In my experience laptops from the competition are as durable when you pick up the professionnal line instead of the general consumers one. That will be Lenovo thinkpads, Dell latitude, HP elitebook, etc.
Lenovo has been tarnishing the think pad brand for several years now, pushing plastic junk that also has the thinkpad branding. It’s not enough to stick to thinkpad anymore, which thinkpad matters.
Ditto HP. Their machines are… not great to operate on (from a maintenance perspective), their hardware maintenance manuals are much lower quality than they used to be…
Only dell latitude hasn’t disappointed me yet, and I fix laptops as a hobby so I’ve worked on quite a few 2014-2019 machines.
Agreed. There are countless old models you can buy off eBay, drop in a new SSD and battery, install your distro of choice and keep using for several more years. Almost all models of that kind have a lot of serviceable parts, for example replacing the thermal paste is usually easy and makes the cooling better than it was brand new.
I haven't bought one myself simply because I have my own units that still work 10-15 years later. The screens mean they're dreadful as actual hands-on laptop experiences, but they're perfectly fine for home servers with built-in battery backup and management console.
