in what the company has called an "intelligent transformation" to capitalize on the rapid growth of the internet of things (IoT) market globally, as well as the wider adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation. "Because of the past few years of laying the groundwork ... we have all the assets needed to now push ahead in the field of automation [where processes can be conducted with minimal human inputs]," he said in a recent interview.
It's funny you mention about stealing designs. Lenovo ran a survey on doing their 25th year anniversary thinkpad, where users overwhelmingly told them they want certain features. While they did honour the 7 row keyboard of old, another one was against using their awful 16:9 displays. They just couldn't help themselves. Users preferred 16:10 or the newer 3:2 aspect ratio, but they stuck with 16:9, all in a really premium price point.
Too ignorant to even do what their customers overwhelmingly tell them!
> You probably forgot price :D
> Anyway, I'm happy with my Mac Books
Yeah if it's the boss's money Macbooks are a reasonable option. Everyone on our office uses them and the only problems I've seen is when you get a bad bit in the wrong place on the RAM, you're screwed unless you paid for Apple Care. Can't replace the RAM and you can't use a kernel option to skip that byte, as you can in Linux.
One day I may get around to writing a *very simple* kernel extension to handle that. All the extension does it allocate some memory at the desired address and use it to - nothing. Just says it's using that RAM address, which means nobody else can use it. With billions of bytes of RAM, it's pretty common for a few bytes, a few addresses, to be unreliable. It's handy to be able to skip using those and use the 99.9999% of the RAM that is good.