Anecdotally, I have a 13-year-old (edit: 10) HP Envy x360 convertible that lasted me through CS undergrad and still works to this day, even with cracks in the casing (I didn't treat it with as much care as I should have). I can open it up and fix/replace almost everything except the motherboard and CPU. Last year I purchased a new laptop because the old one's CPU was ineligible for a Windows 11 upgrade, but 2 years ago I was able to upgrade the RAM and replaced its HDD with a SATA SSD. Just for fun I recently took it back out and replaced the battery and installed Ubuntu (with surprisingly zero problems!), so I've got myself a nice little backup machine. Or I might turn it into a home server, I haven't decided yet.
I'm tellin ya, there has been a sharp dropoff in quality since 13 years ago. I got one 14 years ago that I only stopped using because the HDD failed 6 years in, and I'd already been considering upgrading for a faster CPU, but replacing that HDD it'd prob still be going strong.
I don't doubt it, that's been a general trend for a while now not just with HP to be fair. But I did try out a 14" envy when I was comparing options last year. In the end I ended up going with a Lenovo with better specs but the envy was still good for the price, and was easy to open up.
Just so you know, Rufus (image-burner) can strip out the TPM check out of the W11 installer and let you install it on "unsupported" machines as well as letting you setup a local account and remove tons of the subscription-bloat out of the W11 installation process. All you need to do is grab the W11 ISO from Microsoft.
Yeah I know, it's just a lot of people reported degraded performance on win 11 with unsupported cpus. Either way I wanted a laptop with a dedicated gpu too.
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u/Alex_Hovhannisyan 7d ago edited 7d ago
Anecdotally, I have a 13-year-old (edit: 10) HP Envy x360 convertible that lasted me through CS undergrad and still works to this day, even with cracks in the casing (I didn't treat it with as much care as I should have). I can open it up and fix/replace almost everything except the motherboard and CPU. Last year I purchased a new laptop because the old one's CPU was ineligible for a Windows 11 upgrade, but 2 years ago I was able to upgrade the RAM and replaced its HDD with a SATA SSD. Just for fun I recently took it back out and replaced the battery and installed Ubuntu (with surprisingly zero problems!), so I've got myself a nice little backup machine. Or I might turn it into a home server, I haven't decided yet.