Lifespan of a Laptop?

[Stratoblaster]

Add "Nikon vs Canon" to that list too

 

[USMC_Trev]

My large corporation- provided 17" Dell laptop has been a piece of crap since Day 1. BSOD almost daily for the last year and a half.

My 2017 17" MacBook Pro is still a champ in every single way except for hard drive size and that's my own stupid fault for buying the 256GB version. The ransom for the 500GB HDD was too much to stomach at the time. Dumb decision.

 

[Dave Merrill]

Don't have time to get into details insofar as I even know them (I basically don't), but my non-tech wife is constantly battling with her Mac and iOS devices. Forced updates that cripple battery life, fragile power cables, uncontrollable cloud behavior, clones of files when she just wants to edit, just way too much Magic you can't see or control.

Like I said, she's not a sophisticated tech user, but it really seems like it's way more opaque than it was way back when I was in the Apple world. Part of me wants to consider one, because the quality is clearly there, but I'm not psyched getting sucked into the all-encompassing Apple-verse.

 

[Stratoblaster]

Of course you have to choose good parts when building a machine for long life...

Agreed....I've put together many PC's and can attest to the fact that if you get good hardware (ie. ASUS motherboards/video cards, quality RAM, SSD's, etc.) with great vendor driver support you'll get many years out of a desktop PC. All of my PC builds ran very, very reliably and I work my main computer to it's limits.

I'm looking at this new ASUS laptop from a Canadian vendor:

ASUS ROG Strix G17 (2021) Gaming Laptop
17.3" 300Hz IPS Type FHD
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU 8 GB GDDR6
AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX
16GB DDR4
1TB PCIe NVMe SSD, RGB Keyboard

That is an insane machine indeed, is on sale for a good prices, and is in stock (amazingly enough)...I might see if I can bump it up to 32GB RAM but either way, that is a laptop will be useful for many years. Blender 3D benchmarks for that CPU/GPU are off the wall crazy and the forthcoming Blender v3.00 has a new rendering engine, CyclesX. which renders the ray-traced 3D viewport in pretty much real time with that generation of RTX GPU...just nuts.

 

[Jupiter]

Just wondering how old is your machine before it gets replaced?

Depends on two factors acually:

- User's needs: If the laptop no more meets my requiremets in terms of performance and there is no way to improve it or at least improve it in a cost effective way (say, bigger and faster SSD, more RAM, bigger battery etc), then it's time to be replaced.

- Major failure: replacing HDDs/SSDs, memory modules, keyboards, batteries etc. is easy at least on most of the laptops I've owned (with my Macbook Pros being the exception). So, again, if a main module gives up the ghost (say the motherboard) and there is no warranty, and you can't fix it without selling a kidney, then it's time to be replaced.

Having said that, my main laptop is still a Dell Latitude E7250 which I am pretty sure it's 6 years old now (5th generation i5, 8Gb RAM, upgraded with a 512Gb SSD). No reason to replace it as it still meets my requirements (basic recordings with AF3/Reaper, office stuff, internet, a virtual machine some times etc.). When I was coding like there was no tommorow, I had two Macbook Pros, 13 and 15". If I wanted to do some serious coding, video editing work etc again I would certainly buy a way more powerful and capable laptop.

My wife still uses a 6 years old Dell Inspiron with a 4th generation i3, 4Gb of RAM and a pathetic HDD. Again, for the things she uses it for, it's still perfect and it will be that way for many many years until it craps out.

So, it all depends. If you are dealing with hardware issues that you can't resolve or you can but it's not cost effective, go ahead and buy a new one.

 

[xarkon]

Our company policy has been to replace them every three years, though we've been stretching that.

Aside from the policy, I'm still running my late-2013 Macbook Pro.

 

[Randy4Guitars]

My main problem with laptop lifespan has been the case flexing or breaking and causing the issues the OP stated, and then it's time for a new one. Since I "retired" I carry my laptop around the house all the time and they break within a year. I never had any issues at work and I started using laptops in the 1990's

After 3 broken notebooks in less than 3 years I started using one of those lap desk things to carry it around the house with me and this HP is over 3 years old now. Not only do they help prevent flexing of the notebook but they also keep vents on the bottom clear.

Amazon product ASIN B07N9KZQKR
With this computer I've had a few issues. It had a tight hinge which caused a short that would scramble the display and eventually got worse to the point that the machine would automatically shut down if I moved the screen even a little bit.

Then about a year later the touchpad went crazy. I just plugged in a USB mouse and lived with it.

Then the battery died a few months ago and I had to take the case apart to replace it, and when I opened it a screw fell out. I couldn't find where it went so I left it out. When I put it back together the mouse worked perfectly. I never heard the screw rattling around in it so I think it was wedged against something and worked itself into a position to cause problems with the touchpad. I guess HP dropped it in the case when they did the hinge repair.

 

[mr_fender]

Word of warning for those with high mileage SSD's. Don't depend on them for long term storage. They have a shorter lifespan than HDDs with heavy use and when they die, they have a nasty habit of doing it suddenly and taking all of your data with them. The performance and battery life benefits SSD's give are undeniable, so they make fantastic OS drives. Just make sure you back up your data regularly to external and/or cloud storage. In IT, we say there are two kinds of people when it comes to data backups: those that have lost data and those that will lose data.