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Comment by Programmatic | Hacker News Reader

HP's consumer line isn't/wasn't great (I've had scant experience with it over the years), but their business products are generally great to take apart and repair. The EliteBook series in particular, e.g. the 8460s are built like tanks and are great to pick up off-lease.

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The problem is that skimping quality on one line (particularly with a high market penetration and presence) erodes brand equity of others.

I've sworn of many manufacturers / vendors for crap lines.

If you want to have a quality brand, you're going to have to apply it uniformly.

> HP's consumer line isn't/wasn't great

I have a hunch that can be said for most laptop vendors. There is reason "business notebooks" cost so much more. I'm not saying it's a good reason, but it's there.

Their consumer hardware is insane to repair, on some models its over 20 screws and a full disassembly to change the hard drive. If you send it to HP for repair, expect half your screw mounts to be sheared off by HP's repair team!

Dell is the same, consumer level stuff is difficult or impossible to repair, but the business laptops are well thought out and designed to be repaired.

My new Dell XPS 15 is easy to service. 12 screws on the bottom gives easy access to the ram, battery, drive slots, and wifi. The heat sinks and pipes for the CPU and GPU has what, 8 screws? The screws don't need to be removed to clean out the fans with compressed air.

I replaced the SSD, wifi card, and repasted the CPU/GPU cooler. The operation took me 30 minutes.

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