How long do laptops last?

How long do laptops last? How long should a laptop last? Is there anything you can do to make one last longer? Those are all fair questions. Let’s dig in so you can make your laptop last as long as possible, and save yourself a lot of money in the process.

There is a secret to buying laptops and saving a fortune, as you’ll soon find out.

How long do laptops last?

how long do laptops last
How long do laptops last? In the case of business-class laptops like a Dell Latitude, more than a decade. In the case of consumer-grade laptops in consumer electronics stores, a lot less.

This may surprise you, but this is actually two questions. There are two major classes of laptops, you see. There are consumer laptops, which are the kind you find at big-box electronics stores. And there are business laptops, like the people who work for Fortune 500 companies use at work. They have the same brand names stamped on them, but they aren’t built the same.

Consumer laptops

Consumer laptops come with a one-year warranty from the factory. When you open one up, you find second- and third-tier components in them, generally speaking. Nicer consumer laptops have the same CPUs as their business-grade cousins, but everything else on the motherboard is second- or third-best. As for the rest of the system, it’s whatever the suppliers were able to deliver at the price point the company specified. The same model laptop isn’t necessarily identical from week to week. Imagine if you and your neighbor both bought the same model car a month apart, and your cars had transmissions made by different companies in them.

This situation is good for everybody. Everybody but you, that is. Between the slight risk of the laptop conking out in 14 months, or you dropping it or spilling a cup of coffee on it, you’re going to want to buy that $249 extended warranty to protect it for three years. The store doesn’t make much on that laptop but the extended warranty is profitable.

Business laptops

Business laptops come with a three-year warranty and they’re built very differently. They have the good parts in them. Any variance in the parts they use are designed not to affect the overall reliability of the system. They’re consistent. When a business computer fails, it means the company is less able to make money. So companies are willing to pay more money for more quality, so the systems fail less often, and they last longer.

Businesses may buy insurance to protect their laptops against drops and spilled drinks, but it’s really accidental damage that they’re concerned about.

What about Apple?

I hesitate to bring this up but someone is going to ask. Inevitably, when someone I know has problems with their laptop and posts something on social media about it, someone says to get a Mac. Apple computers are expensive, so they’d better be reliable. Apple does use higher-grade parts, because the cost of their stuff allows it.

But it’s not fair to compare a $2,000 Mac to a $200 computer from HP, Dell, or Lenovo. They can all design and build a reliable $2,000 laptop too. I’m typing this right now on a rather aged HP laptop that was pretty expensive in its day.

How long should a laptop last?

When my dishwasher quit after about nine years, I was mad. That’s about how long they’re supposed to last, but I was still upset. When we spend a few hundred dollars on something, we want it to last as long as possible. And when it breaks, we want replacement parts to cost $25 and we want to be able to install them ourselves.

Laptops are a bit of a mixed bag. They’re more complicated than a dishwasher. Depending on what fails, you may be able to replace it. You may be able to replace it yourself and it may only cost $25, with some luck.

But, again, because of the differences in how they’re made, business and consumer laptops have different life expectancies.

Consumer laptops

In my experience, consumer laptops seem to conk out after about four years. Some make it for five. The best, most expensive ones may make it a bit longer. But if you buy an ordinary laptop, expect to get around four years out of it. If you buy a cheapie special that hits the stores in late November and disappears from the shelves sometime in January, don’t be surprised if you get closer to three.

I don’t think consumer laptops are designed for longevity. Everything about them seems to be designed to last three or four years.

I also don’t think anything about that is a coincidence. The stores want you to buy a laptop, get the extended warranty, take the laptop home, use it for about four years until it breaks, then come back and buy a new one. They’ll tell you that’s how long they’re supposed to last. If you’re upset, they’ll sell you a different brand next time, and tell you that brand’s better. Will it last a year longer than the last one you bought? Flip a coin.

How long should a laptop last? Consumer electronics’ business model depends on people coming back for a new computer every few years. So if you ask them, they’d say about four years.

Business laptops

how long should a laptop last
Business laptops are like this Toyota Avalon. Take reasonable care of them and they last 2-3 times as long as anything else. The difference is, everyone knows about Avalons so used Avalons are expensive. A used business laptop with 5-10 years of life left in it might only cost $200.

I once worked at a very large company whose policy was to keep all of its computers five years. No three-year replacement cycle for them. Five. They did make exceptions sometimes though. If the computer was five years old and still worked well, they’d go ahead and keep it until it broke for good.

They didn’t have a lot of 10-year-old systems on their network. But I found some. They weren’t exactly pleasant to use, but they’d find someone willing to put up with them and keep them in use.

How long should a laptop last? If you asked that particular company, they’d say forever minus one day, because everyone knows it’s unreasonable to expect them to last forever. How long do laptops last? That company’s actions tell it all. They fully expected to be able to get five years or more out of their laptops. If they hadn’t been able to reliably get five-plus years, their policy would have been to replace them more frequently.

But this means you can exploit business’ three-year replacement cycle. When businesses discard their laptops after three years, they still have half their life left in them, if not more. That’s what I do. I estimate this HP laptop I’m using to write this blog post is about eight years old, and expect to get at least two more years out of it.

What causes laptops to break?

Laptops are mostly solid state devices, so there’s a limited number of components in them that wear out and break. The two most common are the hard drive and the battery.

When I buy an old laptop, I always replace both. I get a new battery, and I replace the hard drive with a solid state drive. Solid state drives, or SSDs, perform much faster, and they last longer than hard drives, potentially up to 10 years.

I’ll bet you my old employer has a few laptops like my old HP still kicking around somewhere, and they’re making someone miserable. Drop an SSD into it and install a fresh copy of Windows 10, tweak it a little, and it’s still a usable computer. Not to mention reliable.

This trick even works in consumer laptops, but the hard drive isn’t the only failure-prone component in them. Even when I’ve upgraded family members’ laptops with SSDs, they tend to conk out after about five years with a motherboard issue. They get a new one, I salvage the SSD out of their old one, and put it in a new one. The motherboards in business-class laptops can easily last 10 years.

But simply installing an SSD in any laptop is a good way to improve its overall reliability. It also improves its speed and its battery life. I can’t tell you how to remove the hard drive from every laptop, but here’s a process I followed to upgrade an old HP netbook that covers how I got the data onto the SSD.

The other thing you can do for any laptop is vacuum out its vents to help keep it from overheating, and I have a few more laptop reliability tips.

How to buy a business-class laptop

how long do laptops last
You can buy a new business-class laptop like this HP Elitebook, or buy a used one for 25-75% off its original price and still get many years out of it.

You’ll save a lot of money in the long run by buying a business-class laptop instead of a consumer-grade one. The key is to buy a Dell Latitude, HP Elitebook, or a Lenovo Thinkpad. You can buy a new one direct from Dell, HP, or Lenovo or, if you prefer, Newegg.

I buy used off-lease laptops instead. You can buy one off Ebay, or if you want one that’s been worked over by a professional first, buy something from Newegg’s Refurbished PCs category. You’ll have to do some research because there are refurbished consumer-grade laptops in that mix. If you’re not comfortable taking computers apart, look for one with an SSD already in it and Windows 10 installed.

What about performance?

Admittedly, business computers aren’t known for performance. But remember, you won’t be loading 73 different CPU-draining agents on yours. Yours should come with a fresh, vanilla copy of Windows on it. If it doesn’t, format the SSD and install a fresh one on it. My ancient HP Elitebook still outruns the $300 laptops at consumer electronics stores. A laptop that’s only one or two generations back will do even better.

Should I get the warranty?

If you buy a refurbished laptop from somewhere like Newegg, it will have a 90-day warranty. You can extend the warranty to two years for $90. I don’t because I used to fix these things for a living. If you’re not comfortable taking computers apart, I recommend getting the warranty. You can get an aging business laptop plus the warranty for just slightly more than a consumer electronics store’s extended warranty alone.

Does brand matter?

I’ve been thrilled with HP Elitebooks. Right now it’s a little easier to find a used Dell Latitude at a good price, to the point where I’m tempted to pick one up just to have a spare around. I am not thrilled with the smaller Lenovo Thinkpads, specifically the X200 series. The slightly bigger Thinkpads are good.

I can break an X200-series Thinkpad by giving one to my young kids. HP Elitebooks hold up just fine under their use though.

I’ve talked specifically about HP vs Dell before but as long as you stick with something business-grade and business-tested I expect you’ll be OK.

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2 thoughts on “How long do laptops last?

  • August 19, 2018 at 3:56 pm
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    Good idea for an article. Recycling of useful hardware reduces for our impact on the environment and is beneficial for providing low cost hardware to those that cannot afford anything else.

    My experience from the days before PC’s. Always, always – pick the software before the hardware: i.e. the useful life of the software will in almost all (all) cases dictate when the hardware becomes obsolete well before the hardware breaks.

    With PC’s and minicomputers we used 3-4 years as the depreciation period in our business (to calculate what we charged ourselves or clients for the use of the hardware). We needed to upgrade the hardware to keep up with software improvements/developments. We did NOT find any difference in longevity between “public” and “business” computers allowing for different specifications. The Avalon is just like any other Toyota for longevity and PC’s are far more generic across all manufactures then motor cars (computers are commodities; motor cars are still custom designed and built). Now that software development has somewhat bottomed out in its hardware demand the need to change hardware as often is less: so >5 years is a good idea for end-of-life.

    Despite what David says we never noticed a particular end of physical life for the hardware, even at the low end so I disagree that there was, or is, any “planned obsolesce” in the hardware you get. The “obsolescence of hardware is often driven by the OS provider and their forced “upgraded” hardware interface software (so called “drivers”). Obviously some hardware is more “rugged” than others to take account of different work environments but if this is taken into consideration then the “normal” expected wear and tear will occur and the hardware will not fail and will carry on working as long as the software provided the interface connection software. From an engineering perspective modern PC’s have no “wear” parts. Wear is caused by friction – i.e. movement between parts. Modern PC’s have no moving parts except hinges. Older computers had fans and spinning hard drives but the MTBF (mean time between failure) of these was and is well into the >5 years. In order to keep the yield (defective units as a percentage of good units from the production process) to an acceptable level the MTBF has in fact risen over time purely as a consequence not as a design objective. The yield has much larger economic consequences for the manufacturer to he does not worry about the MTBF. Note that this is true of SSD’s to. SSD’s will be replaced for other reasons more than for their mechanical failure.

    Software is something different, and perhaps should be part of a different article? Since Microsoft became a business (I always say that was when Flight Simulator came out): they have intentionally designed obsolescence into their software as part of their production process and lately their sales process (software as a service). Many, if not all, of software companies since then have followed or adopted their business model. This drives perfectly good functioning hardware into obsolescence and the rich country landfills of the world.

    • August 20, 2018 at 8:30 pm
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      Thanks for the comment, but I have to disagree with you about consumer hardware vs business hardware. I wrote a super-long comment showing why, but I just spent hours writing more than 2,000 words about it. Even if we assume the hardware is equal (even though it’s not), you can spend $300 to get a laptop that you hope will last you about five years. Or you can buy a used business laptop for around $200 that will have an older but faster processor in it, and if you’re careful how you shop, you can get an SSD at that price point. You won’t get much of an SSD in a $300 consumer laptop. The business laptop is a better and faster computer for less money.

      You can assume it will only last you five years but in my experience it’s likely to last longer. Meanwhile, I have a pile of consumer-grade laptops in my basement that belonged to me or to relatives. I fixed each of them several times but once they reached about four years of age, something happened to them that I couldn’t fix. I salvaged what I could from them and put them in business-grade laptops I bought off Ebay and refurbished myself.

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