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Invest in build quality and reliability, potentially at the cost of end-user repairability.

Have you used a ThinkPad? Reliability, quality and repairability.

Only apple have managed to destroy the concept of repairability. Even no brand Chinese clone junk is pretty repairable.

Apple are trying to force a disposable model on computing which is completely not justifiable based on their initial cost.




I deal with a lot of no brand Chinese clone junk, and I can attest that one guy from Xinjiang with a soldering iron and a few screw drivers can fix any of it in the basement of one of the e-markets here (in China). It works for about a week, and degrades depending on how often it is repaired.

In contrast, when my Apple laptop breaks under warranty, I have to trek to the Apple store, they repair, it never breaks again. You never really get it until you own one on why this is so awesome.


I doubt that happens any more. The whole unit will get swapped out instead. They are not repairable. Everything is glued in and not removable.

I've had a fair amount of apple kit - I've found it to be hideously unreliable, clunky and of dubious design. Detail things such as power isolation is not possible which bit me hard after I had an MBP catch fire just out of warranty.

I don't buy the whole quality argument. Its a perception - not a reality.


I don't know what they do if you ask for a battery replacement or when something's wrong with the SSD, but changing a display on my 2011 MacBook Air was a matter of 20 minutes. I'd be very surprised if you couldn't at least replace the moherboard.

Which, by the way, is the only type of repair the other laptop manufacturers ever offered to me.


They probably replaced the lid assembly whereas most vendors you can replace the panel with little effort (I did it on my ThinkPad in 30 minutes with the wrong tools for the job :)

Considering the SSD and battery have the shortest lifespan of all components I can't fathom why they decided to make them non replaceable. Even in worst case scenarios, it's a recyclers nightmare.


You really don't have a clue what the rest of the OEMS are doing. Anything at the ultra book level is essentially two pieces. Your huge mega laptops are still user serviceable (like a bricky T class), but not say....a carbon.


Oh 100% I do. The best selling is the cheapest Chinese crap still, followed by the mega laptops followed by the ultrabooks.

Outside Starbucks and excessively middle class areas, cheap is king.




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