Once, I inadvertently left my Thinkpad near an open window, and it was rained on overnight. The next morning, the keyboard was wet, and the touch screen was unresponsive, causing me to assume it had died. After shutting it off and leaving it in a bowl of rice for a few hours, it functioned normally again.
My X1 Carbon gen 6 (not the one I left under rain), served me more than 6 years, during which it fell maybe once every several weeks. Eventually it screen cracked after it fell from the table, it's still working with an external display.
On another occasion, I spilled some coffee on my MacBook Air's keyboard while working on a train. While most of the laptop remained operational, certain keys, including the Power button, did not function. As a result, I had to wait for the battery to run out to power off the device since the Power button was not a dedicated button but a standard keyboard key. Even with an external keyboard, I was unable to use the Power button to turn it off/reboot.
It went into the shop twice that year. Both times because I had tripped over the power cable. I would say I cherished it and yet as a teenager you're just not as careful with items as you should be. That PowerBook 190 was a rugged beast, and that's probably the only thing that kept it running as well as it did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_190
So, besides being really tough, you probably cared a lot about it or at least your parents told you to be careful with the thing that costed so much money (and you still managed to break it a couple times), think at how you would have treated something that was given to you by the school.
I don't think, for me at least, it was the price tag so much as it was priceless. It wasn't replaceable, but your point is valid. Attitude to technology in much of the developed world is that it's disposable. We don't repair things like we used to.
Like, for example, it might not occur to a child that if you stack 10 textbooks on top of your backpack in your locker — where your laptop/tablet is held in a vertical pocket inside the backpack, and everything else in the backpack is just clothes or something, and so the laptop/tablet is acting as the load-bearing support for all those textbooks — then if you've got an all-plastic device, its chassis will probably flex apart and crack; or if you've got a metal-and-glass device, it'll probably buckle and bend.
Learning a basic corollary to a law of physics by breaking something usually feels really embarrassing, though — a "why didn't I expect that that would happen? I must be stupid!" kind of feeling. So kids really don't like to admit it happened.
But they really were being careful! They were trying as hard as they could! They just didn't have all the information on what they need to pay attention to to avoid breaking a thing, yet.
(And, to be clear, an opaque warning to "never do X" doesn't give them that information, because there's no backing intuition, so while they might remember it in the moment for that specific case, they won't be able to translate it to any related case. What they need is the backing intuition itself — the understanding of the causal process that makes bad things happen, such that if they imagine doing X or Y or Z, then they'll picture the causal process that applies, and so automatically infer for themselves that [unwanted consequence] will follow.)
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Tangent, in the mode of a game designer:
There are many "practical, everyday corollaries to the laws of physics" that a child will just learn from interacting with the world. And for others, there are common "learning toys" you can buy for children that teach them certain principles.
But there are rather a lot of these physical principles that are more niche — plastic deformation under stress of seemingly-rigid bodies being one of them — where you just won't personally observe them in a regular childhood (unless your parents are nerds who like watching "historical failures of engineering" documentaries), and where it's hard for regular physical toys to model them. (A physical toy demonstrating plastic deformation would necessarily be single-use!)
Growing up myself, I (subconsciously) learned a lot about these more niche corollaries in my tween years, from playing with physics-sim computer games in my middle-school computer lab. I feel like physics-sim games were a great supplement to my ability to predict the physical world.
There are real simulational "set things up and see what happens when you press Go" sandbox 'games' that should be standard issue for every school-issued laptop/tablet, because kids can play with them and end up learning getting a feel for these principles that are hard to end up with personal experience with otherwise.
There are also real games, that actually gamify the process of developing intuitions around more specific principles. Games like Kerbal Space Program, Poly Bridge, etc. They won't teach you the math, but you'll be very ready to learn the math, far ahead of the kids who just see opaque formulae without the intuitive sense for what it's doing.
But, as far as I'm aware, there's no physics-sandbox that models plastic deformation of materials, let alone a game that gamifies the process of developing an intuition for it. (Poly Bridge might simulate stress/strain and buckling at the joints, but it won't give you any sense for the fact that a seemingly rigid body like a steel girder can end up crumpling like a wet paper bag under enough compressive stress, or pulling like taffy under enough tensile stress.)
And that's a shame. Someone should develop one. Maybe then kids would stop stacking books on their backpacks.
Back when day trading was a thing and Starbucks was packed with people on laptops, I used to see people pick up their computers by the top of the screen all the time. I never understood that.
Thinking about this, I realize that all of my laptops fall into four categories: (1) MacBooks ——these are made of metal and are quite rigid and strong, (2) large screened Dells, too heavy to pick up comfortably with one hand, (3) Lenovo Thinkpads that are thin but very lightweight, and (4) a couple of Chromebooks that sit permanently on a desk for web use only and don’t get picked up. In all of these cases, there is little danger that I will injure them by handling them as you’ve described.
I start thinking about my collection of laptops and amended my comment above.
It's almost hard to imagine how many laptops break in that exact same stop near the top center of the screen from being picked up like that.
I disagree with this completely. I can pick a reasonable sized mirror up by the edge, and it has a chance of breaking. I can pick a table up by one of four legs, but it puts stress on the connections. I can pick lots of things up in ways that would do damage to them. And the people that made them _could_ make them stronger to avoid that, at the cost of a higher price. Or they could not spend the money and just say "don't pick it up in a way that puts unreasonable stress on it". It is a compromise and, for many items, there is a point beyond which it's not worth spending more money on it.
I understand the theory, but I think significantly more laptops are broken by e.g. squishing them against a non-flat object in a bag, or dropping.
Think of a modern tablet. Would you seriously say one must not hold a tablet by an edge?
(Me personally, I destroy all my laptop hardware by spilled drinks...)
The further back you go, portables were still mainly business machines not expected to be affordable to most students, and businesses really didn't want to send their people out with more than a two-year-old laptop or wearing a suit much older either.
And a new Windows version was coming out every 2 years.