
Lenovo, Ashton Kutcher to Launch Line of Phones This Year - ZanyProgrammer
http://recode.net/2014/02/28/dude-wheres-my-phone-lenovo-ashton-kutcher-to-launch-line-of-phones-this-year/
======
chasing
"Roman said while Kutcher isn’t actually working on any of the design
circuitry, the user experience of the phones will very much be his."

Sounds like he'll actually be a user experience designer, not an "engineer."

Also, unless he's really doing the leg-work of user research, studies,
interviews, and test sessions, he's not really a user experience designer,
either. He's just a guy with some opinions.

~~~
selmnoo

         He's just a guy with some opinions
    

And not even very good ones at that: [http://www.businessinsider.com/ashton-
kutcher-fires-back-at-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/ashton-kutcher-
fires-back-at-woz-2013-8)

He actually now has a colorful history of saying and doing douchey things like
this.

Edit: particularly the douchey thing here was him lying and attacking woz:
("He’s a brilliant man and I respect his work, but he wasn’t available to us
as a resource, so his account isn’t going to be our account because we don’t
know exactly what it was. We did the best job we could. Nobody really knows
what happened in the rooms [...] Woz is being paid by another company to
support a different Steve Jobs film."\-- an outright lie; woz got back to
them, and kutcher et al. didn't like making changes at odds with their
preconceived narrative of how Jobs would be presented as the main hero as both
a tech guru and frontman).

~~~
deletes
Funny how he accuses Woz of supposedly being paid to promote some other film,
while Kutcher himself was directly hired to star and promote his.

~~~
k-mcgrady
Isn't his accusation true? I think Woz is an advisor on the other Jobs film
that Srokin is working on. That doesn't make Woz a bad guy.

------
ZanyProgrammer
From the article "Kutcher studied biochemical engineering at the University of
Iowa before leaving school to pursue a modeling career. " Just like I'm a
mathematician because I took vector calculus as an undergrad!

~~~
wslh
I played the flute in elementary school. It seems nobody listened...

------
k-mcgrady
I wonder how much input he's really going to have. His endorsement is probably
going to bring them quite a lot of value (I used to watch Two and a Half Men
and he was regularly using a MacBook - switch that for a Lenovo product and
they're getting a lot of free marketing). I remember trying a Twitter client
he was part of creating once and it was pretty bad.[1]

[1] Someone else owns the domain now but I was able to find this:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20111011125847/http://www.aplus-a...](http://web.archive.org/web/20111011125847/http://www.aplus-
app.com/)

~~~
berrypicker
I wonder how much input Will.i.am has as the "director of creative innovation"
at Intel.

In general, are these just extended marketing schemes or do they think
bringing actors/musicians in will be of any benefit to the products?

~~~
lhnz
It could be that actors and musicians are creative and innovative people.

Or you could be right and it could all be _schmarketing_.

------
k-mcgrady
I'm no Ashton Kutcher fan but the elitism in this thread is pretty disgusting.

~~~
Jugurtha
The first step to wisdom is calling things by their proper name. This is not
elitism, simply stating facts. He wouldn't be called "Surgeon" if he were to
advise a manufacturing company on how their tools should look nicer.

What you're witnessing in this thread isn't elitism as much as it is people
who've ruined their eyes wanting to set the record clear.

Furthermore, that "Jobs" movie will probably appeal to most people because
it's probably not accurate. It's probably a movie that will portray Steve Jobs
as that genius who knew the future before everyone else, who've seen how Apple
would be 20 years before everyone else. Anyone with more than 2 neurons knows
it's a bunch of crap. You can't know how the end result will be designing a
really small thing, let alone an empire.

In addition, it's "Cinema", not History nor Journalism. Want to read a good
book? Read "Masters of Doom". That's how you get multiple opinions from people
involved in the story, not some kind of lame movie based on the only
authorized biography of a person, as brilliant as that person may be.

And lastly, come on, attacking Woz? If someone manages to get the respect of
Engineers, you can be sure it's not because of his wits or Reality Distortion
Field. Last time I checked, this is Hacker News. If there is any place elitism
is the de facto constitution, it's in the Hackerdom.

------
pasbesoin
As I said a few weeks ago, RIP Moto X and G and their line.

I was about to pick up an X; I'm left wondering whether I can now count upon a
couple of years of good support.

\--

P.S. I see the article mentions Kutcher having signed on in October. If so,
that would be at a point where the generally unliked ThinkPad redesigns were
already done and locked, I'm guessing.

If so, then I don't want to unfairly blame him. If you're reading this,
Kutcher, please spend some time looking over comments here and on Reddit
(amongst others) about the dissatisfaction with what has been happening to
this line that has been a longstanding mainstay of many developers and other
technical people.

If you want _our_ trust, maybe your celebrity can gain enough attention from
Lenovo management to at least consider keeping one or two lines of
"traditional" ThinkPad design. Those of us who really want/need it will pay
something of a premium for it. It might not be a big revenue line, but it
should be capable of remaining net positive. And it would gain back a lot of
good will from people you seem at least in your words to value.

------
ZanyProgrammer
My impression of Lenovo products is that ThinkPads proper have gone downhill
since the IBM acquisition, and they have a lot of lower end brands that are
typical OEM garbage. I think they also have been using the TP branding on
lower end products as well, IMHO. Not sure why Kutcher would want to latch
onto them.

~~~
lazyjones
Have a look at their Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro series notebook/tablet combos. They are
currently the overall most attractive Windows notebooks in my opinion. As a
past ThinkPad (720C!) owner I would have expected Lenovo to do a much worse
job than they actually did and I believe their surprising commercial success
underlines this too. Sure, IBM's ThinkPads were much better (with some
exceptions like the X21), but it's hard to say how they would look today if
IBM had kept the brand (my guess is: not better than Lenovo's).

~~~
ZanyProgrammer
I was seriously tempted by the Yoga (and ended up going the MBP route). My
biggest concern, basically my only concern, was the hinges (were the hinges?).
I kept thinking that they'd wear out quickly, and that you'd be left with a
laptop with a screen that wouldn't stay up. That's sorta my biggest beef with
high end Windows 8 hybrids-too many moving parts that can break.

~~~
zeckalpha
I'm on a 5 year old MacBook Pro and it needs new hinges. Again. That being
said, I'll still likely get another one.

On the other hand, if the Chromebook Pixel had a bigger SSD...

------
pekk
Lenovo hired Ashton Kutcher as a human face for the brand.

This isn't news.

~~~
coldtea
The news is that somebody thought hiring a not that succesful an actor like
Kutcher would be good for the brand.

------
sarreph
I hope this whole thing is just a Punk'd episode.

------
coldtea
Does Ashton Kutcher thinks he is some kind of big name people would care to
buy phones he is associated with?

Beats by Dr. Dre I can understand, but I don't see any point in Kutcher's
moves. If he just wanted to VC, he could have done that without anyone
knowning. It's not like his name offers anything to the brand.

~~~
evanmoran
I don't know what people's impression of him are, but he is #34 in twitter
followers:
[http://twittercounter.com/pages/100/30](http://twittercounter.com/pages/100/30)

------
ryguytilidie
I thought he was hired as a PM, which basically means "dude you can bounce
ideas off". To call this an engineering role is pretty charitable.

------
return0
Let the guy have fun. Judge him in a year

------
artursapek
lol

