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Comment by dorfsmay | Hacker News Reader

> so if you don't like it you're welcome to buy a different laptop or phone

Sadly every brand has been imitating the cool kid.

Case in point: Thinkpads.

Thinkpads used to be an absolute beauty of engineering. I have an old x220: You could swap battery by hand, change the memory and hard disk by undoing one single screw, swap the keyboard by undoing 3 screws.

I also go a new one recently, a T480. Changing memory and mass media means taking the whole bottom off, which means which is almost impossible to do with breaking some small plastic tabs. Changing the battery and keyboard is close to heart surgery.

Their newer model downright solder memory in the machine, making it impossible to upgrade or repair.

Another example, OneOps was one of the few company making sane decision, their latest model does not have a jack for headset.

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I've got a t470s, it's really not that bad. Roughly equivalent to swapping parts on my 2010 MBP, you remove the bottom and everything is right there. I don't love that I only have one DIMM slot, but it's still a very serviceable machine.

I also had an x220 (I actually keep it around my office as a spare). Adding a second SSD to the WWAN slot required basically a complete teardown of the machine. The swappable battery seemed nice, but the battery in mine falls out because the locking mechanism broke.

For my use I actually prefer the newer style thinkpads. If I need to replace the battery I'll deal with the 5 screws on the bottom. Regarding the t490 RAM, it's like my T470s, one stick soldered and one DIMM slot.

I'll also add that although Lenovo is far from perfect (superfish), they do have a history of correcting bad design decisions based on customer feedback (see the t440/x240 trackpads).

Thinkpads are no longer made by IBM, so, yeah.

Other brands have faired a much worse fate. AEG for example was once a brand which stood for good german quality, nowadays everyone who wants to use that name only has to buy the right to do so from some turkish company.

At the very least, AEG home appliances are made by Electrolux. Same internals as Zanussi, a step above the sad state of Sharp, Panasonic, Grundig (made by Beko). Not as good as they once were, though.

Funnily enough, I was chatting to the guy who came to repair my 10yr old Siemens dishwasher a month or so back. His advice - next time you buy one, buy a Beko, as they have long understood how to build a good product to a price cap. The marque brands are now trying to save costs by doing the same internally, but they are not as good at it!

Oh man, funny that you mention that. So Bosch/Siemens have the most reliable appliances (lowest failure rates), except for their bloody dishwashers. They use unique, expensive parts and are very hard to disassemble. Terrible choices, no idea why.

Beko use standard components (except the main board) found on dozens of other brands and most of them only require you to remove the bottom cover for access.

To be fair, Beko branded machines are pretty good. Just not that good. Especially for the premium price they want for some of their other brands.

I've worked on several Beko washers that overheated until the glass on the door cracked (flooding the place). But that's nothing compared to some Miele that will power the heater even if there's no water, getting it red hot and risking a real fire. Ditto for Indesit dryers.

> Thinkpads are no longer made by IBM, so, yeah.

I've heard this line of thought repeated alot--"Thinkpads went to crap once IBM sold them to Lenovo"--but I could swear I read an article stating that the Thinkpad team went to Lenovo as well, such that the same people still work on them.

I'll edit my post if I can find the source.

The Lenovo deal happened a long time ago. Does it matter much today what the team was like in 2004? People move on, etc. The thinkpad brand itself is quite a bit older, even.

Whether or not the team itself moved over, I believe they still use something very close to the original design and build process as the IBM ThinkPads.

This makes sense. They are everywhere in the South East Asia market for electronic goods and their products are trash. I presume a Chinese firm got them as marketing.

I bought a lifetime supply of x220 parts on ebay. Since Moore's law has failed since they came out, newer machines would be a downgrade on every front except the screen.

The reason I got a new one is for the ability to add more memory, but newer machines use way less energy (smaller battery or longer life on one charge).

There's a few lenovo machines which are faster (xeon chips) and you can stuff them with memory, and as I said, the x220 screen leaves something to be desired, but for now, the keyboard kind of wins over these factors. The big battery is pretty good; lasts all day, assuming I'm not compiling browsers.

I have the OG X1C (i7/8/256). I got a free battery swap included in my purchase, and the guy who came out had it done quite quickly.

The 2012 is still going pretty well for me and quite useful as my #2 dev machine. I have a much higher powered desktop. I'd like a new X1C, but won't replace it until it breaks - and currently it looks like I better not hold my breath for that to happen; it's holding up incredibly well.

How's that for reducing waste; buying top spec laptops and making them last not 2, not 3 but 7 years and going.

What if that's just further confirmation that people who change parts are a small minority of the market? I could see Apple purposely sacrificing market share to achieve design trendiness purity, but boring TPS-reporting laptop manufactures? No way!

Design and advertising are used to make devices look obsolete when they're actually still perfectly good to use. Consumers choose to buy new devices instead of repairing/upgrading their old devices. Devices become harder to repair, making repairs more expensive. Consumers repair even less.

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