Why Lenovo puts older drivers on their latest Notebooks?

I installed the latest drivers (that are compatible offcourse) on my Y570 which I acquired fom the Y580 drivers download page...

But for example...the latest Intel Chipset Drivers at the moment are: 9.3.0.1020 WHQL, so they are WHQL certified and were released on the 26th of January 2012, but Lenovo has 9.3.0.1019 WHQL on the downloads page for the Y580

Another example is, rightn ow the Intel Rapid Storage Technology is on version 11.1.0.1006 WHQL but the ones on the Y580 page are 11.0.0.1032 WHQL

And another example, Intel Management Engine Components right now are at verison 8.0.10.1464 but Lenovo only put v8.0.0.1351 on the Y580 Driver downloads page

It's one of the three I think.......

1) Lenovo Engineers have done some testing and found that the earlier versions are better and thus have included them

2) Lenovo Engineers are too lazy to even look what are the latest drivers from Intel

3) Those drivers are meant for Desktop PCs and while they may install fine on a laptop, the older ones are better? please correct me if my assumption is wrong

 

I'd go for the second option, with so many products i guess they haven't noticed that there have been updates to the drivers.

 

Not really a big deal IMO. At least their driver support is much better than for other manufacturers.

 

Probably because they have not finished testing them and adding any hardware specific tweaks/optimisations and integrating them with Thinkvantage Update Manager.
They have a bit of extra work to do than simply copy them from intel site.
Intel only test on reference designs. Lenovo, like most major OEMs use different designs and tweaked hardware .
The drivers might use extra UI features that Lenovo will have to disable, such as extra tabs in driver properties in control panel.
Then Lenovo has its own update manager, so need to test update scenarios that apply to this driver.

Cheers, Nick

 

Because in big companies, there's a 6-12 month gap between production certification and sales. And you don't have bandwidth to risk the latest and greatest, so you go with what works.
Mrk