Lenovo fails for not providing shoppers sufficient laptop repairability information.
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MacBooks lagging behind PC rivals when it comes to repairability: Report
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But many people aren't aware of how bad Lenovo is. Lenovo's consumer laptop QC is also atrocious, having to return 2-3 copies to get one free of issues is common, outside of how bad they are to repair.
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I have a MacBook Pro from 2006 that still boots and runs. The battery died years ago, but it is fine as long as the power cable is plugged in.
My son has the Macintosh SE that we bought in 1987. It still powers up, but doesn't boot. He also has the original Macintosh 128K from 1984. He was 10 when I bought that. But that was turned into a fish tank many years ago.
My son has the Macintosh SE that we bought in 1987. It still powers up, but doesn't boot. He also has the original Macintosh 128K from 1984. He was 10 when I bought that. But that was turned into a fish tank many years ago.
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Knowing how other brands shake out is helpful. Or would be, if the scores weren't based on self-reported info or something, as some of the wording implies. The huge crippling effect on Lenovo's score just "helpfully" makes the methodology issues more blatant, and the whole thing suspect.
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The part of this report that surprised me the most was Microsoft beating Apple. Have recent Surfaces become that easy to repair? The ones I’ve owned (3 Pro and 7 Pro) were glued shut—basically impossible to open, never mind repair.
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henrythefool
Smack-Fu Master, in training
They’re better, in the sense that no material will ever be worse to make computer from than alcantara.
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After moving out of the IT desktop support zone, the last Lenovo that I worked on were the T490 series. Most MS Surfaces were considered DOA and only cry if the warranty will not cover the repair/replacements. It took some good Googlefu to find Lenovo's parts and "repair" pdf depot site. Ever since the move to the slim series and T14 series with mostly embedded parts, new laptop for everyone! groan You dare imagine the amount of E-waste that flows through in a decent mid/large enterprise? Can't imagine what a 5K+ client environment looks like..
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Whereas my 11 year old Dell XPS laptop has only ever needed replacements for the battery - which just clips out! The hard disks and RAM are behind flaps secured by simple screws. It can't go beyond windows 10 but is used daily.
The reason I've still got it is that more recent Dell XPS are thin, glued together, limited in storage and designed to be disposable.
Edited for balance.
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Needs a breakdown by model as well. Lenovo Thinkpads are very repairable and come with full disassembly manuals. It's their consumer stuff that isn't.
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Soldering Ram and SSD's to a motherboard should simply be banned as a practice, especially when the base ram config in 2025 is 8GB. Apple has above all targeted profit and e-waste production above everything else.
They should be ashamed of themselves
They should be ashamed of themselves
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Thankfully they aren't my problem anymore; but I know the surface laptops, at least, are no longer just fused shut, which was a major and seemingly pointless deficiency for the first couple generations; where it was impossible to swap either a screen or a keyboard without major permanent damage to the laptop chassis. I think it was either the surface laptop 3 or 4 where the lower body was made openable; vs. the prior plastic weld all around the edge.
I believe that the tablets still require removing the display to get to anything useful; I'm not sure if they are using a different adhesive or if there is some trick to it; but on the older tablets the only nondestructive removals I ever managed were displays that had already been partially removed by a swelling battery providing constant, steady, pressure from behind.
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Reliability is certainly a valuable indicator; though for people handling computers in quantity, looking to keep them long-term, or dealing with users who are children or children at heart sometimes it's not enough: keyboards and displays both tend to be parts that are fairly reliable but die by violence or accident a lot; and batteries have what's basically a 100% failure rate; just with questions over how fast degradation has to be to count as a defect rather than normal behavior.
What I would be curious about is how consistent failure rates are over time: are most failures the product of cut corners and poor production values that tend to happen at a more or less steady rate for a given vendor(or a given vendor's business line vs. their consumer line); or are they more often the byproduct of unexpected implications of design changes or issues with certain runs of a given supplier's part that tell you things that are useful in retrospect but not really when considering new models("Lenovos with Panasonic pouch li-ion cells in mid 2023 will see atypically rapid capacity degradation" is the sort of thing that would be good to know if I'm trying to get the vendor to be reasonable about their interpretation of a warranty; but tell me little about Lenovo vs. Dell today. "12% of Acer laptops fail within 4 years but only 6% of Asus ones do" would be more helpful, if that's actually the sort of thing that remains stable-ish over time rather than specific models being lemons).
I assume that internal data, at least for hardware inside warranty periods, must be pretty granular; but I'm not aware of anything public that provides terribly useful reliability data. There are brand reputations; and certainly a lot of anecdote and rumor about certain models or panel vendors being better or worse at particular times; but it would be interesting to at least know how failures are distributed: whether it's more defect-based attrition that varies by vendor production values or whether it's design or supplier based and follows particular models; or some of both(potentially with really cheap-seats outfits seeing comparatively high levels of random failure; while vendors with tight tolerances have low random failure rates but when they underspec and LCD cable they get precisely the same bad design across every unit of a given model; not 5 different subcontractors only one of which makes out of tolerance cables).
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I can't agree with this. The Microsoft, Asus or Samsung laptops may have information available and be easy to open, but that doesn't matter when there's not much to repair inside.
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I mean i gave my old 2010 macbook to my brother. he still uses it.
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RickRoyLeonPrisZhoraRacha
Ars Praetorian
Right?
Perhaps a study on the "quid pro quo" of iFixit's self-interest in promoting "Right to Repair" was more about iFixit selling repair tools, takeapart video subscriptions (coming soon) and exclusive parts (Samsung, etc). Its one thing to show how companies like John Deere cattlechute owner-operators of US$500K machinery over a $100 sensor (crippleware enablers) or how automakers moved away from DIN openings so car owners can't upgrade their info-tainment centers. But another where someone pushing for "right to repair" has their own agenda.
I will state my bias at Apple: I've worked for Apple. So their "security" screws are for liability and prevention of access "thermal" event damage, or static damage. Any Apple device that had a thermal event (iphone battery ignition...) was mostly due to a 3rd party, non-authorized repair with non-OEM parts. "we've determined the cause for the battery failure was a loose fastener that punctured the battery membrane"....
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Doesn't Lenovo own ThinkPad? I was under the impression that ThinkPad returned to the modular design that stopped with the T480. You can now swap out any part you want.
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I administer a small (several dozen) fleet of Mac laptops at our business. We gradually switched over from desktops around 20 years ago, other than for some specific uses. I personally have been using Mac laptops since the very first models, replacing my allegedly portable SE/30 “computer in a bag”.
For a long time I was the guy replacing and upgrading the hard drives, RAM modules, batteries and so on, and occasionally turning two broken Mac laptops into one functional one. Modern production designs have largely put an end to all that.
I‘ve never seen or heard of exploding batteries, as claimed in a post above. Apple tends to attract a lot of public notice, so I think issues like that would be well known.
One thing that seems not to be well known is that Apple has an excellent repair service. We’ve used it for battery replacements and during the infamous butterfly keyboard era.
You arrange for repair via online chat with Apple Support and they FedEx you a special shipping box, all prepaid. If under warranty there’s of course no cost. You overnight the laptop to a designated repair center, they fix it and ship it back the same day, and you have it back the next morning. Quite literally you drop it into a FedEx box on Monday at end of day, and have it back in your hands Wednesday mid-morning. Amazing!
For a long time I was the guy replacing and upgrading the hard drives, RAM modules, batteries and so on, and occasionally turning two broken Mac laptops into one functional one. Modern production designs have largely put an end to all that.
I‘ve never seen or heard of exploding batteries, as claimed in a post above. Apple tends to attract a lot of public notice, so I think issues like that would be well known.
One thing that seems not to be well known is that Apple has an excellent repair service. We’ve used it for battery replacements and during the infamous butterfly keyboard era.
You arrange for repair via online chat with Apple Support and they FedEx you a special shipping box, all prepaid. If under warranty there’s of course no cost. You overnight the laptop to a designated repair center, they fix it and ship it back the same day, and you have it back the next morning. Quite literally you drop it into a FedEx box on Monday at end of day, and have it back in your hands Wednesday mid-morning. Amazing!
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I don't really have a problem with poor repairability. I honestly can't think of a single instance where I've needed to take apart a modern glued-together device for any reason (memory upgrades and things notwithstanding). Especially true of Apple devices, which, let's be honest, are usually built to quite a high standard and don't often need physical repairs unless you're a clumsy fool who drops things all the time.
Take care of your expensive shit.
Take care of your expensive shit.
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Is there a place where the individual device scores are posted? The brand scores seem skewed; isn't Lenovo known for making decently repairable devices? The few Lenovo devices ifixit has scored are all got at least a 7.
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Well, hopefully things will change with the new CAMM modules making very thin and light laptops possible - the DIMM slots are relatively big and make it basically impossible to do thin and light laptops.
Though the SSD is a different matter, because it's likely to reduce the chance of user-induced data loss. You see, the first iMacs had replaceable SSDs. Which is all well and good, until people realized that the controller is on the motherboard, and the controller holds the encryption key. So a customer replaces their SSD after a few years, never backing up their data. They go and start up the computer, it prompts to install the operating system, and they're on their way. They try to access the data they stored on their old drive, and can't - no one makes an adapter for it, and when they put it back in, it can't boot since the encryption key changed when the formatted the new drive.
At this point the customer has completely lost their data. The service calls are probably brutal - people thought to upgrade later, and when they did (disregarding the need to backup their computers because who does that at home) and poof, all data is gone. Chances are good that most technicians who complacently also disregard the call to backup the user's data marched forward until the end, only to realize they couldn't get back the user's data.
It would not surprise me if Apple simply got fed up telling people "sorry, your data is gone, there really is nothing you can do. NEXT!". We'll have to see in a few years though when the next batch of computers with removable SSDs start growing old. (The Mac Studio, and I think a few new Mac Mini now have it on a separate module). It's kind of a wonder Apple didn't put a sticker saying "BACK UP YOUR DATA BEFORE REPLACING" in bright yellow.
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TheWerewolf
Ars Scholae Palatinae
That has to be the single weirdest way to phrase this possible... Somehow it makes Apple and Lenovo sound like winners when they're not. Since the ranking is a scale, there technically aren't any losers (Lenovo only got an F because they didn't even submit a score).
Worse, someone skimming the headlines might easily miss the 'losers' and read it as Apple and Lenovo leading in repairability scores.
"Apple, Lenovo at bottom in laptop repairability analysis" or "Apple, Lenovo get worst scores in laptop repairability analysis" would have been better.
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TheWerewolf
Ars Scholae Palatinae
Uhm, I'm going to assume you never upgrade storage or memory then, or are happy forking out the maximum possible for a new Mac so you don't need to?
And way to skip over the best example that contradicts your thesis: I have a MacBook Pro 2018 and the trackpad and keyboard are singularly the worst I've ever used. But you're also skipping over battery issues and the like.
Conversely, I still have a Toshiba convertible laptop from 2007 that works just fine in part because it has removable batteries, so as always - it's a question of how you slice the data.
The plural of anecdote is not data.
But I guess Apple fans have to shill for their company.
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I had 1 MacBook that was sent in for repair and it was for the cracking palmrest which Apple fixed under warranty. Since then all my subsequent Macs have been retired long before anything was wrong with them. So I’m not sure repairability is a big deal at least for me.
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This seems like a very contrived situation. Most PC technicians are able to complacently disregard the call to back up the data because they have their customers sign papers in advance absolving them of responsibility to preserve anything on the disk; in fact, they'd avoid trying to read the files, even if only for backup, because it's just additional potential liability for them. Of the small minority who do get hired to retain or reclaim data, those who are too impulsive to read up on the hardware in question and carefully map out their tasks before even plugging in the machine are unlikely to stay in business for very long.
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