Designed to Fail? The Truth Behind Shorter Laptop Lifespans

A laptop isn’t an impulse buy. Even the “cheap” ones represent a significant cost for most of us. Which means you’ll probably want it to remain useful and functional for as long as possible.

Sadly, there are several trends that mean many shiny new laptops will lose their luster not long after the warranty runs out, leaving you in an endless cycle of buying new computers more often than you need to.

Built Thin, Built Fragile

Having thinner and lighter laptops really does matter—up to a point. I’ve long railed against unnecessary thinness in devices like tablets and smartphones, but laptops are starting to enter that same territory. You could argue that towards the end of the Intel MacBook years those laptops were already too thin to handle the heat and power required by Intel’s CPUs. Apple fixed that by switching to better processors rather than compromising on the form-factor, but already a slightly thicker MacBook Pro (especially the 16-inch model) would likely result in a usable increase in performance thanks to better cooling.

Outside of Apple’s obsession with thin devices, that general obsession with “ultrabooks” is present with just about every laptop manufacturer. Laptops run pretty hot these days, and even if the CPUs and GPUs are designed to cruise comfortably at 100C, that might not be true for every solder joint or VRM.

Maybe I’m just paranoid, but when running my laptop as a desktop I always use a laptop cooling pad to reduce wear on the internal fans, cut noise, and bring the whole system down by a few degrees.

Batteries Are the First to Go

The lithium battery inside your laptop is a consumable item and will fail while the rest of the laptop is still perfectly functional. This was a non-issue in the days when a laptop battery was designed to be removable, but the vast majority of laptops are not designed this way. In the worst case, the battery is glued in. In the best case, these batteries can be replaced by a technician, but it’s actually dangerous for the average person to try because the battery isn’t packaged in a hard case and there’s a risk of shorting or puncturing it.

To make things worse, some laptops might require replacement of other parts—because they’re all part of the same top-case, for example– which increases the price of a battery replacement so much, you might as well buy a whole new laptop—what a coincidence.

As a small comfort, there are some ways to increase the lifespan of a lithium battery. Most modern laptops offer some sort of charge-limit setting. Lithium batteries degrade faster if kept at 100% charge (i.e. you’re always using the laptop plugged in) and by limiting the charge to, for example, 80%, you can increase the lifespan significantly. My M4 MacBook Pro, for example, automatically limits its charge to 80% if it realizes that I haven’t been using it on battery for a while.

Sadly, the other main killer of laptop batteries is heat, and as we already covered laptops are thinner and hotter than perhaps they should be. At least if you want them to last.

Repairability Is Dead

I’ve already sort-of alluded to this above, but laptops have become worse and worse when it comes to repairability. This isn’t universally true, and laptops like ThinkPads and large workstation-grade laptops are pretty great when it comes to fixing and removing components. However, if you browse a site like iFixit, which rates the repairability of consumer electronics, you’ll see that consumer laptops don’t score well often.

This is much worse on thinner and lighter machines, but in general laptops are not designed to be user-serviceable. Apart from that aforementioned glued-in battery, you also have to deal with fragile ribbon cables, soldered components that uses to be slotted, proprietary screws, and the general sense that the manufacturer doesn’t want you working on the computer you bought.

Now, in recent years, there has been a legal push to force laptop makers into creating repairable systems, but the result could be framed as malicious compliance in many cases.

Economics Trump Longevity

Ultimately, making a product that lasts too long is a good way to go out of business. After all, if you sell a computer to someone that’s going to last them 10+ years, that’s a decade of no sales to that customer. So laptops have to be designed so that they last just long enough to seem reasonable, without leading to a situation where you put yourself out of business.

It’s understandable, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it! The good news is that there are alternatives. Framework, for example, are working to standardize laptop components that make them just as upgradable as desktop systems.

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Business-class laptops are also more likely to last long-term and have decent software support for longer, but, of course, these thick-boy laptops with their modest plastic shells aren’t what the general population crave. No, we want those thin unibody laptops that will crack a hinge or burn out their battery in three years. I don’t see that changing any time soon.