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.
this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2025
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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. :)