> [1] I swore a blood oath to never buy an Asus product again; the laptop literally started to fall apart after only about a year of usage, and it was almost never transported anywhere (it lives right next to my bed). The plastic holding things together started to delaminate and I had to do a ton of surgery on it in the form of Gorilla Glue and clamps. Never again.
I know this is tangential but I've had to swear off high end laptops in general because of stuff like this, and I've seen it with many different brands - they'll jam a bunch of high end hardware into the literal cheapest, most badly designed case ever, and inevitably that is what causes the issues, not the actual hardware (with the exception of MSI boards, which always seem to have some inherent hardware issue).
I think that, for reasons that are various but ultimately just different flavors of the same reason, this seems to be the case for high end anything.
My 14 year old Kia Soul isn't in the shop nearly as often as any of the much younger midrange and high-end cars my friends typically drive. My $75 bottom-of-the-line Seiko 5 wristwatch doesn't need nearly as much maintenance as my old boss's Rolex or my dad's Breitling. (And a $5 quartz watch would require still less maintenance and keep better time too.) Our fancy Breville toaster oven seems to be reflowing the solder in its own circuit boards, and my parents' fancy Bosch laundry machines need to be replaced every 5 years, while our cheapo unit works fine and is older than some of my colleagues at work.
I'm guessing it's just that trying to pack more fancy features into a product means there's more to break. Or, e.g., if you've got a higher-end laptop then it might have higher-performance parts that generate more heat and degrade the plastic more quickly. Or they might have tried to distinguish themselves by using materials that aren't typically used for a reason. Stainless steel cars, anyone?
I agree with everything, but I would like to introduce another variable: economies of scale.
There are more-or-less objectively correct ways to do a lot of things reliably, to a point where they’re kind of boring. Since they are somewhat objective, most companies use them as the default and the prices can get lower and lower because they’re making more and more.
When a company purposefully tries the differentiate themselves, that inherently means that they cannot benefit from the same economies of scale, which in turn means higher prices have to be baked in. Sometimes that’s fine, I think Apple generally makes solid products for example, but a lot of the time this differentiation is just “different for the sake of being different”.
Yeah, this was one of those "Republic of Gamers" laptops, which on paper was pretty decent with a nice AMD processor and GPU, but the actual build quality was garbage.
I had this idea that I was going to have "one computer to rule them all", so something I could edit video on and play games and all that fun stuff. Since then I've come to realize that I would much rather just have some dedicated hardware (e.g. a dedicated mini desktop with a decent GPU) for intensive stuff and keep my laptop a bit more utilitarian, and primarily focus on something with decent battery life and solid Linux driver support.
I'm a little disappointed at how bad the 2019-era Macbooks are with Linux, and it's a little frustrating that the Macbook Linux for the M[1|2|3] is substantially nicer and easier to set up than something with an Intel CPU and an AMD GPU. As it stands, I managed to get NixOS installed on my Macbook and it's almost fine, but suspend doesn't work at all, and the audio quality from the speakers is awful, which is a dealbreaker for me right now.
I'm hoping that once Apple stops providing updates to Intel Macs, there will be a huge push to fix the kernel on the T2 hardware.
I know this is tangential but I've had to swear off high end laptops in general because of stuff like this, and I've seen it with many different brands - they'll jam a bunch of high end hardware into the literal cheapest, most badly designed case ever, and inevitably that is what causes the issues, not the actual hardware (with the exception of MSI boards, which always seem to have some inherent hardware issue).
Never again.