Almost every larger company these days has done something bad like that. Lenovo had superfish, HP had a keylogger, Dell had its own superfish, Acer still installs search toolbars and browser hijackers, depending on how far back you want to go Sony had the BMG rootkit and a camera backdoor, ... Who are you going to get your laptop from now of you ignore all of those - especially if you're going to reinstall your OS immediately anyway?
> Who are you going to get your laptop from now of you ignore all of those - especially if you're going to reinstall your OS immediately anyway?
Clevo. They are a whitebox laptop manufacturer so you will find they are OEM for several smaller brands like MSI, Sager, and others. Yes they are Chinese market, but every laptop is made in China these days, even the big American names, so that part is unavoidable. If that truly is an issue you can't get around, you'll be happy to know that System76 is moving towards producing its devices in house in the United States[1], though I have no idea if the recent tariff wars have affected that situation.
Clevo's hardware is not that great though. I've known several people get System76 Clevo systems and they've all been disappointed. I'm hopeful for System76's new systems, that they will up the quality significantly and make them compare-able to Thinkpads.
Yes, I had a Clevo-produced System76 model and I've had multiple hardware issues with it -- for starters, it failed to POST just days after receiving it, and System76 support did repair it, but they were not very accommodating about it, saying there was no way for them to provide a shipping method faster than ground even if I paid for it, etc. I want to like System76, but the truth is that my experience with them was disappointing.
According to https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/8912714/Apple-i... "An unpatched security flaw in Apple’s iTunes software allowed intelligence agencies and police to hack into users’ computers for more than three years" which sounds serious to me if you're an iTunes user (as I guess many Mac and Windows users are).
But I think the real culprit is that all of the organizations the grandparent poster listed distribute proprietary software which is untrustworthy to begin with. Proprietary malware isn't hard to find (see https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/ for an organized set of links) whether it came with the OS pre-installed on the computer or installed later. So long as it adversely affects the user and leaves the user with no permission to inspect, alter, and share the software (only permission to run the malware) the situation is bad.
Get any laptop and clean the shit out of it, mod the BIOS if you want to. I'm still on Elitebooks (8770w), they're tanks, and Intel hasn't made noticeable improvement in CPU performance since Ivy Bridge.
Zbooks seem to continue the tradition. Dell's Precisions are great, too.
Haven't had experience with the newer Thinkpads, the design, materials and being owned by a Chinese megacorp kind of drove me away.
HP's "keylogger" doesn't belong in this discussion. It was a debug trace to a driver. I've left similar traces as part of debugging. It wasn't even their driver but belonged to Synaptics.
