> "Plus" means bigger, and you can regognize it because it's bigger, "SE" means lower-end, you can recognize it because it costs a lot less.
It's also a smaller phone, just like how the Plus is larger and costs more, but isn't any faster. The name or price of SE doesn't imply lower end at all, they've even removed the number so you don't know which one it's comparable to.
You just look at the hardware and read reviews. There isn't really a sliding scale for PCs, that's the awesome thing about manufacturers that let you customize. Doing a lot of gaming or modelling? Better graphics card. Running shitloads of processes? Better ram. Better processor. Extra HDD, or SSD, or optical drive? Etc.
Nothing about driver compatibility :( it's a long and painful process to figure out if the computer you want will even work with the software you want to use.
Of course I'm sure it's better if you use the blessed OS and version pair, but I've never found a reason to use windows before....
Driver compatibility could be hell in windows as well if you're cursed with a "switchable" graphics option. My last lenovo could switch between on-board and dedicated graphics, but the latest video driver that lenovo provided was from the year before I even bought the laptop. If I used the card manufacturer's drivers, they'd usually work but killed the ability to switch to on-board graphics; but if I used Lenovo's drivers, games performed very badly due to how out of date they were.
Having one manufacturer and fewer models usually means longer and more consistent product support.
So, because they aren't sane enough to figure out a naming scheme that makes sense, I have to waste hours or days looking at reviews just to understand what the difference is between the models? From what I could understand it's possible that the X67L is a good laptop, the X67LX is a crappy low-cost plastic netbook. How dumb is that.
Also, why do they ask me if my laptop is for work or home? What if I use it for both (which I do)? It doesn't make any sense.
I bought the new MacBook Pro mostly because of macOS, but also because I couldn't figure out how PC name their products, nor why they have to have 50 different barely-different models.
>X67L is a good laptop, the X67LX is a crappy low-cost plastic netbook. How dumb is that. //
To me that's not half as frustrating as the companies that sell a, let's say 755cx and then create a new model a few years later and call that 755cx ... how bloody annoying [like hey, this review is from 7 years before the thing was made, and it's a completely different system]. Or worse still, not have a model number to refer to. I think the worst I had was trying to find parts for a Toshiba laptop, IIRC, there were about 5 different models in 10 years with the same designation, like lets just call all our new laptops the "Laptop New" what could possibly be wrong with that.
Coming from the PC universe, the process is different.
1. Define: You first decide what you actually want
2. Search: Your search is entirely based on value for money (you have defined value before)
3. Decide: You read reviews and decide which one to take
4. Buy: Find the cheapest offer
Not once should you have to care about the name of the product, it simply does not matter.
There should be more than enough databases that let you sort and filter the latest notebooks.
Well, to be honest, it sounds like you care about the "name" and thus the value the company trying to sell you a product wants you to believe that product is worth.
So apple could release the iPhone 8 with the same specs as the 3GS, and you'd get bamboozled because you can't be bothered to do your research before purchasing something.
You make this sound bizarrely difficult given a defined price range you could probably pick a decent laptop based on amazon reviews in 15 minutes and be pretty happy with it.
If you want to play real pc games get a desktop or a console unless you have a lot of money to spend.
How do you deal with the rest of the consumer universe? I'm betting you get along just fine.
So, since you care, doing research to get the right one doesn't seem unreasonable at all to me.
I put in a solid hour of research at least before buying a new pair of boots. It took me many hours over many days to choose a camera. Took me weeks to build my PC. Each of those products I put in an amount of research that's at least somehow correlated with the price I paid for them (boots -> 100$ -> camera 600$ -> PC $1300)
They are running a business. Presumably they want people to buy things. Making potential customers do research because the product line is opaque is just throwing away good leads.
Presumably they would want to sell you the lowest-cost-to-manufacture product for the highest price. So, the more you know about the product, the worse for them, because it removes an opportunity to obfuscate.
So, yea, research is a bit tricky, but that's good because the reason it's tricky is because you aren't depending on the company to tell you the real value of their product.
I like lenovo laptops and I agree that they have too many model lines, but apart from a couple of subtitles, most of them are descriptive of that particular line.
It's also a smaller phone, just like how the Plus is larger and costs more, but isn't any faster. The name or price of SE doesn't imply lower end at all, they've even removed the number so you don't know which one it's comparable to.
I agree it's not awful, just that it's slipping.