5 ms·
I may be out of touch, but do people really expect a $200 laptop to last more than a few years?
by TOMDM 3y ago
I may be out of touch, but do people really expect a $200 laptop to last more than a few years?
- rolph 3y agoi have a number of laptops, purchased, new 250-300$ range, all ACER brand. more than a decade old. worst problem is wearing a hole through the touchpad on my "console" machine. just to be fair, kids are rough on stuff, especialy if they didnt pay for it.
- jeffbee 3y agoIn daily use by children! Both of these articles, by the same author, fail to engage with the economic design point of the Chromebook. Only the most bozotic k-12 IT department is scrounging keyboards on eBay. The normal people bought their Chromebooks from CDW with 4-years repair or replace contracts, and they don’t care where the parts come from. And nobody wants to be upgrading machines piecemeal the way the author suggests. Absolutely nobody. You upgrade by replacing fleets.
- Nullabillity 3y agoEven buying new you're often far better off buying a low-spec device and upgrading it than buying a laptop with the specs you want.
- jeffbee 3y agoTrue for individuals who are unable to value their time, but I doubt you'd find an IT industry professional who agreed. You buy the machine with the support contract and you get the supported parts and you don't touch them. Modern designs don't even have replaceable RAM, for good reasons and not as some kind of conspiracy.
- Nullabillity 3y ago> True for individuals who are unable to value their time, but I doubt you'd find an IT industry professional who agreed. Sure, if you value your time at hundreds of dollars for a 10min job. But most people would probably just call that delusional. > Modern designs don't even have replaceable RAM, for good reasons and not as some kind of conspiracy. Feel free to state them then. Because as a customer the most generous possible interpretation I can see would be that all manufacturers got a sudden bout of anorexia.
- ghaff 3y agoYeah. The article tosses out this one anecdote of a Windows laptop being easy to fix but I guarantee no K-12 IT department is doing bootleg ChromeBook repairs. Also the main alternative here is probably a tablet not a Windows much less a Linux laptop. As for the life cycle I think laptops are on something like a 3 or 4 year refresh cycle where I work though in practice it’s pretty loose.
- 908B64B197 3y ago> fail to engage with the economic design point of the Chromebook And that the only reason Chromebooks are deployed there in the first place is that they are inexpensive.
- carlivar 3y agoI would expect companies that might say they care about things like climate change to understand the benefits of repairability towards that end.
- Saris 3y agoWell, like the article says the biggest issue is it's difficult to even get parts to repair them, I imagine most hardware used in schools will need some repairs in a few years, so having access to parts is important.
- Gigachad 3y agoEspecially in the hands of students. My school deployed MacBook airs to everyone which are perfectly capable of lasting just about forever but a good chunk of them were dropped, destroyed, liquid damaged, etc by the end of the year.