Mine has been relegated to the bin of forgotten hardware at my house. The plastic where your wrists rest keep breaking off and stabbing me. Battery doesn't hold a charge even after being replaced. Slow as a dog and can't get the latest OS updates.
I regret mine. Keyboard is missing so many keys, speakers are garbage, getting Debian to support the hardware was nontrivial and stuff continues to break. So few ports. And if it's plugged in when the battery gets to full charge, it will often emit a high-pitched whine until I unplug it, meaning I can't leave it sitting plugged-in with full battery (perhaps a defective unit? but who knows if that's due to running Linux instead of ChromeOS?).
I'm shopping around for a new laptop to replace it, that will be more linux-hacker friendly (more keyboard keys, touchpad with real buttons, etc.)
I'm still rocking a 2012 built HP EliteBook 8540w which I bought second hand in 2015. The weight of the thing is a little bit annoying and the battery is dead. It has never failed me, running Windows 10 now. It has always come back from standby and hibernate without fail. By far the most reliable computer I own. But it is showing its age though, not because of the hardware but because of software. Windows 11 doesn't run smooth on it unfortunately :-(.
Our IT is backlogged with broken keyboards and I'm waiting for. backup laptops to become available so I can send mine for replacement. We have upwards of 200 of these sorry devices. The percentage is well above 10%
I had one and it was a lemon. It was so bad that I gave it away and got a second-hand laptop to work for almost a year, it made me so much more productive.
It's largely turned into a doorstop after the battery was dying a year or so ago. I bought a $70 battery from a random seller on advice from a friend who had good luck with fit and instructions. Replacement was a breeze, and it seemed great at first, but pretty quickly started just dying on me. I use the laptop so rarely, it just seems like, no matter what the SOC was last time I used it, next time I pick it up (usually a week or more later), it was dead and needed power.
that said, about a year or two ago was also when it just started feeling too slow to be usable (beachballs all the time). I blame web bloat, mostly :-/
I bought it new, so I definitely got my money's worth out of it.
> It hasn't even crossed my mind to get another device since then.
Honestly, I don't even know what to get in case it would break. I even have a spare mainboard just because it was 30 bucks on eBay. But in case it would fail completely, I don't know how to replace it.
Most other devices would be a major downgrade in repairability, which I meanwhile value so much that getting yet another Ultrabook that runs 2 years would be no option for me. The framework laptop and the System76 devices look nice, and either of those would probably win in that case, depending on which system is more easily repairable.
But still, they're by far not as easily repairable when components break down.
I can relate to this. I needed a laptop quickly and found a factory display piece on eBay. It was an x230. It must have been atleast a year old. I bought it. That was in 2013 or so. I'm still using it. Upgraded the Ram once. The current problems are a slow fan and a poor battery. I haven't fixed them yet but can probably do so. The thing still works. It's running an old Debian and is my primary machine.
There's currently a glaring lack of high-performance repairable devices. Sure, the Framework laptop is a fun experiment, but it's tiny and has no GPU, so it's useless for our line of work/hobbies. I'd imagine many others feel the same.
I wish people would throw out "thin and light" and make something practical. Nobody does it right. There are heavy laptops out there but they always sacrifice things like the display for that purpose.
Maybe one day we'll try to build our own laptop, but that requires such an astronomical level of expertise and commitment and money that we probably won't ever get to.
The current one I use was bought in 2016 (i3/8GB RAM/1TB mechanical HDD) and still works absolutely fine. I use it for browsing, media consumption and light coding, about 12-15h daily. I guess it helps that I use a lightweight Linux setup; Windows would very likely give me more grief without at least investing in an SSD.
Some issues:
1. Battery is dead but I use it as a stand-in for a desktop machine anyway.
2. Webcam and mic are in bad shape. I rarely need them but when I do I use Droidcam. Even midrange phones have better cameras than top-end laptop webcams nowadays.
Mine has long history. I had to hack the BIOS to get LTE working because original BIOS does not support any LTE cards and have already disassembled it completely to the last part twice after I got it wet. Once with hot, sweet latte and once completely drenched with sparkling water.
I had no tools to open the laptop and power button stopped working so it was not possible to go to bios and disconnect power (the internal battery is always on). I had to stand it on its side like an open wet book to let the water drain and then went shopping for tools. The end was that I had to disassemble EVERYTHING including LCD panel where it had water between individual leaves. I never knew that panel has so many layers.
Anyway, it still lives on. I curse it about once a week for being so tough preventing me from buying newer, better machine:)
This sucks, since it will probably mean that I can't buy the new all in one apple laptops. Yeah they can't be upgraded (a bit of a bummer), but when was the last time you upgraded any laptop that you owned other than with more RAM, adding an SSD or a new battery? When was the last time you wanted to?
My grandparents old laptop finally died, and they offered me it for parts but I had to straight out tell them that there was nothing on it that was worth anything.
I recently recycled an MSI Wind U100. Battery was shot, hinges gave up years ago, keyboard was in pretty rough shape. Still booted though off a budget (at the time) 40GB Intel SSD that made it feel fast.
Still chuckle that they offered the overclocking option as if it mattered on that Atom N270 CPU.
Dragged it everywhere for a bit. It was the first laptop shaped device I could afford new as a teenager. I refuse to believe it's retro.
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