Mid-grade is pretty vague. Laptops in general are designed to be disposable while ‘checking off the boxes’ for marketing feature lists - with few exceptions.
I work in a school and we purchase a whole heap of laptops every year. For that price we’d be looking at a student device, defenitely one of the cheaper ones. But yes, we’d expect more than 2 years out of them. Again, we don’t buy consumer devices because they have horrible build quality and get an education + bulk discount.
I just think we shouldn’t accept that cheaper consumer devices get built so poorly they just crumble to pieces after two years.
While I hate to call on the “everything was better back then” argument, a €500 laptop back in 2008 would be a shitty laptop, but it would remain functional while shitty for basically ever.
So many of these cheap laptops with super crappy Celeron processors just keep going even if they are slow as fuck and were barely tolerable back in the day. And when RAM or the storage device dies, you can replace them and keep the machine going. Not so much with many modern devices.
I feel like we’re literally engineering them to fail.
The way we stop accepting it is we stop buying them. Whoever bought a Lenovo Ideapad Flex or a Dell Inspiron needs to stop and take a second to do some research on repairability and build quality instead of buying based on a list of specs.
I think the reasoning is that if you buy a mid-quality machine, it will not have top quality manufacturing?
Thinkpads are pretty solid business class machines.
Even when buying a mid-grade device I kinda expect it to not be complete dogfight garbage and break in stupid ways two days after the warranty ends.
Mid-grade is pretty vague. Laptops in general are designed to be disposable while ‘checking off the boxes’ for marketing feature lists - with few exceptions.
But one should realistically be able to expect a €500 laptop to last more than two years, right?
I work in a school and we purchase a whole heap of laptops every year. For that price we’d be looking at a student device, defenitely one of the cheaper ones. But yes, we’d expect more than 2 years out of them. Again, we don’t buy consumer devices because they have horrible build quality and get an education + bulk discount.
I just think we shouldn’t accept that cheaper consumer devices get built so poorly they just crumble to pieces after two years.
While I hate to call on the “everything was better back then” argument, a €500 laptop back in 2008 would be a shitty laptop, but it would remain functional while shitty for basically ever.
So many of these cheap laptops with super crappy Celeron processors just keep going even if they are slow as fuck and were barely tolerable back in the day. And when RAM or the storage device dies, you can replace them and keep the machine going. Not so much with many modern devices.
I feel like we’re literally engineering them to fail.
The way we stop accepting it is we stop buying them. Whoever bought a Lenovo Ideapad Flex or a Dell Inspiron needs to stop and take a second to do some research on repairability and build quality instead of buying based on a list of specs.