Are all laptops shit?

[News Enjoyer]

Apple laptops are built to last. If you need a portable workstation, your best investment is almost always Apple. The price point is a tough pill to swallow but it's a "buy it for life" situation. I still get use out of an ancient Macbook which has survived my every attempt to kill it. You can buy used or refurbished with high confidence.
Lenovo is a distant second if you're staunchly anti-Apple. Good screens, will develop battery issues and other faults over a few years but it generally shouldn't die outright on you which will let you replace parts or plan to replace it.
If your aim is gaming then I've heard good things about ACER. They are expensive and do the ricer LED shit but I've heard good reports in terms of performance and life cycle. Do not be tricked by ASUS, an imitation brand of extremely low quality.
Steam deck is an option for above but I do not recommend it if your primary form of play is shooters, RTS, ASSFAGGOTS et cetera (which if you're PC gaming it probably is). Some of these are manageable if you can stomach gyro controls or if you're from the Halo twin stick generation, but if you're firmly KB+M (which if you're PC gaming you probably are) the mounted solutions are not great in my experience. I've used an ANKER dock and it seems to introduce enough delay to degrade my play in multiplayer shooters to embarrassing levels. This could be my TV, though.

 

[Kola]

Yes, all non-Macbook laptops are shit. This is the sad state of the industry in 2025. Spend $4000-$5000 on an MBP and you'll get something solid, but then the software is shit.

 

[BrightonAndHoveAlbion]

I bought myself a newer Lenovo Thinkpad (P51) after my 3rd Acer gaymer laptop melted. It has much nicer keyboard with good travel, the keyboard nipple is great and it runs any game i want to play so it's perfect for my usage. The P-Series of Thinkpads is the only one you really want of their newer lines, they are the multiple thousand enterprise machines and still have excellent build quality compared to everything else Lenovo makes which is chinkshit.

Everytime I spent hundreds or even thousands on a laptop it either melted eventually or fell apart since I travel a lot. So now i refuse to spend more than £300 and the P51 I've got at the moment has held up well.

 

[Slav Power]

Apple laptops are built to last.

something something gargle my balls

 

[Lard Shart]

If you want to run Linux get a Thinkpad T480 or earlier, either used or refurbished. Else get a Chromebook.

I like both. Chromebooks are lightweight, minimalistic and just work, while Thinkpads can handle more powerful workloads and are repairable. If you can't choose I'd say get one of each, they're cheap anyways.

Did I mention both have great battery life? Chromebooks do by default and for Thinkpads you can buy giant secondary batteries.

 

[Lapsus of the bepsus]

for your stated use case: buy a used m1 or m2 macbook. get the best deal you can. its now affordable, it Just Fucking Works(TM), its fast and has great battery life, for word processing and emailing and music playing and overall pretty much everything except gaming it will shit all over any windows laptop

 

[Black Man Underwear]

Good laptops are outpaced by good desktops every time by lifespan and performance.

That being said a good laptop can sometimes be cheaper. Balance your needs with price. Laptop performance varies so pick wisely. If you're using it for a home office don't expect to run it on battery a lot, it will die quickly if you're multitasking.

 

[eDove]

what fucking laptop struggles to run word and a website and a song at once? What bullshit are you buying? That's like bare minimum capabilities for a laptop. I thought I'd open this and find you trying to play some high end game or some shit instead it's you struggling to do slightly more than a boomer would online lol.

My laptop doesn't struggle to do any of those things. It runs well. The hardware, however, is inexplicably crapping out and I foresee it becoming unusable soon for reasons beyond my control.

I've seen this happen at the 5-year-mark and onward with nearly every laptop I've owned. They'll be doing well on the software side of things and then something happens to the battery, the motherboard, harddrive, or something else that renders it useless. I bought this one in December of 2018.

 

[Chongqing]

Ok, @eDove. I love my laptop so much.

I bought a lenovo thinkpad yoga from Walmart online, refurbished for $85.

It's great, it's in great condition. It has the hardware needed to upgrade to Windows 11 (which I don't plan to do). It never gets overloaded when I'm running a word processor, browser, and media.

It has a touchscreen. It can be placed on its side and put in portrait mode and hooked up to a wireless keyboard. It has expandable storage, an ethernet port, a Kensington lock, and other good things.

Louis Rossmann swears by thinkpads because of their superior design, specifically because of how they handle water and don't get damaged by it in the same way other machines would.

Recently I spilled boiling hot soup all over the screen and keyboard. It's still perfectly fine.

When I spilled the soup, my heart dropped. When it still worked, I felt so uplifted.

It's also thin and sleek.

 

[robots.txt]

MacBooks are the best laptop on the market hands down, the new ARM chips are ridiculously powerful. There are Windows alternatives, but I hear Windows for ARM is still a broken mess. It can also play directx PC games through WINE compatibility layers (similar to Proton for Linux) and surprisingly well, even with some intensive AAA titles. It's still limited and more technical to setup, but it's only to get better in the future.

That isn't to say there aren't reasons to get a regular laptop though, of course there is. In a lot of ways, this is just the CPU equivalent of a gas car vs. EV. The MacBook and other ARM laptops are smoking the x86 competition in what people want in a laptop. They're silent, they're light, they're fast, and you do not need to carry a charger brick everywhere you go; But you lose out on repairability, program compatibility (non-issue in macOS w/ Rosetta 2), etc. On the other side of the coin, the top thing to fail on a laptop is going to be the fans and heat throttling, especially with gaming laptops with a discrete GPU. I don't think I've met a single friend who has kept their gaming laptop for 2 years without it sounding like a jet engine and falling apart.

I'm hoping Windows for ARM improves and the scene around ARM on Linux broadens. If the next-gen Steam Deck is ARM-based, we're gonna be eating good.

Apple laptops are built to last.

The new Apple laptops after the chip change are built to last, before you couldn't even have Chrome + Blender open without your Mac melting through your lap and literally destroying itself from heat. I wasn't very impressed either with the 2015 Intel MacBook Pro, and that was before Apple made that flawed redesign. Installing Linux on that laptop was the most enjoyable experience I've had using it.

 

[BONECRUSHER]

But you lose out on repairability, program compatibility (non-issue in macOS w/ Rosetta 2)

Rosetta is going the way of the dodo, friend.

 

[robots.txt]

Rosetta is going the way of the dodo, friend.

Oh lawd, I forgot about that lmao. From what I'm understanding, Rosetta 2 is being discontinued but will still be present for things like gaming and other specific cases. Gonna be honest, I'm not even sure what apps I have that are even Rosetta-based because of how well it blends the lines. Steam is the most notorious Intel app I can think of, but Valve released a Steam beta running natively after that news dropped. I hear it's pretty easy to port Intel Mac apps to ARM, but the real issue is relying on a developer to make that change. I'm a new Mac user, but iirc there's a good amount of Mac apps that are basically lost to time after Apple dropped 32 bit app support in an update; Could be the same situation here, but at least the porting process isn't as big of a nightmare.

 

[Janki's Mom]

Macs are shit. I had four of them before I left the dark side. Constant motherboard and video board failures (at least once a year on every Mac I owned). I switched to a Lenovo which lasted 5 years, and I'm now VERY happy with my Asus. As to cell phones, I left Apple and Samsung's top-of-the-line products and I'm very happy with my Moto Edge + (2023) model. I paid less than $450 for an as NIB return that eats iPhones for lunch.

 

[Ed Special]

Buy a business-class laptop like a Latitude or Thinkpad

I'm a big fan of HP's business-class hardware. ProBooks and EliteBooks are reasonably rugged and easy to service. Windows 10 and 11 are fine, just run ShutUp10 and Win10Debloat, make some manual registry tweaks if you're on 11 and want a more 10-like experience, and you'll be golden.

If you want a full computer, get a macbook air.
Forget all the complaints about a closed garden and shit, they are easily the most optomised laptops for basic tasks like you are looking for.

Otherwise, yeah chromebook or even an ipad if you can live with the shit keyboard.

This would be very underrated advice, if not for Apple's inability to make a single fucking laptop since 2006 that doesn't come with some crippling design or QC defect that bricks half the units within a year or two of purchase.

If you can afford a new expensive laptop every year, fuck it, go for it and just use a NAS or Mega or something to back up critical data because the storage on modern Macbooks is soldered to the board and supposedly encrypted such that even three-letter niggers can't reliably recover it. Much as

 

[Sam Losco]

yeah chromebook

Chromebooks

Chromebooks should be erased from history like someone that fell out of favor with Stalin. Nigger tier garbage.

 

[The Connected Nose]

And here's what I don't get about people recommending Framework laptops over ThinkPads. Yes, they make absolutely fucking sure in their marketing to show you that you can replace anything, including the mainboard. But I don't fucking buy it.
First of all, you're still relying on Framework to have a supply of those, it's the same issue as Lenovo replacement parts, where Lenovo has a guarantee of replacement parts availability due to ThinkPads being targeted to businesses. Unless you manage to design something akin to ATX for a standard for modular laptops, you will always have to depend on the manufacturer to fix your shit. All that Framework did is that they made more of their own design modular, but it's still their design and their parts, with practically no third party market despite claiming to be open.

The thing about Framework isn't necessarily that they're easy to swap parts in, it's that their entire ethos is "you own your device." If something goes bad, you can get a new part and they show you exactly how to replace it. If it's something soldered onto the motherboard, then they'll fix it if it's under warranty. But here's where they've differentiated themselves: For systems that are past the warranty, they will provide schematics to repair shops. So if it's outside warranty and you need component-level repair done, then a legit repair shop will be able to get the schematics they need to properly diagnose and repair the issue you're having. Why replace the entire motherboard if one or two IC's or capacitors are where the problem lies?

They want you to be able to fix what you own rather than just replace it, and that's why people recommend them.

 

[the rat]

Apple laptops are built to last.

Until they inevitably Think Different™ of course.

What you're asking is possible on a laptop from 2006 with a nice C2D my nigga, if your computer is struggling to do that then I worry what sort of chink-shit you bought. An Ideapad 100s??? Just stay away from anything that has the words Celeron, Pentium or Atom in it and ensure it was made past 2015 and you should probably be more than golden.

I'd recommend a Thinkpad T480 though. I think they're pretty cheap now?

I'm hoping Windows for ARM improves and the scene around ARM on Linux broadens. If the next-gen Steam Deck is ARM-based, we're gonna be eating good.

I can't wait when computers turn into shitty hyper locked down tablets where everything is on the SOC and I can't run any programs that my main computer can run because a bunch of fucking queers fell for the "arm is just better because it is ok" joke.

 

[Judex Meus]

and you're one of those weirdos who has to have 300 tabs open in Chrome

I disagree with this part only because websites have gotten so unbelievably shitty that a single YouTube tab can eat up multiple gigs of RAM depending on what you're watching, namely playlists, but even a regular video takes up at least a couple hundred MB. At least in my experience. A lot of other websites tend to take up quite a bit as well, at least on Chromium-based browsers (I haven't tested this extensively elsewhere).

I blame this on shitty websites (or browsers?) than the specific computer though. That said, upgrading with a bit extra RAM may be worthwhile. There's probably stuff to be done like some custom uBlock scripts or something, but if you're looking for an out of the box solution you may need to up the specs a bit.

edit: one thing in favor of Chromium: they finally implemented unloading unused tabs. Probably because the pajeets who work at Google fucked up the RAM usage so hard they had no choice. So at least they've got that going for them.

 

[YoRHa No. 2 Type B]

You aren't stuck with Macbook toys if you want something that won't break.
I have a Framework (13 inch model), its really a high quality laptop on top of being repairable.
Hardware wise, it feels a lot like a Macbook, both in terms of looks/style and durability.
So far had no problems with it. But I have the comfort of knowing that if anything does go wrong its very easy to fix, feels a lot like the Thinkpad I used to use in that regard.
They do cost quite a bit of money though, but you get what you pay for. Cheap people pay twice after all.
Best part about Frameworks is that you can run actual operating systems like Windows and Linux on them, rather then being stuck in Mac OS hell.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

Just buy something cheap on sale or refurbished, like an i3-1215U, 1315U, Core 3 100U, or whatever. You don't even require chips that powerful to run the software you want to run, so Intel N100, N200, etc. are on the table. Don't worry about the brand, try to get to $250 or less. Run it until death.

One thing to look for now is USB-C charging, since you can use a generic charger.

At a minimum, I would expect battery life to be halved after 5 years of heavy use. If the laptop was very cheap, it might not even be worth spending $30 or whatever for a replacement battery. Just move on to the next thing. Is it a coincidence that things go wrong around the 5 year mark? Perhaps not.