I’m sick of my laptop breaking after just three years. I want a laptop that:
- comes with a nice APU
- does not have a dGPU
- comes with a chonky thermal solution
- has lots of battery juice
- has lots of modern ports
- is repairable
- is rugged, bulky and thick
- is equipped with a nice, thonky keyboard
- isn’t one of those stupid, low-quality “gAmIng lApTOp”
So far, only the X220 and MNT Reform comes close to this description - the former is a really slow machine for today’s time, and for some reason, still damn expensive. The latter is just too expensive to the point that I’ll have to sell all eight kidneys in my family.
Do they sell anything like this in today’s time, with a reasonable price?
PS. Thick is a strong requirement. I want a really nice cooling solution, plus it also serves it’s purpose as a melee weapon to removed-slap those ultra-book trash-talkers.
Short answer: No.
Long answer: Your laptop desires are common, but unprofitable. Even if manufacturers charged twice as much for them, they’d lose out in the long run. Because you wouldn’t need to buy a new one every three years.
It’s the same problem that mobile phones have. Year after year, the number one complaint in consumer surveys is: “I want longer battery life!” It’s been like that for 20 years now. You’re never gonna see it. The battery having a short daily life—as well as a short lifecycle (before you have to bin the device because the battery isn’t replaceable)—is an intentional design choice. It ensures you keep buying The Coolest New Thing every few years. That’s money in the bank, baby!
If no thinkpad, then dell latitude. Older business laptops are amazing
Oh yes. Rugged Dell Latitude, Getac, and Panasonic Toughbooks are quite good. But the price…
Well, the price reflects the performance and durability.
Its the old quality triangle:
Quality, Cost, Performance… Pick 2
What is your use case? They don’t make laptops like you described because it’s not necessary. You can have a thin light laptop with good performance and reasonable battery life. Thickness is no longer required.
But modern laptop keyboards are nothing what they’re advertised as. They have horrible keyboard, with less travel distance. They overheat and burn the lap, almost as if the cooling system is useless. Their endurance is low, lasting for only four to five hours on video playback. Their body and fragile keyboard suffers from structure deformity. Hinges always break the device. And the repairability, don’t even get me started on that.
Like take for example, the S540-15IWL I own - which was my first laptop. A little bit of bottom case flex or pressure shorts the memory, and I lose everything I’ve worked on. The keyboard frame is attached using plastic tabs, and they’re so shoddy that it has started to sag. The memory, charger port and processor is soldered, which is just peak anti-consumerist behavior. I don’t want to go through another poor experience like that.
I hate apple, but I think you want an m series mac
Edit: just saw repairability is your main concern, definitely ignore this
Are you often doing stuff on the go?
If not just buy an external mechanical keyboard, a dock will lots of ports, and leave the charger plugged in and whatever ultrabook you feel like. I personally don’t like using my laptop anywhere except sitting down at a desk and especially never the lap because makes the thermal suffer short term and long term. It’s also really non ergonomic to use a laptop on the lap.
Soldered memory sucks but unfortunately it’s also faster. Soldered CPUs are just a fact of life, I doubt you can find a single laptop with normal desktop CPUs partly because Intel doesn’t like it.
I think you’re definitely generalising to only devices you have used, but I still do agree with some of your experiences.
Not OP, but they have more space for battery, cooling, replaceable/upgradable components and keyboard with enough travel.
The issue with wanting a bigger battery is that many high end laptops already have the largest capacity that you can take on an aircraft in NA/EU (100 Wh)
More battery is not really an argument for most people… thin laptops like a MacBook Air last 8h easily on battery.
I mean, I’d even want a phone like Energizer P28K, so there’s that.
Unfortunately, no headphone jack. Damn it.Edit: Hold on, it seems GSMArena might have just missed it
Alright, I might actually get it.
There is nothing like this availlable currently. Framework probably comes closest, but they only sell in a few countries, and there is lots of stuff to dislike about their solutions - but building your own around a framework board might be feasible.
I have two mnt reforms - as you said, slow and expensive. They have their use for work prototyping for me, but generally wouldn’t recommend. They also have the worst keyboard I’ve encountered in a notebook in the last decade.
Nope, they really don’t. You may have to engineer a cooling station.
If you want rugged there are some pretty cool options like the Dell rugged latitude. You can also have dual batteries with it and I think they are hotswap.
Most of the rugged laptops are unfortunately expensive af and fairly modular which is neat.
I would suggest removing rugged (like rugged for real and not durable) from your requirements unless you are rich in cash and muscle.
I wonder why your laptops break after 3 years. My x280 has survived very well (only very minor cosmetic issues) after nearly 6 years. I use it quite rarely these days, but I did use it every day for the first 3 years. It was my school computer I got from school for free. I bought it from them when I was finished with school for around 150€
You’re comparing a ThinkPad X280 with an IdeaPad S540, which is not even half the price of the same device - which is not fair, but that’s just part of the entire assumption, that is, good, reliable technicians and spare parts availability.
The laptop crashes 1 2, if I carry it with my palm on the left side - because apparently, the memory shorts itself to the aluminum case.
The repair experience was so frustrating, because just after one year of use, the system board was damaged, and when I repaired it, not only did the Lenovo authorized technician lose a few screws, but also busted the right speaker. I would be without a laptop for almost two to three months.
I rarely close the laptop lid, as I used to leave it on an empty, clean dining table, so there should be no hinge issues, but it broke down one day, and ripped the entire bottom shell. That was when I had to pay to replace the palm-rest, but this new technician from a Lenovo authorized center destroyed the DC jack. Also, my left speaker blew off, and soon the slightly degraded battery died suddenly, leaving me with no device.
For the last six months (starting from December), I’ve not had a laptop to use, and obviously, I couldn’t work on software projects, learn LeetCode or apply to jobs. Just recently, I got a spare battery to use this device, but the DC jack blew again. For the DC jack alone, I had to go thrice, and finally, when I inspected the repair myself yesterday after buying a multi-head screw driver kit, it turns out that the technician never replaced it to begin with, and used a solder to complete a brittle, makeshift circuit.
It did not ‘just’ break after three years. The device was a pile of smoldered shit, and the repair experience was even more horrible, with lost and damaged parts - most of which were M2.0 x 3.0mm Philip screws 6 out of 22 missing, and the essential M2.0 x 5.0mm Torx T5 screw for the base plate - 2 of the 9 missing. I did not play games or run highly demanding applications or LLMs - maybe a little bit of ‘Battle for Wesnoth’ and ‘Final Fantasy 6’ here and there. When not in use, my device stayed in the laptop bag, or the dining table.
It is my first laptop btw, and my experience with it was simply terrible. There’s barely any CRUs or FRUs available, and I’ll have to order from China to India, which would be quite expensive as they’re not bulk orders. My main idea was to look for refurbished laptops that matched the description in the post. I’ll probably never be able to buy a new device, given my present circumstances.
Well it sounds like that laptop was problematic, not laptops in general.
I have a 26 year old laptop that still boots. A 15 year old one (Lenovo) that still runs fine (just replaced a fan in it last month, for $15).
I’ve carried many laptops over the years, and the better brands (Dell, Lenovo) have held up well, and I traveled for work a lot every Friday/Monday for years) .
But… The consumer lines of these brands don’t do so well. I think that’s a key difference. I’d never buy the consumer line of Dell hardware for example (Vostro), as it’s known to not be very good.
Yeah, business tier laptops like the ThinkPad and Dell Latitude (excluding the 3xxx line) lines are generally seen as reliable computers but cheaper laptops like the ideapads are very much not so.
I would never buy an Ideapad but I really like Thinkpads.
If I were you I would just buy an old used Latitude 5xxx or ThinkPad in good condition from the last 3-6 years (or newer if you can afford it). They will most likely work perfectly fine for what you want to do. I have also replaced the tiny ass 256 GB SATA SSD with a 1 TB NVME one.
If you were ever considering an x280, please get one with an IPS 1080p screen. I got the one with an TN panel It’s horrible (awful colour, awful resolution, and awful viewing angles) compared to the IPS one. Luckily you can buy an IPS replacement on eBay so I did that.
If this was your first laptop I wouldn’t go overkill by buying some rugged laptop just yet. It might just have been a laptop constructed on a monday.
Honestly you will probably be fine by buying whatever computer that’s in decent condition on the Facebook marketplace or some other local site. Yes a bunch of ports is very nice but you will seriously have a hard time finding any thing with that nowadays. So unfortunately it’s just easier to buy a USB-C dongle/dock with all the ports.
Btw from what I can find the x280 was just slightly more expensive than the s540 was new.
Surprised no one has mentioned System76 yet. They’re expensive but quality laptops, with repairability as a priority.
What about a framework laptop 16?
https://frame.work/de/en/products/laptop16-diy-amd-7040
I own the 13 AMD and have not regretted the purchase for a second.
They’re not sold in my country, and it is nowhere close to the older Thinkpads, when it comes to ruggedness. But I am definitely interested in this device.
I also have the 13 AMD, and it’s my favorite laptop
If you want thick, have you looked at the Panasonic Toughbooks? They are expensive though…
Besides that, what usecase do you have?
I want a device primarily for web-dev, gamedev and package maintenance for Linux. So I figured out that as long as I have a good APU, I can avoid the discrete GPU shenanigans - you know, Optimus and the likes. I’ll probably play Dark Souls Remastered on Bottles, so there’s that too. And I need a really fat stack of battery because where I’m from, there’s a lot of power cut. And due to power cuts, I can’t be online all the time, so I want a decent machine that can be used to build from source as a fallback mechanism. Repairable is also my primary concern, however, I don’t want a really rugged laptop. Something that has Thinkpad-like toughness will do.
Instead of one super chunky battery, how about a laptop with replaceable batteries, in combination with a UPS?
UPS is so you can actually replace the laptop battery with a spare one , even during a power outage. Just run the laptop on AC from the UPS while changing batteries. Or see if you can find a UPS with a long lasting battery. Entry level ones only have like 15-30 minutes of battery life though, since they’re more intended for safe shutdowns or brownouts.
Great idea with the UPS, but dammit if they aren’t crazy expensive for the battery capacity/runtime you get.
I can build a full solar setup with way more battery capacity for the cost of a typical UPS (yes, they are different animals, so not exactly a fair comparison).
With those requirements why bother with a laptop? Just build yourself a desktop and setup up ssh and/or Remote Desktop if you really need access on the go.
I’d be interested in hearing out what part of the requirement sounds unrealistic to you, as a semi-mobile computing device? There are gaming laptops with low and full-profile mechanical keyboards. Then there’s damage-resistant semi-rugged and fully-rugged books. And at least in my assumption, my reasoning for a thicker thermal solution was because I wished to see a laptop with some nice heat-spreaders. And then, a slightly bigger battery for more juice, which is common in a rugged device.
Oh, nothing about it sounds unrealistic, just kinda pointless. There absolutely are rugged laptops and gaming laptops and probably even some combination of the two out there somewhere. But they both tend to be quite expensive and nothing you mentioned seemed to indicate the need for portability. So, why a laptop and not a desktop? You’ll get a lot more bang for your buck and can have the exact keyboard, cooling system and whatever else you want, plus a much more repairable system.
ThinkPad is your only viable option. They have best thermals on a laptop, and if you buy an AMD CPU model, you are set. You will have to fork out 80K to 1L INR, but it will be a machine for atleast 8-10 years besides some maintenance and SSD/RAM/thermal paste replacement needs.
Are you already familiar with Framework Laptop?
Framework is not durable or has a better than average keyboard.
Panasonic Toughbook. But it’s going to cost you.
Clevo/Metabox have always been my goto for upgradable/repairable machines. I got a Metabox P650SE over a decade ago, and it was rock solid for a very long time (still is usable, but its quite heavy now, so I upgraded to a thinner and lighter laptop).
Super easy to open and replace RAM, harddisks, clean out dust etc.
No trouble getting a replacement battery and bottom shell as it aged.
Definitelt thick as well. Downside is cost, they are not cheap. But also not Apple level expensive either.
I don’t know if it’ll hit everything, and my use case is significantly different to yours, but Tuxedo is a pretty attractive option to me. I do want a serious dgpu, so my shopping list is very different to yours. Nonetheless, the keyboard and ports look good to me.
