With the recent news about the Superfish malware on Lenovo Laptops I am wondering if it makes sense to include "manufacturer trust-worthiness" in the criteria to make a decision what to buy.

Although I would typically wipe the hard drive and install Linux anyways, I am still thinking that devices might have unwanted stuff buried even deeper than OS level into them, so I was wondering if anyone here can think of good reasons as to why one company would be more trustworthy than another.

My personal thinking at this point is I can't trust any of them, and the fact that Lenovo screwed up so spectacularly does'n mean that others aren't introducing security holes as well, and possibly in a way that is harder to find, and thus in fact even more dangerous.

Following that train of thought, you could actually deliberately buy a Lenovo laptop, knowing that Lenovo (or third parties Lenovo is working with, e.g. Komodia) are apparently too stupid to build in a decent backdoor ...

What are your thoughts on this?

I am specifically interested in statements like "you can trust vendor xyz more than others because..." but also in more general opinions on the topic

HP wasn't too bad - but they seem to always include the Norton bugware.
Acer is also quite good, but includes some McAfee bugware as well.

- with win_8 - straight out-of-the-box - do a reset of the O/S,
as that does ditch some of the bugware.

- then uninstall the rest.
did that on two PCs so far & only had the inbuilt A/V left behind.
- ditched that & was good-to-go.
with preferred A/V.

I'm on my second Thinkpad, both of which are great machines and great Linux boxes. My next laptop will likely be a Macbook Air model that hasn't been released yet.

And yes, "I'm not buying from a company that has a history of doing stuff like this"? is a factor.

Does this mean that inspite of your good experiences in the past, Thinkpads will be a no-no for you in the future?

Nice thought, but I don't really think I want to go along the '...give me a laptop from the stupidest vendor that you can find...' line. I'm sure they'd find something else to be stupid about (say, choice of wireless chip, or something) that I can't fix, and thus I'd be stuffed.

Anyway, written from a Lenovo 3000 N 200. My 'default' for replacing this laptop was another Lenovo of some kind, until a short time ago, and now it isn't.

BTW, given that most laptops come with Windows/Crapware installed (actually, the economics of laptop production are so low margin, that it is effectively compulsory), and given that again, my default is largely to ignore the initial install and install Something That Works (TM), I'm not sure how much this affects Linux users.

In the *immediate* future (as in within the year), yes.

In the long term, though, you do need to give people and companies a chance to change and, if appropriate, to reward them for doing so.

Trust does not enter into my buying habits. Otherwise I would have not bought my 110 buck Chrome book with ChromeOS on it.
This Samsung I am posting from was also a good buy from a rent a center.

So price is my driving factor.

As far as trust. I like

http://www.macomp.com/

They build linux friendly laptops/netbooks and used to equip linux in netbooks also.

ps I own 2 M&A Companion Touchbooks and 1 Companion Netbook so I speak as a owner of the above link and statements I posted. But price was a factor also in buying those.

They all look to make the most profit, and this includes getting paid to put cware on the systems, as well as using inferior parts. I have/would look at some of the Linux vending companies, or the companies that sell barebones laptops, personally.
I'd like to see the previously wrote about open bios based laptop, succeed so lower price point ones could hit the market (I don't need high end, and get by with desktops nicely).
The Superfish thing, actually made me reconsider buying a Thinkstation TS140 that was on a deals site (no hard drive or OS at all, was going to turn into some kind of BSD based machine).

This is a good example of why computer hardware should not be bundled with an operating system and software. The OS and software should be sold separately. You can then either buy the hardware vendor's modified version of Windows, the vanilla clean Windows from Microsoft, or another OS (like Linux or BSD).

Anyway, how clean, secure, bloatware free, crapware free and malware free is Android on most smartphones and tablets?

All software cannot be trusted if it has been modified by a middle man between the software OS vendor and the end user. All users, whether you prefer Windows or another OS, should have a vested interest in not allowing middle men involved.

It's hard to say who can be trusted these days, hardware and software wise. Everybody is out to make an extra buck out of you whether they're using malware or sponsored ads to do it.

I'm guessing these vendors are OK:
https://www.debian.org/distrib/pre-installed

Also:
http://shop.gluglug.org.uk/

As I understand it most laptop brands use similar hardware. I think the real concern is at the OS level when it comes to marketing purposes. You know, enhancing product value and customer experience and all that bs.
When it comes to higher level (or actually, lower level) exploits, it's pretty much across the board. For example, remote management in (I think Intel) chips after (I think - plenty of speculation here) i2 core that permit remotely controlling even with the power off.

I already turned mine off in the BIOS. But since it's closed source I can't actually tell what BIOS defines as "off"
So when it comes to privacy and security it really doesn't matter. It's likely at the OS level or in the hardware - something the laptop brands all share.
The first is easy to solve... but the second.. I dunno except not getting Intel.

I think it varies depending on the concentration of the company manufacturing them. For instance there was a period I recall where Dell systems had been good, but suddenly they were horrible and it was because they cheapened out on the parts and assembly. They made it a corporate initiative to fix that and did. This was long ago, and it was for desktops versus laptops, but my point is that any company can be bad with a system. What they do with a situation beyond that point is a different story.

I trust... more a manufacturer who releases free, or at least open source drivers.

Laptop manufacturers don't do that. Component manufacturers do.

Just because AMD releases open source drivers does not mean that their products have great Linux support.