Recommendations of non-Apple products with similar longevity?
Recommendations of non-Apple products with similar longevity?
EDIT: Getting a ton of great responses thanks everyone <3 Once this is up for 24 hours or so I’ll make another edit summarizing everyone’s recs for future reference. Keep ‘em coming!
TL;DR Have any recs for non-Apple phones/laptops that have lifespans of at least 5+ years?
Wanted to get everyone’s opinion on want brands/products have worked for them. I’m lightly techy and not afraid to put some effort in, but also don’t want to build everything from scratch. I think Apple’s products are often anti-consumer, anti-privacy, anti-yadda yadda yadda.
At the same time, with both phones and laptops, I’ve found my Apple products to have double or even triple the lifespan of any other brand. I did my research and bought a $1000+ HP laptop with Ryzen7 a little over two years ago, and due to a flaw in the hinge which is now subject to a class action lawsuit, the screen has cracked and it’s mostly unusable. Other purchase haven’t failed quite that dramatically but don’t tend to last as long. On the other hand, my or my partner’s old Macbooks and iPhones are easily seeing 5+ years of use in addition to software updates.
So let me know what’s worked for you!
Any laptop designed for enterprise like Lenovo Thinkpad or hp elitebook/ProBook
Your laptop was an HP pavilion, right? Those are designed to barely last the warranty period. Their engineers on this product line have a long experience of carefully choosing plastics that will degrade within 24 months
IMHO MacBooks are super overrated. OS support is not as long as normal computers (5 years instead of "indefinite") and they still have hardware flaws to hinges and keyboard
Okay i'm not sure how much + is in your 1000$ and obviously there's a manufacturing defect at olay here. But man a MacBook is 2000$+ I have heard this argument too often unfortunately:
I tried Android once and it was horrible so i just went back to iPhone©™ and now everything is great again.
Context: they bought a 300$ Samsung phone and expected it to perform the same as their previous 800$ iPhone....
And this just sounds too similar. "I previously had a 2000$+ device, now I bought a 1000$+ one and it doesn't perform the same." Except for the part where it's also a shitty brand and the device had a manufacturing defect.
For phones 5+ years of updates is good compared to the alternatives, and is why I have one. For a computer, on the other hand, it’s just not very impressive. Perhaps FairPhones come close (don’t know how long their software is supported but their selling point is longevity), but their specs aren’t that impressive. On the flip side you get something repairable.
MacBooks are often built better with higher quality materials than many other laptops, but it is essentially a computer. Most computers that have high enough specs will always run the latest version of most Linux distributions or Windows barring any need for weird drivers from the past century. Feels a little iffy to have a perfectly good computer that won’t update software anymore just because. Up until recently you could just install some Linux OS on your old MacBooks when it went out of support but honestly I don’t know whether you can still do that after they started making non-x86 stuff.
With all that said, haven’t seen many laptops physically outlive MacBooks’ updates. With the exception of some ThinkPads and possibly some XPS models. Plastic laptops with plastic hinges tend to struggle keeping up, especially if the display is on the larger side. A large gaming laptop living the life of a typical MacBook, going to cafes and university in a backpack every day is probably gonna have more stress on hinges etc.
As for HP I have only heard bad stuff about them for the last 10 years or so. Don’t think I’ll buy stuff from them due to their evil printers that won’t scan without ink etc.
Not many specific recommendations here but just some observations I have made. Hope it’s helpful.
I can't say if the quality is still the same, but I bought a Chromebook when they first came out for $99 and that little buddy has lasted me a decade now. It's seen me through a deployment, a degree, several moves, and has been through a load of abuse and come out the other side working as spiffy as day one, minus some scuff on the screen. (Unfortunately Google has recently aged it out, but I'll find a use for it with a virtual machine perhaps).
I imagine most little netbooks are similarly built and can withstand a boatload, although their computing power definitely lacks.
thinkpad T series laptop
Oneplus phones are good. Beastly specs and run LineageOS. Also not too challenging or expensive to replace (most) parts.
I mean, if we're going by anecdotes, on average, most gear will last 5 years more often than not. I still have my Samsung Galaxy Note 3 that's still working, just that it's sorely obsolete on the software side. Another even more extreme example: I also have a Samsung i600 that's also still working, and only recently has the battery started showing signs of bloating. That's a 15+ year-old phone!
The several thousand laptops the charity I worked for (and still volunteer for sometimes) give out yearly also indicate that plenty of laptops will make it past the 5 year mark. Until last year we were still giving out 6th gen Intel laptops.
Side note, I have such mixed feelings on HP. I have only anecdotal things to say, so please keep that in mind!
I bought a budget HP Pavilion back in 2020, for a similar reason to you, because of the Ryzen setup. It sees use 4-5 times a week. And I have to say... I love it.
The build quality is, in my opinion, outstanding for a budget ($600) laptop. Its metal, solid, with almost no noticable keyboard flex. It feels so much better than both Dells my wife and I use for work. And the keyboard is actually my favorite of all the boards in my house.
My family has always had new tech coming in and out of the house and one of the longest lasting devices we had was an HP 2-In-1.
I don't support their scummy software practices (shoutout brother printers). But for the most part every piece of HP tech I've bought has been average or above. But online they're somewhat universally panned. Its interesting.
Dell Precision line for computers. They are not light. They are not slim. They are not fashionable. They can probably stop a bullet. Dell is still actively still selling (refurb'd) units from ~6 Intel generations ago. The desktop workstations are similarly bulletproof.
My work machines get cycled out after 3 years, but I've had good results with Lenovo and Dell.
My Lenovo Legion laptop is going strong for 5+ years now, also a Nokia smartphone is 3+ already. Had terrible experience with ASUS and HP laptops in the past and had to change them after 2-3 years of use.
Thinkbook t14
I've had good luck with Dell,I recently was using a old Dell Inspiron again to access my VM from. Stuck a SSD in it and upgraded the ram and it works surprisingly great, I think it's from like 2015 but the i5 in it still runs super quick.
For phones I'm really liking my Samsung, I upgraded to a s22 from my pixel 3 last year and having Samsung Dex is pretty awesome, I used to build up a little PC to use on my breaks at work but now I just spin up dex on a spare monitor and can parsec into my VM and do anything I'd want without carrying a laptop
I buy a lot of my laptops from Dell Outlet. Extremely good for the price and I haven't had a single one die on me yet - and the first was bought 13 years ago!
Smartphone: I've just said goodbye to my Honor phone after 5/6 years of service (can't remember how many precisely). Incredible lifespan for its price.
However repairability could be great. I've changed its battery once and screen a couple times, by the end of it the frame was about to break from all the times I had opened it.
Dude did you get the HP Envy x360 too? My hinge failed a year in, I got the panel replaced, a year later the hinge fails again. My screen hasn't cracked but I can't close the laptop anymore... Gonna get a Thinkpad L14 and hope it holds up a bit better, since Thinkpads are known for decent build quality.
Linux phones should allow for much higher longetivity than Android or iOS devices as Linux phone OSes update more like desktop OSes than mobile, in that the device-specific parts are relatively small instead of having the entire OS image be custom made for a specific device. As long as your device has mainline Linux support it will continue to receive updates pretty much forever, or until Linux drops the architecture (unlikely any time soon for ARM, especially ARM64).
People praise Apple for 6 years of updates but my 2010 desktop build runs Windows 10 flawlessly still and will run fine with updates until 2025. Windows 11 arbitrarily ends support officially, but it would still work fine. Linux works flawlessly too and will continue to do so. 6 years is shit, but the entire mobile industry is even shittier on average so 6 years ends up looking decent.
Business devices from HP (Eliebook). Having mine since 2018, runs like a charm