"What sells laptops these days is a trendy rep, cute names and colors like purple. Let's face it: To Americans in their 20s, IBM is not particularly cool."
Well, I do take exception to the 20-somethings not thinking IBM is cool, but that's beside the point. And this is something really cool:
"So Americans raised to salute the IBM logo still find it jarring to see those letters erased. IBM is so much a part of the culture. The famous talking computer in the futuristic 1968 movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" was named HAL, which, if you move the letters up one step in the alphabet, spells IBM."
But the real reason is simply branding:
"For the record, Lenovo executives say that their motive is to build their own brand recognition in the United States. It now appears that the name they were most interested in exploiting was "ThinkPad," IBM's Apple-like trademark for its laptops."
Whatever, it's just a laptop anyway, right? They will have to pry the System i (formerly AS/400, iSeries, i5) from my cold dead hands with the letters IBM still in place!
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