OK - I’ve had a variety of laptops and desktop computers. Some have been very well made, others not so. At work I used a number of Dell machines (Desktop and Laptop) and none were put together well (or at least the materials meant that they wore out very quickly).
The main issue with the MacBooks has been the battery life over the years. While they seem to last 4 - 5 years on average, the battery life tends to deteriorate towards the latter part of that time. We have had several BacBook Air machines and they survived quite a bit of student-inflicted punishment but they are not bullet proof (ie standing on them is not good!). The MacBook Pros have been outstanding.
Software for Mac OS is generally great, they are still less likely to be hit by viruses (but these exist and need to be protected against). There have been very few issues working across teh PC/Mac platforms in recent years.
In summary:
work out what the laptop will be used for, how robust it needs to be physically and what you could afford.
see if you can borrow some for a few days to get a feel of them in real life.
some people might consider Chromebooks or a tablet a better choice while others conclude that the desktop machine is for them after doing some testing.
consider what support you might need/have available (informal from friends who use similar systems, more formal from vendors or from the local Apple Centre Genius Bar).
BTW - never had a case of a heat-induced cracked case for any Mac and I don’t think any of the new ones have plastic cases.
My personal experience is Dell XPS 15 inch. I have used them since a Studio model years ago and they are on par with the Macbook in specs but have the advantage of an infinity edge border.
The main draw card to Dell is I always purchase the extra 4 years Pro support (gives you 5 yrs total). You get people in Sydney (not overseas) 24/7 who work one on one and have hardware specialists available. You get next day (in the country this can be 2-3 days) on site hardware warranty so there is no need to be without your pc except when they replace parts.
This gives me the peace of mind that if it has a serious fail or constant issues you can get a replacement with a small effort and they always upgrade if the one you got is unavailable. I went up from a $1400 XPS to the new model that was $ 500 more a few years ago.
The only drawback is cost. With the 256gb SSD and an I7 core plus 3840x2160 resolution it was $2700 + $ 500 for 4 extra yrs pro support. I had a 15% coupon so it came to $2700.
At least I know I am guaranteed to have a a fast beautiful resolution pc at that price for 5 years.
I have an HP laptop which is a bit over 3 years old. So far no problems. I had a Dell previously which died. I bought a large capacity usb stick for backup, only to find that the backup utility didn’t support usb sticks, only discs, so it has never been backed up. I’ve found external hard drives to be unreliable hardware.
I have used HP laptops at work over about 5 years and they have generally been reliable, although I have had a few problems with docking stations over that time. They do rotate them every 3-4 years though and they are probably corporate models rather than consumer.
Personally I have had a couple of Samsungs and currently a mid-range Dell which has given me few problems over the two years I have had it. My old Samsung is still going after 5 or 6 years - a friend is using it now. The only issues I had with it was the need to replace the battery and it is ready for that again. My wife has also had a consumer grade Samsung for about three years with no problems.
Generally I agree with other’s comments. The corporate grade laptops are generally better engineered. But they generally need to take more punishment. I regularly transport my wok laptop but have seldom taken my personal laptop out of the house!!
It is also important to distinguish between hardware and software issues. Any laptop will slow down and misbehave if you don’t maintain it properly i.e. keep updates up to date, use a good anti-virus program etc. Even then things can go wrong with software. My biggest issue with this laptop was a dodgy video driver from NVIDIA which caused the laptop to continually shut down util they patched it. Many people would have thought it was a hardware problem (as i did initially) but it was software.
There are a number of backup programs out there that will support USB sticks, some have free options some are pay for software. Look at
Acronis True Image 2017
As to the external drives they can be damaged by too rough handling, by moving them while they are still running/spinning and in most cases they use the cheaper physical drives in them eg WD Greens for most WD external. They are not designed for 100% of the time operation and do require the same maintenance care as your normal Hard Drives do. This should include Defragmentation, and chkdsk which you should use with /f on about a weekly basis if it is being used a lot and /r about once every 1 or 2 months. Also try to avoid filling them up completely as this does impair their operation, leave at least 10% free if possible.
Solid State Drives (SSD) are becoming increasingly cheaper and some larger capacity external drives have started appearing with them. These will take a lot of physical abuse eg dropping, shaking, and knocking on desks and may present a more reliable back up device for your needs than the traditional external drives. I am not suggesting you abuse your external drives but even small knocks and shakes can have big impacts when a drive is spinning.
Re backup to “unreliable external HDD”, the HDD is the most reliable choice you can have excepting for the very robust enterprise systems provisioned by data centres and cloud backup companies that are HDD arrays (I’ll leave the various RAID technologies aside).
Defrag is a religious argument but is truly unnecessary with no value added for discs holding nothing but backups. The NTFS file system is very robust, but an occasional chkdsk /r never hurts. Disc manufacturers usually provide free downloadable maintenance/test programs for their products that go beyond just chkdsk.
If you backup into the cloud make sure you have adequate download/upload quotas. It is usually impractical to make a disc image backup in the cloud in these days of TB+ HDD. (Some of us still like to do disc images, and some just our important files. To each their own).
A USB stick is not a good option for very important backups because if they have an electronic failure they are as useful as dirt. Always have your important data backed up somewhere, and backup the backup somewhere else.
I am currently using a 6 year old ASUS laptop, and my wife has a 5 year old HP laptop. My previous laptop, a HP died after 5 years. My wife’s previous laptop, a HP, is still operational after 11 years, and I use it to run Microsoft Flight simulator and some other old programs.
In my experience, a major killer of laptops is dust which is blown into the heatsink by the fan and after a year or 2 causes the CPU to overheat. This causes the CPU to run slowly and if the dust is not cleared, the CPU eventually dies. I clean this dust from our laptops every 12 to 18 months. This is a simple operation on my ASUS laptop, as I can remove a panel on the underside and access the CPU, fan and heatsink. The three HPs that we have owned are a different matter, as I have to dismantle the base, remove the keyboard etc. to get access to the heatsink - not recommended for the inexperienced. When I buy higher powered laptops in future, ease of access to the heat sink will be a major consideration.
Last year we bought a cheap Toshiba laptop that has a low powered Pentium CPU. It has a very minimal heatsink, and does not need a fan (it uses between 10 and 13 watts, compared to 40 to 70 watts for our other laptops that have Intel i7 CPUs), so it should never have a problem with dust. It is unacceptably slow for heavy duty work such as software development and video editing, but if you only need a laptop for every day email, office programs, watching videos etc., then a cheap, bottom of the range model would serve your purposes, and may be more reliable in the longer term.
Recently I used a Acer gaming laptop . The Predator 17.3 inch screen model . Two of its features were quite good in application .The twin cooling fans reversed themselves every so often to blow out what they had sucked in .You can take out the optical drive and slide in an extra cooling fan for heavy duty gaming or graphics work .The spare fan is supplied . I thought what they had done was quite innovative .
Unfortunately because they use a 980 -4 gig card they seem to be a discontinued line although they are still out there for well under $2000 . There original price was over $3000 from memory . Was very impressed with their performance and cooling capabilities , the killer of most laptop performance . Cant wait till they release new models with the 10 series Pascal cards in them . I’m glad Acer has entered the gaming laptop fray .
FWIW you might be interested in Venom. Got one for the son as a HS leaving gift 8 years ago and it has not missed a beat, and he can still play most but not all of his games in their highest resolution. A sample of 1 is probably meaningless, but for prurient interests see http://www.venomcomputers.com.au/Products/blackbook-x/ and for models/pricing http://mln.com.au/venom/blackbook/
I have owned Toshiba and Sony higher-end laptops with never a problem in a few years of business use. I have purchased a number of Acers built to our company spec which proved reliable in business use. I currently use a 2009 MacBook Pro 17-inch which is in daily use. I have had to replace one loudspeaker and had a keyboard problem which required a new unit not a replacement key.
I bought a Dell for my daughter which performed fairly well for her student days but she replaced it with a MacBook Pro on graduation. My son has had a succession of Mac Books and MacBooks Pro. All have been reliable, being replaced only following physical damage – dropped, drowned etc.
I have no experience of HP laptops but some experience of their desktop models which we found fine for general word processing and spreadsheet use. We replaced these after 3 years of use. Ditto with Compaq desktops.
I do not have access to detailed service records of any of these – just my sense of what brands work. If asked I would suggest finding something suitable from Toshiba, Sony or perhaps, a higher-spec Acer. An Apple might be a dollar too far for some people but my MacBook Pro has been a reliable performer for the last seven years.
I am an IT pro & my laptop history goes something like >>
15yrs & prior, religiously Toshiba then they started slipping seriously in quality.
Tried an IBM/Lenevo & it was terrible (first & last) & failed in short order.
5+yrs now I have switched to ASUS for both my wife & myself & been very happy with them.
My machine gets a lot of use for both work & play.
This is obviously way out of date now but I still used it to decide to go from Toshiba to ASUS.
I did also look at Fujitsu & it’s interesting that Fujitsu are not featured in the 4sqr report. I “believe” they are very robust - but I have not been prepared to pay the high price just to find out for myself.
Had my Asus ROG 74S serviced today . Wow what a difference in performance . Played an hour of Planetside 2 on much higher graphics settings than normal and it ran a steady 60 FPS . Very happy .Best money I’ve spent for along time . The CPU was running as high as 75C before servicing . Now 45-50C .Like wise the Motherboard . I should have had heat sink paste replaced a couple of years ago as it is a known weakness in the G74’s . Might have to postpone the upgrade now . For a 5 year old gaming laptop it can still hang in there .
We had a mid-range Fujitsu (Win XP) and the hardware was excellent, but Fujitsu less so in how they declined to license software upgrades required for everything to function in Win 7 for a 2-year old product, only for more expensive models that were otherwise 100% compatible. If you wanted some things to work you had to buy the software. Thus, would never again touch a Fujitsu.
ASUS was as bad but you could find what you needed. I have what was then their flagship notebook (UX31A touch) and they disavowed anything related to Windows 10 for it, even though everything works 100% with only a modest effort searching for updated software on their support site.
I too have a Toshiba laptop - over 10 years old and still going strong. Never had a problem and it has been on a cruise, to W.A. about 4 times, driven across the Nullabor last year.
MacBook isn’t a constructive solution because if you are comparing a $1500 Mac to a $750 Wintel of course one will have inferior build quality.
In the Laptop Ranges if you do in fact have $1000 or more Lenovo and Dell “Professional or Business” laptop “Not at JBHIFI” are the best options,
the pro series laptop will be comparably have an i5 at the same price a i7 will be in the consumer one.
but they keep the same model on the market longer so easier cheaper repairs. (cheap consumer ones get completely redone as often as twice in a year)
They have a stonger chassis
they have 2 or more Years warranty with option of buying on site warranty upto 5 years.
instead of 1 year send to base warranty
Dell for example $1000
Dell Latitude E5470 14 inch Notebook Laptop - i5-6300U, 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD, WL, 4G LTE, Win10 Pro, 3yr Onsite Wty [DD-E5470508128-3Y]
Lenovo T Series
Lenovo ThinkPad T460P 14 inch FHD Notebook Laptop - i5-6300HQ, 4GB RAM, 500GB, HD530, Wi-Fi+BT, Win7 Pro 64, 3yr Wty [20FW002SAU]
This sounds more like product envy than a comment about reliability. Apple products are more expensive than many other brands but it depends on whether you are comparing apples with apples rather than oranges. It would be more convincing if specifications and performance were matched when comparing models and prices. One factor in favour of Apple laptops is their longevity and the ability of non tech-heads like myself to update software easily (usually for free) and to even update or replace hardware such as memory and a hard drive with a solid state drive. I have done this with easy-to-follow instructions from ifixit. After spilling a cup of coffee over my 2010 Macbook recently I stripped it down using ifixit instructions and had it working again in 2 hours. If Apple computers are considered expensive I believe this doesn’t take into account their lower overall running and maintenance costs.
