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Comment by bityard | Hacker News Reader

My favorite laptop has consistently been the one that I can buy off the second-hand business surplus market for cheap, and has a plethora of replacement parts available on ebay. Up until the whole PC market got stupid about a year ago, anyway.

My current daily driver is a Dell Precision 7550. It has a nice 15" display, touchpad buttons with a middle-mouse button, USB-C + Thunderbolt. Keyboard is not great, but not terrible. I did have to buy a new battery for it. I don't know what I'm going to do if/when it dies, because neither Dell nor Lenovo make a laptop now that I am interested in owning in 3-4 years.

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Ever since Dell launched their Ubuntu laptops, I've had nothing else (since 2012?) I'm on my fourth now, an XPS*. They all still work.

* It's not called XPS anymore, though.

Like Land Rover owners, I’m always shocked that people look to buy a thing that has plenty of spare parts.

I’d much rather buy a thing that doesn’t need them. Two decades of laptops, never replaced a single thing or had an issue. Shot, I have not had a single app crash or system crash in 5+ years. Also two decades of driving around the world without a single breakdown.

The spare parts availability is not really about failures. It’s often about upgrades (and sometimes downgrades). Also there are accidents.

You want to downgrade your laptop?

Maybe I’m a sucker , I have to ask.

Why?

One case: I had a (work provided) 15 inch laptop with a 4k touch screen. I didn’t like touch (never used it once) And 4k was a pain, but I don’t remember why exactly (tiny icons) or mixed dpi with an external screen.

So you modified the hardware on a work provided laptop instead of just running the screen at a different resolution?

And like Kawasaki KLR650 owners, I always look for things that I can easily fix myself and have plenty of spare parts on the market. "Zen or The Art of Laptop Maintenance", I suppose!

Obligatory "Don't forget the doohickey!"

But in all seriousness, the KLR is such a great example of this mindset. Find the tool that suits your needs, learn how it works and how to maintain it, and you're set for life.

There's no laptop that doesn't need spare parts. Even if some model is known for reliability, it doesn't matter when you're suddenly the unlucky one. Or when it drops on the ground and something cracks. Not that I have perfect information, but in a calculation similar to insurance - I'd rather have something a little bit less reliable but with cheaper spares/repair than "perfectly reliable" but needing a full replacement. (Or apple's "we can replace all of the inside or all of the outside")

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