and Lenovo is itself an IBM spinoff.
After the company rebranded itself to Lenovo, it merged with IBM's PC business which produced its ThinkPad line in 2005, after which it rapidly expanded abroad. In 2013, Lenovo became the world's largest personal computer vendor by unit sales for the first time, a position it still holds as of 2024.
Not a spinoff. It was founded 20 years before and was the largest PC manufacturer in China 10 years before buying IBM's PC business.
Interesting. Did not know that. I thought someone bought the IBM laptop business and renamed it.
It was bought, but after the renaming. Today IBM only build Servers. Mainframes. All other PC, Laptop and Server Production/Branding is sold. IBM rebranded mainly to IBM iX. A full service agency. Hardware is now Mainframes. And other deviations are mostly Cloud, OpenShift, Ansible, and RHEL.
They did, but they also were a large existing manufacturer.
I don't know what they had before but their identity seemed to be IBM's overnight (thinkpads and all).
They used the Think(Pad|Centre) brand and expanded it to other things (like IdeaPad).
They basically bought IBM's good reputation name and style and used it for both IBM-alikes and budget machines.
Some of it was good machines, some of it was crap.
They actually bought entire ThinkPad R&D as well, and have been subcontracted manufacturer for some time before that.
So Thinkpads are still designed in ex-IBM Lenovo Japan