I use my laptop on a laptop stand on the couch and bed. Every time I slightly shift positions, the lap detection mode is triggered through the accelerometer (even though it's not on my lap) and the power limit throttles to 11W. You can clearly tell Lenovo does not dog food their own products, nor do they care about them. They've also released broken bios updates which ends up bricking devices. I can find links if people want to know more, but I have stopped recommending ThinkPads to friends and family. The quality is no longer there.
This is not a company that cares about their products - just one that attempts to extract the maximum possible value out of its consumers.
To me it got bad around the time they gave up the docking station port and switched to USBC for that. We have such models at work now and they had multiple failures, like one USBC port dying, which was hilarious to figure out first because the docking station uses two, so it still half worked. Then the keyboard on one died. Another colleagues speakers died.
We had lots of models from the T series before, and while they were not all perfect they still worked perfectly and we usually got to take them home when they were replaced and they kept working for years to come after the inevitable battery swap.
Yup, planned obsolescence. Apple does it way more but it's still unacceptable. Might as well go with any other brand then since they're charging a premium anyway.
I just replaced my daughter’s T14 gen 3 with a MacBook Air M2 because the thinkpad lasts 2 hours on battery and gets hotter than satan’s nuts. Terrible machine.
I've wasted at least a full work week's time figuring out whether speaker/keyboard/suspend/lid/forcepad/stylus/overheating/GPU/scaling/dock/HID audio/application problems in my Z13 Gen 1 were caused by Lenovo, one of Lenovo's partners, the Linux kernel, Fedora, Wayland + GNOME, or just cosmic radiation.
Ironically, when I have the laptop on my lap, there is enough clearance between my legs to let air through. If I put the laptop on a mattress, it gets ridiculously hot because it doesn't activate lap mode and the mattress makes a great seal on all of the chassis bottom edges.
It's also a mismanagement of resources that someone is writing IMU drivers and some [clearly imperfect] decision logic, some other person is routing that IC onto the motherboard, the thing will need to be documented and bugfixed (and not necessarily by the same people that designed and wrote the thing), it adds another supply chain constraint, the whole subsystem is an unnecessary power consumption (even if it's optimized to 50 or 20 uA)...
There are much bigger fires to extinguish at Lenovo with their hardware/firmware/vendor/driver choices, and a handful of people are spending finite engineering resources on "lap mode."
Yes. Complete mismanagement and ruins user productivity but can't disable it "due to legal". No gamer would allow this to happen on their gaming laptops (nor afaik have been sued) but according to Lenovo no office worker can put their laptops on their laps with more than 11W TDP being delivered to the laptop. It's crazy.
The laptop stands readily available on amazon allow for airflow while being on a mattress, for example. Just poor design where you can tell they don't care about their products. I will be replacing this unit with either Framework or a Tong Fang laptop which costs half as much but delivers twice the sustained TDP (54W) even when not on lap detection mode, provides proper cooling via 2 fans/vacuum chambers and comes stock with PTM7950 - all things Lenovo keeps on devices that cost 2k+.
ThinkPads/Lenovo no longer take pride in their products. It's a milking machine.
This is not a company that cares about their products - just one that attempts to extract the maximum possible value out of its consumers.