[toast0]

Looking at your trend, you've got $500 laptop / 2 year, or $2000 laptop / 5 year, which reduces to $250 laptop / year vs $400 laptop / year. Getting low cost laptops isn't necessarily a worse financial outcome, although it depends on how fast the processor updates are moving; when a 2020 intel cpu is about the same as a 2015 intel cpu, it would probably have been better to pay a little more in 2015 for a faster one; when a 2015 intel cpu smokes a 2010 intel cpu, incremental updates every year or two mean a low cost 2015 cpu is probably better than a high cost 2010 cpu. Plus, you get a battery refresh (even if it's small).

I think there's more junk at the low end to avoid, but it's not as if the high end doesn't have a lot of junk to avoid. Either way, you have to do careful shopping.

It's like just my opinion, but a lot of higher end laptop spending seems to be on increasing the screen's DPI, which is then run with scaling, at the cost of more CPU, more RAM, more GPU, and more software BS. Buying a cheaper laptop with fewer pixels that just runs 1:1 saves all that extra computation and BS, and maybe looks a bit less nice. Sometimes glossy screens are reserved for the high cost laptops, which is like wait, I want a matte screen, so I have to save money to get one, great!

[tombert]

Yeah, I've actually done this math too, though I don't think it's quite this simple. When a laptop started falling apart, I usually tried to just put up with it until I couldn't.

For example, I used to have an Asus computer whose plastic surrounding the screen decided to start coming detached from the monitor flap. This made the laptop substantially more fragile and annoying to use, and after a certain point I tried to remedy this with gorilla glue and it led to this ugly mess on the bottom left corner. The laptop still "worked" in the sense that still did computation, but it was crappier. Then the 7 key broke off the keyboard, I was unable to put it back on, so I just decided I didn't need the 7 key, since I didn't type 7 that often, and when I did I could still hit the little switch. Again, the laptop still "worked" in the sense that it still did computation, but it was crappier. A bunch of other stuff ended up happening (e.g. the LED for the backlight started to go out and become this flickery mess, the connector to the battery didn't always seem to make contact, etc).

Stuff like that starts to add up, and "experience" is substantially more difficult to quantify. I bought an expensive Macbook, and I never had any issues outside of the inevitable "moores law" depreciation.

[toast0]

> I bought an expensive Macbook, and I never had any issues outside of the inevitable "moores law" depreciation.

I hope that keeps going. I used a macbook for work for almost 8 years, and they did OK, but I had one that decided not to take external power and the hard drive wasn't removable, thankfully I noticed it wasn't charging while it was near full so I could pull a backup to a spare work hand. And then there was the year where iTunes would have a 25% chance of spewing high volume digital noise at me instead of playing music. I guess that was a software problem because it went away with the next major OS X release, but no useful forum contents. I think there was something else bothersome too, but not sure anymore.

[roland35]

Maybe next time your 7 key breaks you can set up a macro so everytime you type "6+1" it will replace it with "7"!

[volta83]

I have an apple macbook air from mid 2012, that i paid 1200$ for. If it survies 6 more months, then I've spent 120$/year on laptops over the last 10 years.

[lotsofpulp]

I have a 2015 air that was $1k. I expect to get down to $120 per year in a couple years, but I would have to add $10/year for replacing the battery every few years.