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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!

119 comments
  • Oneplus phones are good. Beastly specs and run LineageOS. Also not too challenging or expensive to replace (most) parts.

  • 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.

  • My work machines get cycled out after 3 years, but I've had good results with Lenovo and Dell.

  • 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.

  • 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.

119 comments