Laptops are always less repairable than desktops as all primary components are baked in to the logic board, driving up repair cost and saving the manufacturer money at your expense

Need help choosing
the right laptop?

v1.6.84

Table of Contents

BOOK CONSULT

LAPTOPS: PROGRAMMED OBSOLESCENCE

Due to thermal and power constraints, laptops use slower variants of desktop processors.

U-class

U means “ultra-low-power,” and that’s basically it—they’re chips that aren’t necessarily the very best in terms of CPU performance, but they’re instead low-power designs made with efficiency in mind. They have lower clock speeds, lesser cores, and more importantly, a very low TDP.
- For example, the Intel Core i7-1x65U is rated for 15W and can turbo up to 5.2GHz (55W) in brief bursts. Some U chips go as low as 9W. These processors can be cooled relatively easily, and depending on the PC’s design, they could even be cooled passively.
- Best suited for:
  Everyday computing with focus on battery life vs. performance.

P-class

P processors sip a little more power—28W, to be precise. That’s almost twice (or even triple!) what a U-series chip requires. As such, power and thermal requirements for these chips are higher, and you’ll need beefier cooling. But at this point, nothing would make a thin and light laptop thicker than it should be, and with the right cooling, it shouldn’t be a problem.
- Whereas you’ll normally see U-series processors on laptops between $300 and $600, P processors are present on higher-end “ultrabook” laptops like the Dell XPS 13, which cost north of $1,000. That’s because the increased thermal headroom allows Intel to cram better performance on these chips.
- Best suited for:
  Professionals that command more CPU performance without sacrificing form factor or mobility.

H-class

Unlike the P-line and U-line, the H-lineup is not made to fit into a thin, lightweight laptop. While those chips go up to 28W, an H CPU can go up to a whopping 45W. Granted, that’s not even close to a desktop CPU (the Core i9-12900K sips 125W), but for a laptop, that’s actually a lot—remember, they have enclosed, tightly-fitted spaces where internal components don’t have a lot of room to breathe. That doesn’t mean they’re not good. In fact, they’re pretty much as good as it gets for laptops. You might also find variants of H-series CPUs ending with different letters, such as S or X, but they’re technically still H CPUs.
- Another advantage H processors have is that they’re very close to their desktop counterparts as well. So while the Intel Core i9-1x900K is kicking in desktop PCs, the i9-1x980HX is instead made only for the very best laptops out there.
- Of course, when we say H processors can’t fit into thin and light PCs, we mean it. These parts normally go inside gaming-oriented laptops, which are physically larger and thicker than other laptops since they need to be packed with better cooling to compensate for the heat the internals will put out. If you try to put one in an ultra-light PC, it’ll thermal throttle over most of its lifespan.
- Best suited for:
  Gamers and creators.

KEYBOARD REPLACEMENT

Read More

SOLDERED RAM & SSD

Read More

BATTERY ISSUES

Read More

Laptops frequently experience bloated battery.
Battery chemistry is optimized for charging and discharging.
Laptop batteries do not tolerate holding a full charge for extended periods, which deteriorates the cells at an advanced rate and accelerates bloating.
- This is due to a variety of factors and can be avoided as follows:
  - Don’t leave charging when not in use or overnight.
  - Unplug and run down the battery periodically, minimum 2x per week.
  - Replace the battery if it starts swelling or is no longer performing to expectations (e.g. battery life).
  - Always use the correct charger meant for your system, avoid using generic or universal chargers.
    - If unsure what the correct charger is, submit a ticket for assistance.
  - Another consideration is that if you use a laptop plugged in all the time, you probably are better off with a desktop.
    - It’s very common for those who mostly use their laptop like a desktop to develop bloated battery.
    - You may want to consider a desktop which of course does not have the potential for this issue.
Dell and Lenovo have charge mode control options for “Primarily AC Use” which basically tells the system to only keep the battery half charged.
- This is the optimal level for battery “storage”
However, brands that lack any charge mode control typically suffer from bloated batteries the most:

Apple, Razer, & HP
In June 2019, Apple announced a worldwide recall for certain 2015 15″ MacBook Pro computers after receiving at least 26 reports of batteries becoming hot enough to produce smoke and inflict minor burns or property damage. The problem affected some 432,000 computers, mostly sold between September 2015 and February 2017. The company asked customers to stop using their computers until Apple could replace the batteries.^[78][79][80]
In September 2019, India’s Directorate General of Civil Aviation said MacBook Pro computers could dangerously overheat, leading the national carrier Air India to ban the model on its flights.^[81]

DESKTOPS: MADE-TO-LAST

Read More

If the laptop trade-offs of less reliability, inability to upgrade, and higher cost of repair vs. desktop are worthwhile for your usage, or you truly need mobility, only then does a laptop make sense, as you get significantly better specs per dollar with a desktop, they can be upgraded, and are significantly less expensive to own,

Read More

BRAND MATRIX

Brands grading is aggregated Repairability, Reliability, Build Quality, & Warranty Renewability

**GRADE LEGEND**
A Excellent
B Good
C Satisfactory
D Unacceptable
F Fail

**SAFE BUY**
**YES** Indicates that the likelihood of hardware failure is unlikely
NO Indicates intentional engineering shortcomings are regularly present.

**AMD-BASED SYSTEM WARNING**
With AMD, be wary of sponsored reviews with cherry picked comparisons that showcase the wins, ignore glaring issues and gloss over the losses. Also watch out for AMD’s army of Neanderthal social media accounts on reddit, forums and YouTube, they will be singing their own praises as usual. AMD continue to develop “Advanced Marketing” relationships with select youtubers with the obvious aim of compensating for second tier products with first tier marketing. Despite offering better performance at lower prices, as long as Intel continues to sample and sponsor marketers that are mostly funded by AMD, they will struggle to maintain dominance.

AMD makes notoriously hot running, intentionally poorly engineered, unreliable products and holds only a small fraction of laptop market share.
For more on AMD see: AMD: A History of Advanced Marketing Deception

Read more:
Are Best Buy computers defects?
Intel Undervolting
AMD Undervolting

WARRANTY RENEWABLE	^_ACCIDENTAL	TERM LENGTH	RENEWAL URL	GRADE	SAFE BUY
YES _{^{UP TO 1 YEAR AFTER PURCHASE}}	YES	^{_{UP TO}} 3 YEARS	acer.com	B	✅YES¹
YES _{^{UP TO 2.5 YEARS AFTER PURCHASE}}	YES	^{_{UP TO}} 4 YEARS	dell.com	D	❌NO²
YES ^{_{WITHIN 60 DAYS OF PURCHASE}}	YES	^{_{UP TO}} 3 YEARS _{^{OR INDEFINITE SUBSCRIPTION}}	apple.com	D	❌NO³
YES ^{_{WITHIN 180 DAYS OF PURCHASE}} NO ^{_{IF PURCHASED AT BEST BUY}}	YES	^{_{UP TO}} 4 YEARS	asus.com	F	❌NO⁴
YES ^{_{UP TO 2.5 YEARS AFTER PURCHASE}}	YES	^{_{UP TO}} 4 YEARS	dell.com	A	✅YES⁵
NO	N/A	N/A	N/A	F	❌NO⁶
YES ^{_{ONLY AT TIME OF PURCHASE}}	YES	^{_{UP TO}} 2 YEARS	google.com	C	❌NO⁷
YES _{^{UP TO 2.5 YEARS AFTER PURCHASE*}}	YES	^{_{UP TO}} 3 YEARS ^{_{OR INDEFINITE SUBSCRIPTION}}	hp.com	A	✅YES⁸
YES _{^{UP TO 2 YEARS AFTER PURCHASE}}	YES	^{_{UP TO}} 4 YEARS	lenovo.com	B	✅YES⁹
YES _{^{UP TO 1 YEAR AFTER PURCHASE}}	NO	^{_{UP TO}} 3 YEARS	lg.com	C	❌NO¹⁰
YES ^{_{WITHIN 30 DAYS OF PURCHASE}} NO ^{_{IF PURCHASED AT BEST BUY}}	YES	^{_{UP TO}} 3 YEARS	^{msiproservice.com}	C	❌NO¹¹
YES ^{_{WITHIN 11 MONTHS OF PURCHASE}}	YES	^{_{UP TO}} 3 YEARS	^razer.com	D	❌NO¹²
YES ^{_{ONLY AT TIME OF PURCHASE}}	NO	^{_{UP TO}} 3 YEARS	^{sagernotebook.com}	A	✅YES¹³
YES ^{_{UP TO 1 YEAR AFTER PURCHASE}}	YES	^{_{UP TO}} 3 YEARS	^{_{samsungcareplus.com}}	C	❌NO¹⁴

Acer
Most reliable brand. Known for becoming obsolete before failure in the past. Poor parts availability. Sometimes nerfed when overspec. (spec too high for power/thermal abilities).
↩︎
Alienware
Terribly overpriced and loaded with bloatware, Alienware has been a no-go ever since Dell purchased them in 2006 from a small boutique builder.

The pinnacle of gaming pre-built at the time, Alienware was all about function and performance. Unfortunately after the buyout by Dell their sole focus became looks while making the guts cost as little as possible by using the internal Dell Parts Bin. Dell has a long history of terrible cooling and niche non-standardized parts that essentially guarantee the system becomes e-waste. They choose proprietary at every opportunity to make most upgrade paths a dead end.

In the photo below, you can see how small the Aurora line of systems really is, and how they would rather suffocate the CPU than redesign the case to become thermally manageable. The tooling for this chassis was originally made in the 1990s and it continues to perform poorly even after nearly 30 years of retooling.

On the upside, they have always had the most flexible warranty renewal grace period in the industry, you can renew it years after expiration. That’s good because the GPU’s they make die really fast, you’ll need it.
_^#1The Worst Pre-Built We’ve Ever Reviewed: Alienware R13 $5000 Gaming PC
_^#2Alienware Can’t Get It Right – R15 2023 Pre-Built Gaming PC Review
↩︎
Apple
Only consider purchase with infinite annual AppleCare recurring, fixed term only recommended with planned resale within coverage period, otherwise they are just too expensive to own due to all of the intentional defects and oversights. Additionally, the OS version gating is 6 years so you’ll be trapped with an outdated OS.
_^#1 FlexGate: Intentional Widespread Display Failure » Mr. Robot
_^#2 Apple’s New FlexGate, Caused By Dust » Mr. Robot
_^#3 The horrible truth about Apple’s repeated engineering failures – Louis Rossman
_^#4 How to Reinstall Root Patches on Unsupported Macs » Mr. Robot
_^#5 Hack Apple’s Mobile Device Management (MDM) » Mr. Robot
↩︎
ASUS
The company mottos really say it all here: “For those who dare”…to RMA products. ASUS is truly “in search of incredible” …because they have highest defect rate and worst RMA service turnaround time in the industry, typically over 30 days.

They regularly deny warranty service for superficial cosmetic reasons unrelated to the issue, use warranty stickers which are illegal in the USA, and in further attempt to try to side step warranty coverage, upon opening RMA support staff follow a mandatory scripted series of questions aimed to help you self-void your warranty, that and the preinstalled spyware make ASUS a hard pass.

Additionally, most models have poor parts availability and overpriced logic boards prone to high rates of failure, especially their AMD-based gaming laptops. ASUS does however make great routers when paired with custom firmware.

If you considered this this brand, focus less on branding and more on “how will this company treat me as their customer” because you’re mainly just paying for branding, not quality or service.

ASUS models with liquid metal suffer worse performance degradation than normal models, due to poor application. It’s so bad that the dry spot becomes etched in the top of the processor within a year of usage. See examples below:

For more info, see:
_^#1 Scumbag ASUS: Overvolting CPUs & Screwing the Customer – Mr. Robot
_^#2 Backwards capacitor causes fiery failure for some high-end Asus motherboards » Mr. Robot
↩︎
DELL
Laptops: Other than the many overspecced throttling thin and light options, and general disregard for VRM cooling, the less thin-focused models tend to last longer. See lots of issues with XPS 13 and 15
Desktops: Long history of niche parts essentially guarantee the system becomes e-waste. They choose proprietary at every opportunity to make most upgrade paths a dead end. On the upside, they have always had the most flexible warranty renewal grace period in the industry, you can renew it years after expiration.

↩︎
Gigabyte
Highest RMAs, poor build quality, no warranty renewal options, nerfed power and cooling, similar to their desktop products.
↩︎
Google
Poor parts availability and pricing. Similar to Apple, Google gates their products which leaves older models open for easy exploitation. On the upside, the Chromebook Recovery Utility does allow for easy reset vs. Windows/macOS systems, and there are several linux distros that run well, even on systems that can’t run the latest chromeOS. Also they have left the budget segment and become quite overpriced for systems that only run Chrome apps.
↩︎
HP
Known for pioneering the impractical procedure of melting keyboards to palm rests to increase repair cost by 6-9x. Overpriced logic boards and poor parts availability.
2020 & older: warranty renewal grace period limited to 1 year after purchase.
2021 & newer: has 2nd most flexible warranty renewal grace period in the industry behind Dell.
↩︎
Lenovo
Has a nasty tendency of soldered RAM, overpriced keyboard assemblies, and logic board failure despite low market share and outrageous board cost.

That board cost is systemically generated by a multiplier of +200% MSRP to encourage you to just buy a new system when the board fails. See example below on a $1,988 MSRP system that someone purchased for $999. Then they charge on top of that just to get a warranty.

↩︎
LG
Terribly overpriced, good build quality, and no parts availability. Low market presence.
↩︎
MSI
While they make some excellent graphics cards and motherboards that are highly reliable, their laptops are not, leave a lot to be desired and have consistently failed to innovate in a market saturated with thermally constrained gaming laptops.
↩︎
Razer
All negative qualities possible with zero redeeming or mitigating factors. Thermally throttle from factory, high logic board failure rate, overpriced and poor availability of parts. Refuses to sell parts to customers. Avoid at all costs.
↩︎
Sager
Most reliable high-end gaming laptop brand. Known for becoming obsolete before failure in the past. Zero failures encountered. Poor parts availability.
↩︎
Samsung
Known for pioneering Apple’s impractical procedure of gluing displays to the lid panel, for Windows PCs, to increase repair cost by 3-5x and help encourage replacement over repair. This had a domino effect in the industry to make all thin and light laptop displays less repairable. High logic board failure rate, poor availability of parts.
↩︎

WARRANTY CONCIERGE SERVICE

Includes Contingency Guarantee (no fix = no charge)

In-warranty but don’t want to deal with support? Out-of-warranty but want to know your renewal options? Get warranty concierge service: Mr. Robot will obtain repair for your system on your behalf from the manufacturer for a mere fraction of the out-of-pocket repair cost, and the repair is guaranteed.

BOOK

LAPTOPS: PROGRAMMED OBSOLESCENCE

CPU GENERATION

MACOS UPDATE BLOCK

LOGIC BOARD ISSUES

GAMING -vs- REGULAR

CPU PERFORMANCE CLASSES

KEYBOARD REPLACEMENT

SOLDERED RAM & SSD

BATTERY ISSUES

DESKTOPS: MADE-TO-LAST

BRAND MATRIX

WARRANTY CONCIERGE SERVICE