Every laptop I’ve ever owned has been at the 500USD or less price point, and every laptop I’ve ever owned has had some kind of catastrophic structural failure in the chassis that causes the entire thing to gradually disintegrate after about two years, like clockwork.
Like, that must absolutely be something they do as an explicit design goal that forces you to buy a new disposable laptop just after the standard warranty expires, right? It’s not just me being bad at computer or something?
Make and model number and I’ll try to point you towards what you can do to fix it.
Computers are like cars. Any amount of money you’re looking to spend on a kia would be better spent on an older, higher mileage Toyota or Honda instead.
In this case, an older thinkpad (or other business class laptop) or mac would be an infinitely better purchase than a newer consumer grade laptop.
Called planned obsolescence.
Spend your 500 on a used professional machine instead , like Thinkpad or elitebook. This will last forever .
Honestly if you rely on a laptop, I would see if it’s possible to find a used model with a metal unibody in your price range.
Refurbished corporate ThinkPad is where it’s at for this reason… 3-400 bucks and built much more sturdily.
Thinkpads and other non consumer laptops (Dell and HP though they are seen as B tier to Thinkpads) i.e. use business laptops are the only ones meant to stand up to continual abuse within a corporate/work setting.
I just got a refurbished T14s thinkpad and it’s the most pleasant laptop experience I’ve ever had. Worked with every Linux distro I’ve tried out of the box. Good build quality, great matte IPS screen, charges by USB-C. It even has a little built-in sliding webcam cover. Not great for gaming but fantastic for travel.
Not great for gaming but fantastic for travel.
Yeah for gaming you’d need a thinkpad with a descrete GPU and there are a variety but sadly they’re value goes down on the secondhand market much slower. For instance I recently splurged on a previous gen refurbished P16 that came with an nvidia gpu and it does acceptable gaming but nothing crazy like what you’d see from a desktop setup
yeah i got a new T16 and the build quality is 100x better than the new Inspiron we have. bendy plastic trash in comparison
MY favorite are their X1 carbons that have the magnesium carbide outer shell that has a nice durable feel to it
Eh, kind of but I even found Thinkpads to be lacking there, they start showing wear and tear symptoms after around a year tops.
Unfortunately, literally the only company that produces laptops with some actual durability and build quality is Apple. I would really like to be proven wrong here but so far I haven’t.
True though in contrast with Thinkpads you can buy a lower spec model and not worry about soldered ram or in a few cases have the option for a GPU swap out or even CPU swapout/upgrade (this is for the PGA prev gens only though).
Oh yeah the repairability/upgradability of Macbooks is absolutely horrendous but at least you can be pretty sure it’s gonna last you a while unless you have an accident with it.
To second this - Thinkpads in my experience have been pretty solid. I’m still using the second hand x280 I bought a few years ago and installed linux on. It took a big hit and the screen smashed so bought a replacement (higher resolution) third party screen on aliexpress. I poured a glass of water on the keyboard. It still worked but some of the keys had to be pressed quite hard, so I got a replacement keyboard also on aliexpress, was pretty easy to install (youtube video plus 20 mins time, the replacement even came with the screwdriver I needed). I treat it pretty rough but it keeps ticking along. I don’t think I’d ever buy a new laptop unless I could expense it. Plenty of second hand thinkpads online with decent processors / ram. idk if they’re any good for gaming but for work/web browsing they’re great.
Honestly, save up the money for an expensive laptop. It is a night and day difference. I have had my dell XPS for almost 10 years now, and it simply won’t die. It sucks, because hate spending money, but a good laptop starts at $900. When I worked at Best buy, let me tell you, if I sold a laptop <=$500 I knew that thing was coming back (especially Dells. Only buy enterprise Dells). Asus were better quality at a bit lower price ($700), but other than that I would personally not buy anything that is not made for business.
I see this happen with a lot of laptops, for sure. And not to shill or anything, but in my personal experience Asus and Lenovo laptops have avoided that kind of disintegration (with daily use for years). Whereas the Dell and HP laptops I’ve had have quickly structurally failed like you describe, snapped hinges, detached frames, etc.
Could just be luck, could be the fact that I tend to buy used, could be they give 10% more thought to durability? Dunno.
On my last laptop the screen just suddenly broke off one day lol
things I learned from repairing/refurbishing laptops as a hobby/way to save a ton of useful electronics from becoming ewaste/way to earn extra cash:
most laptops are designed atrociously bad. like from an electronics perspective but also from a casing perspective. This is the case regardless of your laptop being $300 or $3000 and it’s a mixture of planned obsolescence, idiotic design choices, poor material selection, and cost cutting
Sometimes it’s just a cheap laptop with very thin or brittle plastic that will inevitably wear down and start to break apart, especially if it’s used heavily. Lots of chromebooks were like this but even pricier stuff like the $6-900 acer nitro
Sometimes it’s got a weird material selection like a rubberized coating that wears away like the asus zephyrus ($1500-3000)
Sometimes the hinges are basically designed to fail and after a year the top half cracks apart in such a way that the casing needs to be entirely replaced or given a hideously ugly and not sturdy repair (basically every hp laptop ever ranging from hundreds to thousands)
Sometimes boards are given cost cutting measures that are paired with “security” measures that render repair impossible. If you have a macbook from ~2015-20 that was a cheaper model one of the cost cutting measures was to remove what’s called a TVS diode from the 3.3v and 1.8v nand power rails. A TVS diode, to oversimplify things, is to protect against power surges. So now when a power surge occurs on either of those lines instead of a TVS diode taking the hit and either clamp the excess or in extreme cases fail. In that case you’re replacing a 3 cent diode that takes 5 seconds to solder instead of a much more costly SSD that requires complex BGA rework. BUT here’s the kicker - apple also stores the firmware keys on the SSD which are paired to a chip called the t2. So once the ssd is dead you are fucked, only apple can restore it. I can reflash macos and efi partitions but without the firmware keys it won’t boot. Only option is an entirely new logic board. Also all your data is gone
It’s fucked now. We let tech bros win. Apple gets the heat but they’re not the only ones. Dell pairs ssds to their tpm module, pairs displays, webcams, fingerprint readers, etc. hp has whitelists for ssds and wan (meaning only “authorized” parts work) and pairs ssds. Lenovo has whitelists for wan cards. They’re all not as aggressive as apple and it’s not across all models but they’re testing the waters and clearly moving in that direction.
Even consoles now - ps5 and Xbox pairs optical drive (though Xbox can be done with some nonsense), switch pairs nand, all three will ban you from their network for fucking with the console.
Our world is designed to consume and waste.
I am convinced laptops are designed beginning and ending with specs and price point. Shit like the keyboard, case, speakers, electronics, etc. are 100% afterthought, and completely neglected if the alternative is being $10 more expensive than a competing product line. Nobody is sorting their search results on Amazon or NewEgg by durability. There is no way to assess this when ordering online.
This is absolutely true. It’s called design-to-cost or design-to-spec. It’s not how every laptop is made but it’s how a lot of them are
Most companies will say “let’s make a $699 laptop built around amd ryzen with 15” display and 8gb ram” then engineerings job is to work around the constraints
That’s how you end up with plastic instead of aluminum casing, 60hz panel instead of 120, soldered ram, weirdly placed ports, etc
Some laptops are design first (macbook, framework, surface) but even these will have cost cutting measures to bring them to ideal price points
With a 500 budget, just buy a much more expensive device secondhand, preferably from the pro market
Thinkpads comes to mind but Dell has good stuff in that category too.
Also I still use a macbook air from 2013, no issues.
I have never had this happen or seen any of my friends shitty plastic laptops do this even after 7+ years
Are you guys overheating it often?
Most ThinkPads I’ve seen take more like 7 years.
Maybe try to get repair parts on ebay? Don’t have too much experience with plastic components braking down, but I understand the planned obsolescence frustration. Mostly around phones, in my case.
But yes, I hate all of this planned obsolescence. I have an ASUS C100P that reached end of life several years ago, so I need a new operating system. It was cheap and has a good aluminum chassis and good other hardware, but I need an up to date OS. I think maybe with enough effort Arch Linux ARM might be able to work, but would like a more polished OS.
Happened to me as well with a lenovo yoga that I had, the bottom of the laptop came off basically because it wasn’t glued in correctly.
I have a macbook running GNU/Linux now so I’m chilling, also Thinkpads have been good to me so far.
Yes I got a aluminium one for this reason much has lasted 3 years and will for much longer I’m sure
