[pubby]

Well, consumer reports is still kicking. I don't think an aggregate review service does much good though.

Reviews for physical items are super inaccurate. The average consumer doesn't have the money to buy 10 laptops and compare them, so they buy one and hold a biased opinion about it. In 5 years when shitty battery and defective hinge become apparent, the laptop is already off the market and the user isn't interested in reviewing it.

Besides, a ton of reviews are fake these days. You just can't trust them anymore. And for many products, the manufacturer cheapens them oven time without telling the public. So a review from 2 years ago may not reflect the quality of today.

[avgDev]

The internet used to be filled with nerds and people that are interested in things enough to seek information on the web. Now, internet is a marketing tool, filled with corp influence and mostly garbage.

I really miss the old days of niche forums, gaming communities with own servers and forums. You were actually able to get decent and reliable information, now internet is mainstream.

[xela79]

> The internet used to be filled with nerds and people that are interested in things enough to seek information on the web.

and/or actually do proper testing, and share their results, in a consistent manner, but the effort and time is simply no longer worth it. quality content gets buried under 10 second video clips, spam sites, and your content gets copied by large websites. 10 years ago I spent up to 200 hours testing one video card, having build identical systems to do proper apple vs apple tests. But all that time invested, even then, was barely worth it from a commitment point of view. And if you publish such an article now, your viewership is so limited to a very select few. New generation simply doesn't know how a computer actually works, where as 30 years ago, you had to learn more than just the basics to be able to operate it.

[carlosjobim]

The real world used to be filled with these people too. They'd have brick and mortar shops to sell quality products, and customers could step in and get expert advice on what to purchase within their budget.

Something happened.

[johnfernow]

> In 5 years when shitty battery and defective hinge become apparent, the laptop is already off the market and the user isn't interested in reviewing it.

Yep, and quality can vary quite substantially from one year to the next. I mostly like my 2015 MacBook Pro 15" with an AMD dGPU, but many people hated the 2016 MacBooks with the butterfly keyboards that quickly broke and touchbar that would freeze up.

It's especially an issue for products with bad model names. Is my experience with the MSI GE72MVR Apache Pro-080 going to be insightful for anyone considering a current MSI laptop? No idea. There were tons of MSI laptop models back then too with who knows what quality.

Automated lab tests can't perfectly represent real world tests, but I'd still like to see more of them. I remember seeing a machine fold and unfold the Samsung Galaxy Fold around 119,380 times before half the screen stopped working. [1] While it's a sample size of one and not a perfect representation of real world use, it's a lot better than nothing. I'd like to see similar tests for opening and closing laptops, plugging and unplugging cables into ports, pressing keys on a keyboard, etc. Some things can't be simulated, such as long term battery health, but there's a lot that could be tested but isn't in nearly all product reviews.

Something that'd be expensive but that I'd like to see is long-term automated tests to see how frequently a machine crashes. The machine should browse the web, play games, and use commonly used software: Adobe CC, Office 365, G Suite, Slack, Zoom, VLC, ffmpeg, AutoCAD, Blender, Unity, Unreal, and various Docker instances, IDEs, compilers, runtime environments, local servers and databases, etc. It should have automatic updates on and reboot only when required for an update, though sleep and wake-up should be tested regularly. Then, one could analyze how stable of a machine it is.

Personally I'd rather buy a slightly older machine that is proven to be stable than a brand new machine with better performance but questionable stability. Unfortunately, neither is currently an option for me, and with OS and driver updates, stability and performance can worsen at any moment with little (convenient) recourse (or in the case for phones, often no recourse at all.) If my work tools were available on Linux or worked through Wine/Proton/etc., I'd probably try an immutable OS like Fedora Kinoite just so I'd hopefully have more stability. I could automate stress testing the drivers after updates to make sure they were safe. Unfortunately, depending on your hardware, it may never pass driver stress tests even on a clean install (even on Windows, which the machine was designed for!), so may have to exclude certain tests.

1. https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/galaxy-fold-lasted-for-1200...