$2,500 AUD Paperweight: Brand NEW ThinkPad P16 Gen 2 is dying at 35 cycles. Lenovo Australia’s support is an absolute joke
I am absolutely furious, stressed out, and deeply cheated by Lenovo Australia.
I bought what was supposed to be a bulletproof, high-performance workstation—a brand-new ThinkPad P16 Gen 2—for heavy engineering and technical workloads. Price tag: $2,500 AUD. I expected a premium professional tool; instead, I got a nightmare.
The timeline of this disaster (It was born broken):
Day 1 (March 2026): Unit arrives. I start migrating my engineering software.
Before Day 15 (April 2026): The nightmare begins. Severe system performance drops, random throttling, and terrifying battery instability under any real workload. It couldn't even handle my baseline engineering applications simultaneously. The machine was fundamentally broken from the start.
Today (25/05/2026): The final, catastrophic confirmation. I ran the official Lenovo Vantage diagnostic test. Look at Screenshot 2026-05-25 113851.jpg.
The manufacturer's own software explicitly states:
Battery • Battery capacity remaining 7% - FAILED
The battery reports a failure and needs to be replaced as soon as possible.
The kicker? The battery chemistry shows as 'Unknown' at only 35 charge cycles! The power management system or the motherboard integrity is completely compromised.
I am a student and professional. I am currently paralyzed, unable to run my engineering programs out of pure fear that this defect will permanently destroy the rest of the internal hardware. I’ve had to scale this nightmare to the Office of Fair Trading Queensland (Case 25-0156-FT) and I am calling my bank first thing tomorrow morning to force a chargeback for defective merchandise.
Under the Australian Consumer Law (ACL), this is a textbook Major Failure. I have the legal right to REJECT the goods and demand a full refund. Yet, Lenovo’s corporate wall keeps trying to force a physical repair on a machine that has been defective since its second week of life.
Avoid the P16 Gen 2. Avoid Lenovo Australia. They will take your money, deliver a defective product, and completely abandon you when their own software confirms their hardware is failing.
Has anyone else dealt with this level of corporate negligence in Australia? How do I force them to pay up immediately?