Around 10 years ago most laptops came with 9 cells or 6 cells.

But nowadays, most laptops come with 3 or 4 cells which means they come with very disappointing battery lives.

And also, in the past, laptops were very strong and rugged, but nowadays most laptops use very cheap materials and end up being broken down in less than a year.

I bought an Asus with Intel i5 in April 2014 but it did not last until Christmas and I ended up buying a Toshiba a few weeks ago.

so????

some idiots/twits in marketing think everyone wants a disposable feather weight thing that can never be repaired
not even by the folks at Ifixit

and the rest of the idiots/twits went along and top down forced the issue

this will not change until people VOTE with their wallets
and STOP listening to the TV commercials

The number of cells has no relation to the time one can use a laptop.

Laptops have not been rugged since IBM made thinkpads in my opinion. (at $5K each)

All this electronic stuff is made to be the very minimum. They don't want you to own it for too long. They know it will be outdated in a few months.

You cannot directly compare the number of cells vs battery capacity. You should look at the miliamp hours instead.
Even better is watt-hours

What happened to it? I have a hp laptop over 5 years old now + a asus 2 years old. Both work fine.

I will agree though about them being all or nothing though. What happens if the backlight dies or HDD fails? It's pretty much toast.

Of course, I hope you're not expecting that a budget laptop will have any quality to it.

Unless I'm traveling, I don't use my laptop/netbook, so it can be cheap and disposable and have low battery life. If you want a higher-end laptop, they still exist, but are expensive.

I have a 13 year old laptop/notebook that is still running fine, maybe it is down to how you handle them(?).
I don't throw mine around, but it does have some scuffing, & I have never grabbed it by the screen to carry it, like I see some people doing.

Here, the average life of PC equipment is ~5 years.

That means, if it's 5 years old, it pays a company to junk it, and buy new. It pays in reliability, setup costs. Because a new PC/laptop is cheaper than the maintenance required to keep a banger going.

Unless it's been replaced, I find it amazing that you still have the hard disk bearings intact after 10 years. Have you replaced the disk? Or is your 10 year old PC like "Trigger's Broom" (from the comedy Only Fools And Horses). Trigger (who swept roads by day and stole by night) once said.

"I have had the same broom for 21 years working with the council. It's had 15 heads, and 12 handles, but it's still the same broom.":-)

There are laptops on the market that will have high reliability, solid metal frames, long battery life and be able to survive all sorts of drops and bangs and keep on trucking.

They are expensive.

The world voted with their wallet and want CHEAP, so manufacturers make laptops to a price point rather than to a specification, and the people buy them.

People complain about how crappy low-cost airlines are but still fly them, why? Because people want CHEAP.

10 years ago a laptop was still a "speciality" item, bought for business "road warriors" and were built and priced accordingly. Now EVERYONE has one because... "LAPTOP.... I wanna surf in bed and watch movies in bed and poogle!" so the whole economic dynamic of the laptop has changed. We're seeing the same now with Android tablets, prices range from high-end with HD+ screens, mega PPI counts and good batteries down to cheap and nasty no-name bought from grocery stores.

I'm sorry but that seems really stupid and wasteful.
5 years is now 2009-2010 equipment. I have had a few laptop hard drive failures in less than 5 years
but that is literally the only part. Desktop drives have treated me better.

Oh and the original hard disk in my 22 year old 486 still runs perfectly with 0 bad sectors.

My old IBM from 1994 is still running my mothers knitting software.

As noted above, the world votes with it's wallet. Companies have dramatically changed how they produce and test and sell products over the last 25 years.

In an average home, I'd think that few people keep gizmo's very long.

Ask yourself how much you'd pay for a 5 year old computer. Answer: Not much, if you'd even consider it.


Business have to account for that on the balance sheet and have to depreciate the value of assets accordingly. So if a company has $1M of brand new computers in 2015 then eventually they have almost zero resale value so the company "value" on the balance sheet is now effectively $1M lower. In general it's an accepted accounting practise to have a 3 or 5 year depreciation on this type of asset. Hence companies tend to replace their equipment on a more regular basis than individuals.


I still have computers from pre-2000 running at home!

I have a HP from 2008 and it is still in use - not everyday use, but it's becoming more everyday. It has my only working copy of Windows: Vista 64. I also have an EFI hard disk for this box, which has windows 8.0 but that's only a PITA.

Are all these anciant boxen pulling their weight in laborious tasks, or sitting there in retirement like the Vintage car Collector's Model T?

Up until about 2 years ago one of the 2000 era Del OptiPlex's was my at-home desktop PC, one of them still is my wife's desktop, although she hasn't used it in many years.

Depends on the dude with the Wallet I guess.

This one can be dropped from 3 feet to a concrete floor without breaking the screen. Keyboard is waterproof. Battery is still good from 2008 for hours.
Price was about a 30 pack of beer.

I have a IBM T23 and Panasonic CF-48 that are older and not as tough or battery life as good as this unit.


The other 2, I owned. That are just like this one. I sold for a pretty penny with Android Kit Kat on them.

They paid for the newer touchscreen version of these netbooks. Free so to speak in
a loosey goosey way.

So to me. It really depends on the dude. That. And how available things are where you are. I quit paying lots of money for computer gear after learning Gnu/Linux.
But I am not a computer office type of guy.

That pays a lot of money to run a few computers, In a motorcycle shop.