Today I saw someone once again trash System76 for rebranding Clevo machines and writing that off as some kind of deceptive business model. Ultimately, they’re not “just rebranded Clevo…”, but even if they were, the ignorant douchebag posting this misguided rant fails to acknowledge that EVERY SINGLE LAPTOP OEM does the same. Yes, HP, Dell, Lenovo - fucking all of them!
Good points on clarifying the source of the criticism and the challenges this company face. We still need to explain why so many people trash System76 with this particular garbage. Other small suppliers face the same challenges, and we don’t see this “just a rebranded …” rant applied to them. Some examples would be Purism, Tuxedo and Star Labs. Why aren’t people trashing these companies with the same rhetoric? If anything they do much less to the ODM machine than System76.
I think System76 has much less of a perception problem than the others. For Purism, I read much more damming critiques like waiting 3 years for your order. For the others, I nearly never read about them unless I go out of my way to find people discussing them. I would say those are much bigger problems for companies to have.
Yeah, I know Purism gets trashed for reasons they are actually accountable for. And good point about lack of business being a major worry, but in your search did you happen to see anyone trashing these other companies with “It’s just a rebranded [whatever]”?