>I bought a laptop once. It came with windows pre-installed

Some would say, not without merit in my opinion, that the malware part started with Windows itself.

https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/malware-microsoft.html

But even if we aren't that stringent with the definition of malware, we had malware preinstalled on our computers quite some time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenovo#Security_and_privacy_in...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dell#Self-signed_root_certific...