possible consequences of IBM's sale of its PC division for IBM owners?

December 3, 2004 1:59 PM

Apropos of my earlier inquiry regarding a new laptop purchase, can anyone here fill me in on the possible consequences of IBM's sale of its PC division for IBM oweners? If I buy an IBM laptop now, am I setting myself up for possible doom as far as warranty coverage and tech support go?

The consensus on the previous thread seemed to be that an IBM was my best bet, and I was in the midst of doing research on different models when I heard the news this AM.

posted by foxy_hedgehog to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

You know, there are some Dell laptops (Latitude 600M) that I've like pretty well, but a friend got one of those T series Thinkpads and I just couldn't believe how much better the construction seemed to be. It made me sad today to think this kind of build quality might disappear, if/when IBM sells the business unit. If I were in the market for a laptop, I would snap up a Thinkpad now, on the assumption that most of the warranty period would occur before any potential transaction can be completed. And just to say that I had owned one.
posted by coelecanth at 3:00 PM on December 3, 2004

I would like to believe that any intelligent company that purchased IBM's PC business would continue to honor warranties from when the division was owned by IBM, otherwise they would be killing any chance of repeat customers.
posted by internal at 5:11 PM on December 3, 2004

The precedents here are IBM's sale of their hard drive business to Hitachi, and IBM's spinoff of their printer and typewriter/keyboard business into Lexmark. IIRC, nobody got hurt warranty-wise the other times products left IBM, and I would be shocked if warranty support was not a term of the sale of the product lines.

I wouldn't worry about it.
posted by eschatfische at 5:51 PM on December 3, 2004

it would be an amazingly stupid thing for them to do - they'll be trying like crazy to keep the good name of the brand alive, not screwing over their customers.
posted by andrew cooke at 6:15 PM on December 3, 2004