Oh I read it was a backdoored BIOS.

Yeah libreboot would probably not help much then.

I haven’t paid too much attention on what lenovo is doing lately, but at some point they brought L-series thinkpad-branded laptops on the market which was pretty much garbage. At least in here local stores sold first models of L-series as a ‘thinkpad grade laptops for consumer pricing’ and they were just bad on all fronts, as the L-series was just a competition on a*-brands trying to get their share for sub-300€ (or whatever that was at the time) laptops from your equivalent of walmart riding on the brand which they didn’t build.

Gladly that died out pretty soon and Think* brand is still somewhat strong with their T/W/X models as they used to be when IBM ran the business. Of course they had their own issues too, USB-C docks were garbage with everyone when they started to appear and people at the office still curse on thinkpads for various issues with firmware/hardware/whatever, but in my experience it’s been the same road for all the big players. Dell had a pretty decent sales/support going on at 2010(ish), but their hardware had plenty of problems, HP had pretty good pricing for their hardware a bit later, but they had massive issues with firmware and so on.

I’ve been pretty happy with thinkpads I’ve got since R50 brand new (if I recall correctly) and for me they’ve been available on second hand market in here since that. But that’s just a personal experience, I’ve never been in charge to buy hunderds of anything on IT department at work.