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Comment by bugake | Hacker News Reader

I have lots of family and friends who bring me their broken "thin laptops." Their thinness makes them super fragile, and they break all the time. They're also getting harder to repair as assembly becomes more convoluted each year. Even basic maintenance, like cleaning the fans, requires increasingly super difficult disassembly.

The latest models require repeatedly disassembling the sandwich from both sides. You have to remove the keyboard to access a screw, open the bottom, remove another screw to lift the top, then go back and forth between both sides just to reach a fan that frequently gets clogged with dust and needs frequent, regular cleaning.

Even worse, the unavoidable cleaning voids the warranty.

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I don't think most people do maintenance on their laptops at all, which is probably why they usually end up with that one friend/family member who does.

Laptop manufacturers would like to have you think cleaning them or removing a "warranty void if removed" sticker over a screw actually voids the warranty but it usually doesn't actually.

Most people do repairs all the time but that doesn’t mean it has to be ib their garage with their own tools and bare hands. Point is getting it repaired

Easily

Affordably

Anywhere (almost anywhere)

In other words: not having to face something like this: “ah, so your A and G key don’t work? Lovely. Let’s look. Got it! The chassis needs changing and motherboard which is soldered into it. Good news, we can let you reuse the battery” and all that a bright grin that puts my house’s brightest LED to utter shame.

I just had a MacBook fixed. The hinge area had accumulated crunchy food debris, and it ended up busting the hinge angle sensor. But this sensor is paired with the top case, so the top case had to get replaced too, so the entire bill came to close to one thousand.

So.. can someone tell me again why a humble hinge angle sensor is paired with an entire hideously expensive top case assembly ?

> Most people do repairs all the time but that doesn’t mean it has to be ib their garage with their own tools and bare hands.

Unless you live in India or a similarly developing country, this hasn't been true for many decades.

The local cost of labor is simply too high to make it economical to repair even simple things, let alone complex electronics.

All the wokeification posturing didn't make those companies manufacture maintainable computers for poor countries.

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