by maxloh 18 hours ago
I don’t think so. Motorola Mobility is owned by the Chinese Lenovo, making it an adversary-owned entity in the eyes of most Western governments.
Even with a fully open-source OS and first-class MDM, the company would struggle to gain significant market share. The Hardware Root of Trust and the binary blobs would still be compiled by a firm that Western governments view as a fundamental supply-chain risk.
Even then, it can be solved by having open-source firmware, kernels, drivers and userspace. If they make that the core value proposition, they will win.If they can guarantee the entire execution chain is open & clean, or even just flashable with custom firmwares/kernels, that would be amazing.
I never worked in a corporate that didn't use Lenovo
You won’t see any Lenovo in the defense industry.
Defense industry is a small fraction of the notebook market, meaning Lenovo is still no. 1 globally even when missing the global defense market
There are MacBook companies, but Lenovo is basically the only other alternative.
I've had Dell in the past, but haven't seen one in years.
Re: "The Hardware Root of Trust and the binary blobs would still be compiled by a firm that Western governments view as a fundamental supply-chain risk."
Sorry to break it to you, but all of the US hardware firms have now fallen into this same trust-abyss. Trump's USA is now seen in many parts as as big, if not a bigger, digital sovereignty threat as China's communist party is.
> Lenovo (/ləˈnoʊvoʊ/ lə-NOH-voh, Chinese: 联想; pinyin: Liánxiǎng), is a Hong Kong–based Chinese-American[11] multinational corporation
> Lenovo originated as an offshoot of a state-owned research institute.[14] Then known as Legend and distributing foreign IT products, co-founder Liu Chuanzhi incorporated[2] Legend in Hong Kong in an attempt to raise capital and was successfully permitted to build computers in China
Ok holy fuck, how did they stop that from being common knowledge? Nobody I know would ever think of Lenovo as nothing but another US company.
I guess you're too young to remember Lenovo buying IBM's PC business and folks complaining about security since they were Chinese?
It was common knowledge in my circles back at the time of the acquisition, but that's been 20+ years ago now. I try to bring attention to it whenever I'm asked about using Lenovo gear.
I’m pretty sure OP is being sarcastic.
The companies I have worked for in the past have always sworn by Thinkpads.
I don’t care who owns them Thinkpads are amazing.
I can only supply you with facts. Trust could be an emotional word after all.
Using a device manufactured by an adversary-owned entity defeats the sole purpose of MDM. Your data isn't safe within an OS compiled by a Chinese company that "originated as an offshoot of a state-owned research institute." [1] There are so many layers where a backdoor could be hidden within the stack.
I don't think Big Techs or any companies that take data security seriously would accept such a device.
I remember it being a pretty big deal when IBM spun off thinkpads to Lenovo, and then again when they were caught installing malware in the EFI on some of the entry level models.
I've avoided them since despite them being the favored laptop of most corporate and Linux users.