I worked at a repair tech at a local computer shop, already over 10 years ago. Certainly all the tech people were secretly a little bit embarrassed we were selling Acer laptops. I did some sales too, when it was busy and people were needed, and always tried to steer people away from Acer.

For some of their models we had over 50% return rates. Far from all models mind you, but still: it was ridiculous. Many came back after warranty as well with hardware issues related to the casings and hinges. Their warranty service took forever and often we had to send back the machines again because they didn't actually fix the issue (we weren't allowed to repair them ourselves too, we had to use their repair centres; other vendors tended to be more flexible about this, especially if we had a long relationship with them).

But they were cheap. So we sold many.

We didn't usually sell ThinkPads, but we did on special demand. One customer returned theirs for whatever reason (T400 IIRC). We put it in the showroom, and it was there for well over year before we managed to sell it, at quite a loss I might add. We actually had a lot of business customers as we also did office management etc., but people just don't want a €1,000 laptop.

Another aspect is that ThinkPads just don't look good to most people when put next to flashy Asus or Acer laptops. The keyboard is more "wonky" instead of the neat rectangular square; it's clearly better designed instead of the cramped 1cm Shift keys and such, but it doesn't look as good. The more matte display is better for loads of people, but it looks kinda crappy next to a bright Acer in demo mode showing off cool pictures. And the "black box" design doesn't seem to appeal to many people's tastes (although personally, I always felt it looked quite handsome; I miss the blue Enter keys btw, I always thought they added something).

Oh, and gosh, don't get me started on the Acer "laptop" they put out with a desktop Pentium CPU, regular DIMMs, and 3.5" HDD. That was truly an abomination.