Update | YouTube channel Linus Tech Tips characterizes Motorola phones and ThinkPad laptops as "zombie brands"

We all know brands that are not what they used to be. Yesteryear's giants such as Nokia or Philips have in some cases become mere stickers that other manufacturers stick on their devices to sell them based on name recognition - like in Nokia's case with HMD phones and with Philips and their TVs. Characterizing such brands as "undead" can be a fair assessment. Nokia has nothing to do with Nokia branded phones these days and neither does Philips with TVs, yet the brands still exist in the market. They are, so to speak, zombified.

While those are real zombie brands, Linus Sebastian, one of the most successful tech Youtubers, did not mention them in one of his most recent uploads on his channel "Linus Tech Tips" when he was talking about zombie brands. The video titled "The All Home Depot Setup" is about PC hardware that is available in Home Depot, a US based home improvement retailer. Here, Linus stumbles upon a webcam by the brand Monster, which was apparently known for cables before. When complaining about the quality of the webcam, the content creator brings up the term zombie brands and how many of those are owned by Chinese holding companies that are "exploiting its once loyal customers to sell garbage".

On screen, four examples of such brands appear: AMC Theatres, a cinema chain in the US, Dirt Devil, a formerly American brand of vacuum cleaners - and Motorola as well as ThinkPad, both owned by the largest PC manufacturer in the world by volume, Lenovo.

While Lenovo is indeed Chinese, characterizing these brands as "zombified" is very questionable to say the least. After all, Lenovo did not just buy the brand names, but absorbed the IBM ThinkPad laptop division as well as Motorola phone division, including all employees and many patents, with Lenovo continuing many of the pre-existing product lines, like the ThinkPad T series and Moto G series, to this day. Calling Lenovo a "holding company" is a stretch.

It should be noted that the brands only appear on-screen, with Sebastian not mentioning them in voice over - however, when combined with the fact that Linus Sebastian owns shares in Framework, a small manufacturer of modular laptops, the appearance of slandering a different laptop brand can certainly be seen as a bit problematic for Linus Tech Tips.

July 17, 20:56 GMT update: It seems that Linus Tech Tips has reuploaded the video in question, removing the part about zombie brands and cutting the analysis of the webcam short.