If it still works six months from now, count yourself lucky My underwear smells of bacon. The idea, I think, is to make carnivorous members of society salivate in the unlikely event that they should ever bring their faces into close proximity of my shreddies. Unable to test the effectiveness of this theory "in the field", as it were, I am forced to take it on trust. That said, I can …
Back in the early 2000s HP made a range of "thin and light" laptops and one went to a company consultant. It had 3 year warranty against accidental damage. He wrecked it so thoroughly in 6 months that what came back was a new machine. Along with a note to the effect of "We've replaced it this time but if you give it to your gorilla again we're not going to fix it under warranty." After this, he stopped throwing it in his bag along with all the junk he had managed to accumulate, and it lasted rather longer. Titanium Powerbooks similarly treated had a habit of developing severe cracking, because titanium is not really a suitable metal for cladding consumer goods in thin sections.
However, later on I acquired an Acer Ferrari (half price being the reason) and that was almost of Panasonic Toughbook durability, better even than Thinkpad. I think it had rubber bumpers on the rubber bumpers and the carbon fibre lid wasn't for show. It eventually got sidelined because it wouldn't run 64 bit W7 (though it would run 64 bit Ubuntu.)
So I am not totally convinced that Mr. Dabbs has actually tested some of the tougher Windows notebooks.
Typing this on a THIRTEEN year old Acer laptop than will need replacing soon (the door fell off the DVD player slot, the space bar is wonky from time to time). My iPad mini bricked in under a year. I will go buy a new Acer as soon as Windows 10 is either fixed or scrapped.
What trash are people buying. Computer components don't fail. Every machine I've built over the decades has become obsolete, then the replacement parts have had long enough to become cheap themselves.
All except a 56k modem which was struck by lightning. An act of god according to insurance policies.
Capacitor plague affected components around 2000-2005 I dodged that bullet, though one mobo was starting to bulge before obsolescence. Now all but the large PSU caps are tantalum or polymer.
My theory is that dirty power from not using UPSs prematurely wears people's gear. That and OEMs use shit components to begin with.
Ah, I just rembered I had a hard drive fail in storage. Not spinning for a year or two caused the grease to gum up.
Either way Google agrees with me. Consumer grade gear is statistically amazingly reliable.
@AC
Either way Google agrees with me. Consumer grade gear is statistically amazingly reliable.
Yeah, I'm writing this on a Dell laptop which has served as my main computer since before iPads existed, and it all still works fine. I've upgraded the memory and wifi cards though.
I view 5 or 6 years as a full life for portable computers, which my Dell has met superbly. Will the Surface Pro last so long? Possibly not, but then how many people are using the iPad 1 they bought in 2010 as their main device? Not many I'd wager - most will have moved on to newer kit, with the iPad 1 being given to kids, relatives or charity, or otherwise relegated to background tasks rather than being the main event.
... how many people are using the iPad 1 they bought in 2010 as their main device?
Not as a main device, but I recently switched back to using my old iPad 1 instead of my Samsung Galaxy Note Pro 12.2 as my primary ebook reading device. Android is a pile of steaming crap (my opinion), and there is literally no ebook reader which displays all of my PDF's correctly. I've tried many.
Ironically, the old iPad 1 displays them fine. Modern iTunes can't deal with the iPad any more, but using Calibre and a local-only network setup lets me transfer files to it without hassle. Time to sell/throw-away the Samsung POS. Never again with Android. ;)
Lead free solder dramatically has increased failure rate. Thus INCREASING landfill. The health and environment impact, if electronics is built to last and then recycled is negligible. The prohibition doesn't apply to Aerospace/Military and some watches.
Also gold is unsuitable for consumer connections. Any damp and nearby tin is attacked. Gold should only be used with gold, and if not regularly unplugged. It's not even the best conductor, just corrosion free and pretty, though causes electro-galvanic corrosion in many other metals.
Fan failures over the last 20 years have been a massive source of PSU, CPU and Graphics card failures.
While ceramic and plastic dielectric capacitors are hugely better than 1950s paper capacitors, the Electrolytics are a disaster, modern ones seem to be too small and in places with more heat than a valve radio (they put the caps away from hot bits). I think modern electrolytics are 1000s of times less reliable than 1950s ones.
Computer components don't fail
Oh dear. I would recommend dialling back your blind trust in components. In general, if something electronic has been working for 6 months you're OK, at that point the expected point of failure tends to move to mechanical parts such as connectors, spinning parts (hard disks, fans) and power supplies.
There has been a real scandal with electrolytical capacitors which expired quite quickly (look up "Capacitor plague"), and stuff like that will happen again as long as people are in search of short term profit.
Also, electronic components themselves are not free of latent issues - poor welds and internal wiring can also create a ticking clock as thermal movement eventually causes a disconnect.
So no, they DO fail. Not as often as before, but they do fail.
Indeed manufacturers cannot build against user stupidity and clumsiness.
However, how much care and attention does a normal person give to a laptop costing £400 to one that cost them £1500?
Plus do people really carry those very heavy MacBook Pros around with them all day? I wouldn't.
Personally all my (non Apple) laptops long outlast their usefulness to me and still look at worst a year old before I hand them on after 6 years or so use. I still get 4 hours+ battery out of my 13" 2009 Dell laptop (to be replaced today with the new Dell 13" i3 Chromebook).
Looking after kit is quite easy. Though you cannot guard against the crappy Toshiba HDD in your laptop, that's luck of the draw. If you have one of those then you are on borrowed time no matter how long you've had the laptop.
No, it came with a big 8 cell battery as standard. With the 1.3GHz dual core ULV Intel chip it gave over 10 hours when new. Funny at the time I hated it as I wanted a nice slim lightweight laptop but I came to appreciate not having to carry a laptop charger round with me all day.
Also the fact I don't have it hooked up to a charger all the while helps. Like I said you just have to look after stuff and it will look after you mostly.
Utter BS. Transistors have a lifetime, particularly the more they get squashed down and used. You replace your servers on a rolling 3-5 year cycle, because dealing with the shitty intermittent problems that older servers give you is not worth the time when a replacement server will be faster and use less power. If you have servers older than 5 years old, and they actually do real work, replace them now.
It's a bit late to go back and tell that to one customer I had who ran the application on the same server for 10 years and only stopped using it because my company stopped development. They just didn't think the problems of virtualisation were worth it.
Transistors do have a lifetime, it is affected by gate thickness, temperature, voltage and switching frequency. IBM POWER devices used to have stonking thick gate oxide and be immune to everything but nuclear strike, Intel commercial parts are more fragile. But I think power supplies, electrolytics and motors tend to die long before modern CPUs that are being run within limits.
Transistors have a lifetime, particularly the more they get squashed down and used. You replace your servers on a rolling 3-5 year cycle, because dealing with the shitty intermittent problems that older servers give you is not worth the time when a replacement server will be faster and use less power
I would agree with frequent server replacement mainly because it'll give you more bang for the buck (and with decent accounting you should have written that off at least a year earlier), but from an electronics perspective there is no need - other than the mechanical parts those things will keep on working well beyond the point where you consider them serviceable (assuming you run inside specs, of course).
For things that are not stretched to their limits, their lifetime can surprise you. One of the small older computers I have around displays "C Copyright Psion PLC 1986"(*) on bootup, and that did not exactly have an easy life. Yet, it has never failed even once. I suspect the EPROM packs I still have for it would work too, but I don't have the required UV light anymore to erase them (note to self: find out what actually happened to the eraser I made myself). Actually, the 256k FLASHpack I have still works too :). I think that implementing planned obsolescence for especially consumer electronics is actually hard work because components don't fail that quick by themselves.
(*) It's a PSION Organiser II LZ64, still in perfect working order.
uncover eprom window
place on windowsill in direct (UK) sunshine for about 30 minutes
Cool
Repeat 3 or 4 times
Note : using windows correctly saves cost of UV eraser.
About the only decent use I have ever found for windows & electronics ....
Note - in Tropics or high altitude places (Jo'burg) 10 minutes is about all it needs...
My bruv is still using a Dell pedestal server (on NT4) that he bought 20 years ago
My main printer is a HP LaserJet 4M that was purchased in 1992. Around 10 years later I swiped the Postscript card from a dying LJ4MP and plugged into into the 4M, so now it's technically a 4MP and handles PCL and Postscript. These days I have to use one of those USB-to-Centronics cables, but it works fine.
"What trash are people buying. Computer components don't fail. Every machine I've built over the decades has become obsolete, then the replacement parts have had long enough to become cheap themselves."
You've never owned a teenager have you? Everything they touch eventually turns to crap.
There _ARE_ components that fail. You just never ran across them. They are (ab)used in their design configuration and will _ALWAYS_ fail. They are, however, the minority.
Some of the more well known examples which I have run over the years:
Low power Athlon 64 1500+, part number ADC1500B2X4BX (E6) - Every single system I have seen this chip in has failed sooner or later. I have 3+ dead MBs with this soldered on them in my loft. It dissipates way too much heat for its official thermal design and being severely underpowered to start with usually runs at full hilt so it emits it mas power too.
Various low power laptop series and fanless board Nvidia chipsets (~ 5-7 years ago). In some cases (PNY) made worse by using "sticky" silicon transfer to heatsink which was guaranteed to detach after 4-5 years. Same story. It will fail. Question is mostly "when".
Last (before they disappeared off the market) Ali based laptop chipsets as used in HP NC4000 and NC4010. Guaranteed fail for same reason - combined chipset + CPU power output cooks the chipset over time.
Early pre-centrino Sony Vaio P3 laptop keyboards (non-mechanical failures). Same story - CPU too hot, the "scanning" backing of the keyboard is cooked over time so badly that the plastic goes brown and cracks breaking the wires etched on it.
And so on.
It is quite common for components to fail and in most cases the failure can be traced back to bad cooling, bad/loose heatsink + sticky silicon instead of paste, nasty "hotspots" in case, etc - thermal design issues. Failures are also quite often not immediate - 2-4 years.
All of my PCs have been binned due to obsolescence, not faults. Probably thanks to I always built (or had them built) them using good components. I still have a working 286 with its 20MB "Winchester" hard drive.
BTW: I have a Surface 2 Pro which I carry with me every day, and it's been working flawlessy. The only thing that worries me is you can't replace the battery yourself - but that's something Apple pioneered with its all-glue-sleek-designs.
I have to agree with the Apple hardware comment - as a reasonably recent convert to Apple hardware my 2 and a bit year old MacBook Pro is still working perfectly, whereas the previous 3 "pc" laptops that came before it - none of which I would consider "cheap" with all being in the £600 - £700 price range - barely made it past 18 months each before batteries or trackpads or DVD drives gave up the ghost and refused to play any more or the inevitable drag of windows updates had reduced them to a crawl.
Thats been my experience too which is why i praise the Mac so much now and moved to Macs at work.
From 2003 to 2012 i had a new laptop every 18 months ish. The battery would be crap after 12 months, getting worse to the point of having to be plugged in all the time, machines fans would be on constantly after a few months, i would have laptops just reboot instantly, power connectors snap, WiFi just stop working, and motherboards just die. But i kept getting these HP, Acer and Asus laptops because there was no way i wanted a Mac, Mac's were overpriced crap blah blah blah.
Then i gave in and got my first Mac, a Macbook Air, after all it could not be any worse than something running Windows 8! and now I'm a complete convert. 3.5 years on, and its still as fast as the day i bought it, i still get over 5 hours of battery out of it (it was the 2013 Air where the battery hours leaped closer to 9/10 hours , so just missed out), i've not done a clean install of OS X on it ever, it came with Lion, i upgraded it to Mountain Lion, then Mavericks, then Yosemite then Al Capitain and its still fast, and amazing if that was Windows it would be dog slow by now going through that many upgrades. The MagSafe power connector is such a great thing , the trackpad is the best i've ever used, and no fan noise unless i load Minecraft or rip a DVD, and best of all i could still get close to £500 for it today if i wanted to sell it!
Just wish i had not been so closed minded for the last 15 years and ignored that Mac, i could have saved a lot of time and money if i had bought one years ago.
Just wish i had not been so closed minded for the last 15 years and ignored that Mac, i could have saved a lot of time and money if i had bought one years ago.
:). In my case it wasn't being close minded, it was exposure to OS 9 that made me hesitate. I used that at a company, and the non-familiar way it worked and the toy noises it made did not create a good impression. If it hadn't been my wish to ensure I covered all the basis for something I am writing I would have never bought a Mac, and even then I expected to use it as a poor Windows/Linux backup once I was done.
Instead I threw out all Windows stuff, and Linux now mainly lives on some VMs and on servers. Best decision I ever made, and, like you, I regret not having tried this earlier.
This is why I find the Windows fanatism occasionally expressed here rather suspect. That comes either from people using their computer for gaming (fair enough, OSX isn't that hot on it), from people who have never been near OSX so maybe that's just jealousy, or from Microsoft sponsored trolls (of whom we have unmasked a few when they started spouting BS).
Mind you, OSX is not *perfect*, certainly not certain apps that come with it. Apple Mail doesn't have the first idea about the difference between attachment and embedding when it comes to sending images (it quite simply sucks at that, to the point where you need to buy a plugin to fix it), Pages and Numbers are too much focused on a Desktop Publishing Model to be decent for the average end user, and I much rather use Firefox than Safari because it works in more places. But it's so much easier to use and simpler to keep safe that that still makes it worth it.
Unless you're heavy into gaming.
Best thing to do, speaking as ex-Applecare, is not use any Apple apps. They are for short-bus people. The kind of people that thought that buying a computer would make them proficient. See my vaporware book entitled "Software that helps too much and the people who use it".
I've used Mozilla-then-Seamonkey since the M-builds, still works with ancient emails and everyone that I set up with it never has a browser or email problem, no support calls. Neo-Open-Libre Office does that kind of work well enough for most and doesn't look fisher-price like pages. Lots of good devs on OSX, you can find just about anything.
Delete iTunes and use a good music player, download a better photo editor, etc. A lot like setting up a new Linux distro.
The last lappie I bought from them, however, will probably be the last after 20 years of being a customer. I just put a new battery in it which I won't be able to do on the new ones, cleaned the useful ports which no longer exist on new ones, and replaced the hard drive which is still possible on some older models.
The hardware is now catching up to the software in being mostly for wet-asses, sadly. Mr. Cook is more into profits and image than quality, it's already obvious from his recent exec hires.
Never had any problems with Mail.app, Safari or indeed iPhotos/now Photos. iMovie does the business for simple video, assuming you are happy to assemble in linear fashion. Pages is pretty good if you want simple and effective Newsletter layout, for everything else there is MS Word or Indesign.
So in summary - the Apple apps are just fine for everyday use. I think the person destined for the 'shortbus' is probably the person who makes such a meal of them.
No, I'm not going defend iTunes.
Nothing lasts forever, but you can save much by assembling kit from high end components and using Linux || Free BSD. How? Purchase quality hardware, avoid shopping by brand-name, buy the maximum amount of RAM your MB supports, and purchase more CPU power than you need while remaining within budget. Similar rules apply to Hard Discs, buy enterprise grade long-life kit. Use RAID storage where you can (make sure you know how to manage them), and SSDs where speed counts.
The machine in use to write this has an Athlon II CPU, 4GB RAM (which is a small amount these days) and what was at the time a high end MB; it boots from an SSD and uses a software RAID for /home. The graphics card is an nvidia GeForce 6800 GS. A hardware RAID would be faster, but I've been burnt by their oft-proprietary nature, and when those fail they can be a more of a hinderance than help when it comes to getting them back on their feet.
The PC that this one replaced is also still working, 24/7/365 doing duty as an internal-facing web-server and NAS running an older version of CentOS.
My 8 year old Asus Core 2 Duo laptop is still working perfectly, and it's accumulated more than five years of "on" time by now. My 11 year old HP laptop works great too; I just don't use it when I have the much faster and more current Asus available. Everything works on them both (hinges included). I did replace the hard drive on the Asus, but the original (though too small to be of much use) still works nicely.
The comments about electrolytic caps are right on target. I've had a number of electronics devices fail or develop odd behavior, and in nearly every case, I found bulged electrolytics inside the errant devices. Upon replacement of the caps, these old items often spring back to life, working as well as they ever had. In fact, I haven't yet replaced caps in a device and had it remain in a failed state. It's always revived dead devices and restored proper function to ailing ones.
It seems that the capacitor issue has gone beyond the "plague" era (supposedly a function of industrial espionage) and is now in the realm of "cheap, crappy components are good enough to get the product past the expiry of warranty." Most electrolytics are terrible; there are only a select few manufacturers whose electrolytics can be relied upon, as compared to hundreds of manufacturers who provide the cheap ones that end up in many respectably branded devices.
Fortunately, my Asus laptop (as well as the Asus motherboards in my desktop PCs) have only polymer capacitors, and so far they have worked very well.
That's hardly an endorsement. Kit like that should last at least five years, else I'd consider it 'not fit for purpose' with a subsequent claim against the manufacturer.
The most-intensively used systems I can call my own are all Thinkpads of varying age, none younger than those five years. The only problems I have to deal with is a reluctant chipset fan (not the primary CPU fan, and once it's past POST the system apparently doesn't care about it stalling again) on an X61, and the batteries on two 701C's being, quite understandably, rather expired. Somewhere in the past I had a T23 and an A21 joining the choir invisible at age 7+, and an X22 that was loaned out, subjected to a puddle of soft drink, improperly cleaned and only handed back after several days. It did keep going for about three months, but finally ceased to be. An X30 is still in use 24/7.
2 years?
I have 2 Macbook 13" "Whiteys" I bought in 2009, all that's been replaced in each are hard drives after they failed. Sure the batteries are only able to hold a charge for about 90 mins now but the laptops are still going strong!
Also have 2 iMacs. A 2007 24" and an 2008 24", one has had the HD replaced the other is untouched internally but both working fine and one of which is the one my Missus uses on a daily basis as her main machine, in use for at least 4-5 hours a day. My 75 year old father still has his 2008 iMac, despite replacing his main PC box at least 4 times in the intervening time with kit he built himself. 1 box is running Yosemite and the other 2 are running El Capitan!
Not bad for a system that's 7 years old and able to run the very latest O/S from Apple! Like to to see Microsoft running Windows 10 on kit that was bought in 2007.
I don't have a 2007 Windows laptop to try that on, but my 2008 Asus laptop is running Windows 10 just fine right now. Everything worked right out of the gate after the upgrade from 7-- even the fingerprint reader and the associated software. I'm not keeping it like this, mind you-- Windows 10 is awful, IMO, and this PC that has spent nearly all of its existence running Windows XP is going back to WIndows 7 shortly. That's another topic, though, so I'll leave it at that.
After the success with my 2008 laptop, I decided to try putting Windows 10 on my 2005 HP laptop with a single-core AMD Turion CPU and 1GB of RAM. Guess what-- it works! This pre-Vista relic is up and running with Microsoft's latest... triumph (cough, cough). It's quite usable... or at least as much as Windows 10 is, anyway.
So you Apple folks are not the only ones that are able to run the newest OS on hardware that is quite old. This laptop's 11 years old (and everything still works on it & the hinges are still nice and stiff). I know HPs are know to have hinge issues (my even older pre-HP Compaq's hinges became completely floppy years ago), but this one has been a gem. It was retired from front-line duty for reasons of obsolescence, not because anything was wrong with it.
My 2007 iMac is still going, perhaps not as spritely as it once was as I'd imagine that El Capitan requires a little more from the hardware than Tiger but perfectly usable.
With the 2012 MacBook the jury's still out, the video output fried and It had to go back to see a Genius. Hopefully it's not a regular occurrence, it's not covered by the extended guarantee that all the other MacBooks of its age are in spite of exactly the same symptoms as its a dual nVidia/Intel and if Apple says they don't do this then they don't do this...
The batteries last in these because they ship with a neat app that reduces the charge cycles on the battery - so they last longer in "corridorr-warrior" usage patterns. If you leave it on the desk plugged in, it simply never charges the battery at all. Other laptops tend to "trickle-charge" the Li-ion cells, which kills them in a few months.
However, more recent Thinkpads seem to be gravitating towards the rest of Lenovo's output in terms of quality. Shame.
With the 2012 MacBook the jury's still out, the video output fried and It had to go back to see a Genius.
I had a MBP from 2011, and the graphics subsystem was what made me buy a new one in the end. That series seems to have had a problem that was just hard to fix. The one I have now is quite simply brilliant.
My 2006 Perspex iMac ran without a hiccup until I sold it on eBay recently - purely because I wanted a new shiney retina iMac. The only thing that I noticed was some screen burn on the LCD (and I didn't know that happened). Compare and contrast that with the 7 work Lenovo laptops I've been through in the same time, even through these laptops have spent 99% of their time in docking stations: in fact three of them never left the office.
An Apple is a high quality product. It's built to a high standard. No argument there.
Same goes for high quality PCs/Laptops ect.
However, as Apple tend to only to mid range to high range, everyone makes the mistake and fallacy of remembering the low end and dirt cheap laptops to compare them to.
I'll agree it's harder to find a Windows based system with the same quality, but there have always been manufactures out there doing it. Though from now on I may prefer to ditch Win10 and go for a Linux.
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