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About LinkBacksRead more."You can't get inside without inflicting a lot of damage" warn iFixIt experts.
Read more."You can't get inside without inflicting a lot of damage" warn iFixIt experts.
It's a shame but many things are heading this way...
Old puter - still good enuff till I save some pennies!
It's cheaper this way and they're taking a leaf out of other manufacturers books by saving costs by form fitting.
Why would you need to replace a laptop battery within 4 years? I've had my current laptop about 3 and a half years and the battery's still absolutely fine ... I'd be VERY surprised if it failed within the next six months...I'd be particularly annoyed that the battery replacement is "difficult and dangerous," as this is a laptop that Panos Pannay said would be give good service for a student throughout the whole of their university studies. That's at least 3 or 4 years isn't it?
Depends how you use and its quality. I had a cheap lenovo battery fail in 7 months as I mainly used it plugged in yet my work lenovo (thinkpad line so higher end) that is used on battery all the time is fine 4 years on. I'd still not buy a laptop I couldn't replace the battery. I try not to do it with phones and they usually only have a two year life time for me...Originally Posted by scaryjim
Some (most, I'd imagine) don't pay any attention to extending the battery life of their laptops, same as most people don't keep their OS and background processes clean at all, leading to complaints that their laptop stops working well after even a year of ownership.
Having said that, well-designed laptops shouldn't need opening for the sakes of maintenance, and opening for the sake of upgrades can be reasonably regarded as a perk - modularity costs more than a streamlined all-in-one manufacturing process.
I think it's probably best to consider Surface devices as consumer electronics rather than PCs - which is a direction Microsoft has been wanting to take Windows devices for a few years now.
Wonder how long the warranty on the battery is going to be ... if they're talking about the device lasting students through Uni I hope they're willing to back that up with a long warranty...
As said it depends on how much you use a battery they do have limited cycles. They will do an Apple and just replace the whole thing and refurb the components
Old puter - still good enuff till I save some pennies!
who buys a surface laptop? Do you expect me to leave an Aorus or Razer Blade for a surface
It depends perhaps on usage scenario. A business laptop will be written off in three years, so repairs or upgrades are unlikely to be considered. With no hard drive or SSD to remove, a corporate data security policy may require destruction of the whole machine, so resale value doesn't enter into the buying decision either
At the other extreme, I no longer use a laptop enough to justify replacement, but value mine as a spare machine enough to repair it, so in ten years I have replaced the battery (twice), RAM and HDD (upgrades), video card, power jack and screen inverter. I am definitely not within the target market for a Surface Book - although I have no scruples about borrowing my wife's Surface Pro :-)
Batteries have limited charge cycles and students use the laptops quite heavily and will most likely charge daily. I notice a difference of most things with batteries after around 2 years.
"A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in."
Oh yeah... Non replaceable battery? Specially considering that from the 2 to 3 year warranty the battery is only covered for 6 months of that period, you might end up with an expensive paperweight in less than a year.
Under EU law don't they have to provide a 3 year manufacturer warranty for electronics? And considering it's a consumer product it would have be judged as a whole and not on its component parts?
Sealed units and all.
Working in a school you'd be surprised at how poor some laptops batteries have become. We've entire series of laptops where the battery won't last an hour (down from perhaps 3 hours when bought) yet we had some Acer laptops from ~2008/2009 where we only needed to replace the battery a couple of years back (and they were refurbs!).
The cheap Lenovo and HP laptops are particularly bad in my experience. It's almost as though they want you to replace the whole laptop regularly...
I guess there's a line between repairability and thinness, etc.
Eventually repairs will die out - When robots and 3D printers can pop out thousands+ units with no need for human intervention, it'll eventually be so cheap and easy to get a whole new thing and recycle the old one that repairs might not be as needed as they are now
EG-RL 99/44 only covers things that deviate from product description, not expectations. In other words: if you product's battery lasts 1 hour instead of 3 hours after purchase, you get a replacement. But if the battery degraded normally from daily use, you have to rely on goodwill to get a replacement.
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