A laptop you can take apart and put back together and it’ll be fine. You take apart a phone and put it back together and it’s like haunted now. You can’t get it wet anymore, and it rattles sometimes. It says it doesn’t like its new screen, so it’s not gonna let you unlock it with your face anymore. It doesn’t trust you since you took it apart. The buttons feel different now. They still work, but they feel… different.
this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2025
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Don't be mean. I promise to do my best to judge that fairly.
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You just don’t know how to do it right!
(I’m replying this before anyone else does.)
It was a joke, relax.
(This too.)
Most laptops these days are not that far away from the glued together phones. It used for be you could swap out a hard drive or RAM in a laptop no problem, I even had a macbook way back that you could do it with like one screw. These days I won't touch other people's laptops anymore (I'm lucky enough to have a framework where I can, and have, upgraded it).
This person and I have had wildly different laptop experiences.
Yours actually have legs?
In french the word "marcher" can be used either for "walking" or for "functioning/working".
The classic prank was to call random numbers in the phonebooth and ask "does your fridge work/walk?" Pretending you're trying to sell them a new one and when they'd say yes to get rid of you, you'd suggest them to buy it some shoes (damn weren't we smart in the 90s).
All that to say, there's a joke around that concept somewhere in there.
In English the joke is "is your fridge running?" followed by "well you better run after it!"
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We have the same joke in English: ‘Is your fridge running?’
Well duh. How else do you expect it to use chopsticks? Like cmon now.
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My current laptop survived three phones and it was already refurbished when I bought it. And I can still install current versions of my OS (Ubuntu) on it.
Buy better laptops.
I just threw Ubuntu on mine and my god it's so much cleaner than Windows, but I have so much to learn.
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Tell me about it. My daily driver is 12 years old and the only time I even remotely feel it is on websites designed by imbeciles.
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A Linux laptop has, like, three souls
Inside you there are 3 GRUB entries
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I've got a 23-year-old netbook that slowly perished under the weight of windows. I've got some lightweight Linux distro on it and its absolutely fucking fine.
I resurrected it specifically to use as a digital reference guide for electronics, and to program my new Arduino. It can even barely load Firefox (exclusive) OR play videos!
Tldr is: Buy old electronics. Use better software.
After much hesitation, I bit the bullet and installed Linux Mint on my old netbook from college, an HP Mini 210. It runs MUCH better than the stupid limited Windows it had, and it's great for running old DOS games for my kid. Firefox is... another story.
The wild thing to me is a computer from 2005 running (a fresh install of) Windows XP feels more snappy and responsive than a computer from 2025 running Windows 11. Everything about the newer machine is somewhere between 4 and 10,000 times more powerful; processor clock speed, core count, cache capacity, RAM capacity, RAM speed, main bus speed, storage speed. I mean, that alone, in 2005 SATA hard disk drives were basically the only option, NVMe SSDs are considerably faster. But how is it that machines felt snappy back in the day but are now utterly useless?
~~never forget, oh poweruser, what blind enshittification has robbed from you.~~
e: whoopswhoopswhoops!
i remembered the phrasing from somewhere, and after a couple searches i realized it must’ve been here.
that specific wording is literally straight off a monument, erected by germany in 1933, at the polish border, which was a popular pilgrimage site for german nationalists.
big whoops.
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I wonder how many people glossed over "netbook" without understanding what your referring to That's incredible 🤣
Mobile phones are so locked down from regular users that those usually just physically break before the operating system becomes unusably slow.
Laptops can be destroyed by software. Give a regular user permission to install programs, and suddenly there are a random purple monkey sitting on the desktop telling jokes and multiple crypto miners.
In my experience it's the opposite. It starts behaving unreasonably slow way before it physically breaks, unless I do something very stupid, and there is no way to free it from creeping bloat or even diagnose what's actually wrong. Old laptop will behave like new again when I get it clean and install fresh OS on it. With phone there is nothing can be done, I have like 5 perfectly working old phones that just became too slow at performing the same tasks
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There’s definitely a ring of truth to this. Not for me personally - as others have commented, I know what I’m doing and tend to look after my tech well - but for plenty of friends and family who are seemingly incapable of taking care of a real computer with a desktop OS.
Happens all the time: they buy a new laptop, probably without asking for advice first, and within weeks they’re asking for help because it’s on its last legs. The fans spin up like jet engines, two dozen random apps open as soon as it boots, the desktop is a landfill of icons, normal actions cause error messages, etc.
‘Oh yeah, it just does that.’
Some people can’t be trusted with full control over their hardware.
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I only recently sent my old as fuck Windows Xp laptop that didn't hold a charge anymore and had to be plugged in just to be turned on off to a recycler. I still worked. Probably coulda slapped a new battery in it if I could have found one. I used to use it for WarDriving back in the very early days of wifi when everything was either just open or using an easily broken encryption method. Shit made me feel like one of those heist movie hackers even though all I was doing was mapping where I could get free internet. 😎
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Try buying quality laptops.
Over the years iv learned more and more. Almost every fucking major problem with laptops everyone always has basically boils down to
People are cheap fucks.
It's like my MIL, she bought a 150 euro android phone and always complained about it. At some point my wife got a new iPhone and gave her mom the old one. Now she is telling everyone how iphone is so much better than every android phone.
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My MacBook Pro 15“ from 2013 still runs perfectly and all parts work. Had to replace the battery at some point and the charger cable is falling apart.
My experience is pretty much the opposite. Phones give weird problems and I can't even properly diagnose.
Yeah and also with a laptop you just think what OS do I want to install or what application do I run? Instead of oh is this app in the app store? Will my phone ever get that new version of android?
I think this is more of a bloated ass windows problem than the form factor. It's so fucking heavy that it kills the machine, crushed under the weight of an inferior OS
Y'all're talking about this as a windows problem but for my old laptop it was the USB ports started dying then some keys stopped working and finally the frame began dying. It didn't last 5 years.
Surprised everyone is blaming windows. Maybe I just have bad luck but almost all of my laptop problems have been hardware or firmware related. Although windows certainly doesn't help the battery life when it decides to just ignore power rules and I open the laptop to find it never reacted to closing the lid and it has just enough charge left to flash 'battery low please plug in' before dying on 0%.
My Arch install is still chugging along on my Dell XPS 13 from 2017, and I've noticed no difference whatsoever.
Windows machines definitely don't last as long, though I think a massive part of that is the ever increasing piles of steaming shit they keep piling into Windows every update. That's bad down to make any machine appear like it's slowing to a crawl.
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I'm afraid to even hear what this person thinks about a desktop.
If I were to guess
"A desktop computer is like an elephant. Goes forever, respectable, venerated. All have their own personalities and we mourn them when they go.
Some are weird lean elephants, almost like horses, as they also want to go fast and explode.
But most people have their elephant they will only replace when it finally slowly lays down to rest. And never get up again. "
That motherfucker should lay off the DMT
Sounds like Windows laptop problems.
“Was I good laptop?”
“You were weirdly cheap, entirely made of plastic, and had very little cooling…so no not really.”
As someone who has worked in both refurbished consumer electronic resale as well as enterprise systems administration, for me it's the Consumer-grade hardware. Thin plastic, no reinforcement in the weak spots, and if you need to open the thing, clips that break, hidden screws, nonsense. Enterprise laptops on the other hand, survived my sales reps throwing them or running them over. A thinkpad's shell may crack, but it's innards are stronk
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I have a 2010 Thinkpad that I ordered new. I still use it on campouts and in the garage and stuff (plugged in, no battery)
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Lmao what have y'all devolved into?
It's not that I don't like it, I'm just scared
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I have no idea what this means
Tech illiterate people create their own problems and blame the machine. Smartphones largely prevent you from messing things up too badly.
A computer is like a pet. You need to care for it, clean it, feed it (cooling paste) If it's left neglected for too long it will suffer.
Also, here's your reminder to clean your keyboard. Properly, remove the keys and give a good cleaning. Take a picture first so you know where it goes back.
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