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by tombert 1727 days ago
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.

2 comments

> 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.

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"!