Hello infinitve wisdom of the fediverse!
Delving into the undepths of laptop manufacturers, I have recently found out that very few distinct manufacturers actually exist. A lot of laptops are just rebranded/whitelabeled.
Since I have not found an answer to my newest question on the search engine of my least distrust and I wont ever post on reddit again (which did come in handy for this stuff in the past), I ask you folks.
Captiva, a brand that seems to be sold by a lot of vendors, at least in germany, seems to be a subsidiary of ecom trading (a b2b seller for hardware that I use for work). They use the same chassis as schenker from what I can see.
I heard that some chinese vendor makes these but I think, since we have a more consumer oriented audience here, we might want to make it more transparent so people can make informed decisions instead of doubling the price of their hardware by it going through tons of hands.
P.S.: I took longer to search for a fitting community for this question than I took for writing it. If you know a better place to put this, pleas lmk. Thank you, have a great new year if you celebrate it.
It’s a similar situation with power tools. There’s about 4 large Chinese manufacturers that make almost everything, despite what the logo on the side says. I did some research last time I made a purchase and it was disappointing.
That’s how most manufacturing works. But just because 2 different brands roll out of the same factory, doesn’t mean they are the same thing with different labels. Brands like Milwaukee and Makita are going to have completely different specs and manufacturing price points than someone like Ryobi or Harbor Freight’s house brands.
My friend, I understand how manufacturing works. I was just looking to see who might be a better choice to support with a purchase.
I see, I misread. It is a shame it’s so hard to find non-chinese power tools. Even “All American” brands like Snap-on, Matco, Mac Tools, all just sell over priced chinese drills with a warranty.
Thank you for chiming in. This is very good information. I would highly suggest you dump the stuff you found out in the fedi or link to a place so we can make as many people as possible buy stuff for cheap or at least have the smallest amounts of downstream hands and margin on it.
What you’re looking for is the Original Design Manufacturer, or ODM. These are the companies that actually make the pieces. Some have mentioned Clevo, but there’s also Pegatron (ODM for ASUS), MSI, Quanta (a favorite of HP), Compal (common for Dell and Toshiba).
A more complete list is available here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laptop_brands_and_manufacturers
Now, there’s a bit more involved in this process. The ODMs make stock designs that they sell to the smaller OEMs. The same way that you can buy white box desktops, you can buy white box laptops. Typically, these come as a barebones laptop base. The OEM will add CPU, RAM, SSD, and WiFi. They will also load the OS/additional software, procure licensing, etc. Then they sell and support it.
The large OEMs like Dell/HP don’t use stock designs. They contract with the ODMs for something custom. Sometimes the ODM also handles the full manufacturing of the final product.
BTW, the ODMs are mostly from Taiwan, not China.
Thank you so much! That is pretty much peak transparency right there.
I did try to look for some way to contact clevo but I cant get to their website for whatever reason.
Sometimes when a product is whitelabeled and can be bought directly from its real manufacturer for much less, there’s still a good reason to buy the expensive one. The main one is that sometimes the ones that pass QA are sold via the whitelabeler and the ones that fail QA are sold directly, so the cheaper ones are known to have something wrong with them and you’re gambling that it’s something without symptoms.
Sager has been one of those deals for a couple of decades there and I know for a fact their machines are rebranded by several other nonbrands. If I were OP I would start there.
Sager is rebranding Clevo, which are in fact awesome, but I don’t think you can buy them directly from Taiwan. And of course, no support.
Okay thanks to everyone in this thread so far. This is very good info which may help a lot of folks in the future. :)
About 20 years ago IBM has used this brand for PC’s. Maybe the brand has been sold to Lenovo together with the whole laptop business, and so become a Chinese brand.
I think you’re thinking of Aptiva.
Maybe. Well, it was a while ago.
Certainly was.
Thanks for the info. :)
