OEM, ODM, manufacture of laptops

Posted Aug 29, 2006 4:17 UTC (Tue) by drag (guest, #31333)
In reply to: OEM, ODM, manufacture of laptops by giraffedata
Parent article: What is a Linux laptop?

ODM in laptop terms are the actual people that make the laptops.

Apple, Dell, HP, Leveno, etc don't actually manufacturer the laptops they sell.

See:
http://www.gen-x-pc.com/laptopmanu.htm
maps relationships:
http://tuxmobil.org/laptop_oem.html

The biggest manufacture is Quanta. They make laptops for Apple, Dell, HP, IBM, Toshiba, Sony, etc etc.

The difficult part is actually figuring out the real relationships. Obviously people like Apple and Lenovo don't want you to know that your buying the same exact laptop you can get at Dell for 2/3's the price, but only in a fancier case. So they hide were they obtained the latpops.

Nowadays the only thing a 'OEM' does nowadays is install the CPU, memory, harddrive, and install the operating system.

Of course some customization happens on the assembly lines. But not as much as you would think given people's brand loyalties and such.

OEM, ODM, manufacture of laptops

Posted Aug 31, 2006 13:27 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]

I've had quite some (>10) Dell Laptops (business series, not the consumer crap), and I had even more Thinkpad laptops (starting with the butterfly (that still works without flaws and even runs Linux!!) and later mostly A- and T-models). I worked for companies that used thousands of laptops, of several brands.

I don't know what the difference at Quanta is, but there is a real difference in stability and reliability between a Dell and a Thinkpad laptop; there are many more problems with Dells than with Thinkpads. And I don't even need to start about the keyboard and the trackpoint.

So, to say that all laptops are equal, might be correct in theory, but that hypothesis has contradicting empirical evidence.

Joachim