ThinkPad Thunderbolt 3 failure: What's happening, why it's happening, and how to fix it

[z00ps00p]

No wonder there are so many cheap T480 laptops on eBay UK. I was considering a used one for my next laptop (in place of my current T430), but given it can stop USB Type C ports from working entirely, I think I'll wait a year or two and then get an L490 or something. :(

[Ali]

I have tired to install the driver/firmware Lenovo offers on the website. The Thunderbolt drivers installs but the firmware upgrade fails and says "No Active Thunderbolt (TM) controller found in the system or Thunderbolt (TM) software is not present in the system". Anybody knows how to fix this issue?

[Andrew]

The issue for me was resolved by replacing the motherboard.  The cost and labor was prohibitively expensive, but I was able to significantly reduce it by purchasing an extended 1 year warranty on the laptop and using that to cover the replacement.  Good luck!

[G Lewis]

I have a P1 Gen2 and TB3 purchased less than two months ago. When using the TB3, every so often, anything connected to the TB3 stops and starts usually several times. So the computer is useless for 10 seconds a few times a day.  Annoying. Haven't contacted Lenovo yet.

[bmct]

Just got my 20R1 7th gen x1 carbon back from depot and the issue persists. Display is a HP z27

I was holding off on doing BIOS and intel management firmware update -  anyone else in same situation ? I guess nothing to lose from updating at this point

[Mykii Liu]

Yeeesh, this has been a nightmare for the company environment that I'm in. I can't imagine it being any better for consumers at all..

250ish devices all affected by this on various levels.. So nuts.

[Mykii Liu]

So it's been a few months. I'll update clearly for this.

We were suggested to extend our warranties for 6 months in order to create a CritSit claim for our fleet. So we did. Essentially, Lenovo has sandbagged service by mishandling data and asking for diagnostic results that didn't apply to our machines. On top of that, they've said they would focus on one model out of the three that are affected. Along with that, apparently they only service machines for 5 years-- a number that was never discussed. So that 6 month warranty extension caused machines to hit the cap of 5 years and they said they won't service them. On top of that, we had video conference meetings that given us verbal confirmation that since we started this ticket well within our 6 month warranty extension, we would be covered in a resolution should we exceed the 6 months. Lenovo's CritSit team denounces that and says too bad so sad. You paid 13k for the warranty and we sandbagged? Awesome, we'll give you 4k back of that back-- which doesn't address any of the machines. What a slap to an enterprise customer's face after spending the last 14 years of history with a company. It really seems as if they had this plan from the very beginning of this process. None of the details prove that they wanted to competently comply and fix the machines.

Anyway, our entire fleet was affected and continues to be affected. The firmware patch wouldn't resolve issues of machines that were already degraded, and even though we started applying the patches as soon as possible, most of our machines still succumbed to these symptoms. I have 32 P52s machines in my office that are pulled and replaced with other machines, and there are still about 100 more P52s machine that are still affected as we wait for a resolution-- a "chance", not a guarantee, that they might service the P52s machines that are afflicted. It's been 3 weeks, and it seems they have ghosted us.

I'd hope that people would read this and to find out that they'll treat everyone equally badly, both enterprise and consumer. I would hope this would gain traction some place somewhere, and if necessary, I might go un-retire my authorship at a known blog to bring light to the situation.

It would be great to help people that have experienced the same - there are a bunch of people on Reddit.

It's frustrating.