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Ask HN: How come there are no durable laptops anymore?
In the last years the desktop market has become more or less stable. Mainboard manufacturers are competing these days on making the most durable and high quality boards with components like Anti-Sulfur Resistors design, Surge LAN Protection, Japanese made capacitors and more.
But contrary to this trend the build quality of PC laptops has declined tremoundlesy in terms of components quality. You can find quality motherboards or capacitors and it seems that there will be a demand for it in the market.
- gaspoweredcat 8y agodo laptops really need such measures? laptops use much lower power across the system, chips are not pushed anywhere near as hard as in desktop implementations, in many cases ive found laptops to last longer than PC mainboards do, just look at the amount of old Thinkpads around. personally on average i expect a laptop to last about 3-5 years generally the ones ive had have lasted longer than that, adding those sorts of components would only serve to make systems more expensive and likely heavier amongst other things
- JamesAdir 8y agoThe thinkpads you see lying around are exactly the models from 5-7 years ago that are still kicking because of the various options to fix them. You can't say this for example on the last models (like the X280)
- gaspoweredcat 8y agothere are plenty of ones even older than that still kicking and in regular use, just check out r/thinkpad, im typing this on a 2012 X1 carbon which shows no signs of dying despite being used heavily every day. that being said current laptops, thinkpads included are all now using components which output too much heat for the cooling systems, almost every modern i7 laptop has some level of thermal throttling which could well shorten the life of other components but i guess only time will tell on that. i still dont think its enough to warrant the inevitable increase in price (and likely weight and size to a degree) that using higher end components would incur