Laptop reliability

YBR

OK, thanks everyone.

I was never asking about specs, just about brand reliability.

I'm not going to comment on the repair cost, I wasn't there. 

"Fatally" means there is a hardware failure which cannot be resurrected. Not a "3-pin reset", or a reinstall the operating system failure.

Am-I-Paranoid

YBR said:

just about brand reliability.

Just bear in mind that most manufacturers have budget brands and their higher-end business versions, sometimes with completely different design and manufacturing processes, so the quality can vary a lot; so it's not always just about the brand name.

I spent over 20 years in and around IT support in large corporates and I've seen several attempts to move away from IBM/Lenovo (to Dell / HP) and although they would have the odd model that was good, nobody came close to the IBM/Lenovo Thinkpads for consistency.... also the variance in quality once you go for their non-flagships does dip fast. Some of the HP's are pretty good for the compact Spectre/Elitebook ranges, but I've never been impressed with their home-spec laptops (reliability or design) - I've had a couple of them that just died for no reason.

I know you weren't asking for spec advice, but that has to come into part of the equation once you have a budget to consider too: if you want hardware encoding for streaming or CUDA cores for video editing (need a discreet GPU for that).

The concern is that if you want to get a solid, reliable laptop (e.g. Thinkpad/Elitebook) for <£800, you will not get one with a discreet GPU or H-series Ryzen.... only U-series (ultra-portable) CPU and no GPU.

Lenovo do have decent Thinkpads for video editing and streaming, but not at that budget: I was looking at one in August, but it was £2900 for exactly the same spec Thinkpad P1, rather than the £1100 I paid for my Lenovo LOQ16.

Once you've got an idea of what you're after, look up "Jarrod's Tech" on YouTube as he does some very decent reviews.

Cisco001

YBR said:

Thank-you for your comments. It is comforting that HP are still regarded as normally reliable. I don't think much of the commercial Dell laptops my employer gets in bulk.

The dead laptop was not used where the vents are blocked, such as your example on a bed. I don't know the details but the cost-to-fix would have been around £700 so really not worth it. I might have tried pursuing consumer rights but he chose not to.

We now know what we want to replace with, and both the same. I'm not sure why Cisco assumes that I want a less capable machine than my husband, or that I am only up to "ordinary web surfing" and don't do video editing!

That is my interpretation on what you are saying initially when you mention 10 years old laptop.
I don't expect laptop of 10 years old capable of doing anything other than web surfing!
And how often do you need both laptop doing editing at the same time?

Anyway, I agree with what Am-I-Paranoid said.

Macbook also an option in terms of reliability. 

cerebus

My 9 year old lenovo laptop with an i5 4th gen chip is more than capable of video editing and certainly more than just "Web surfing" 

Why would it not be?

Am-I-Paranoid

cerebus said:

My 9 year old lenovo laptop with an i5 4th gen chip is more than capable of video editing and certainly more than just "Web surfing" 

Why would it not be?

Sorry for the huge replies, but some things need explaining

Firstly, there's a huge difference in being able to edit the odd video and being happy to wait between each action versus asking for a laptop for video editing: this implies being able to edit a video smoothly and comfortably (i.e. higher resolutions, being able to scrub up and down the video in real time, recompress the video quickly).

If somebody is stating video editing as a requirement, then it is fair to assume they would like to have a laptop that is tailored toward that at least a little bit.

Things that impact this are GPU, CPU and RAM (and software choice, but that can be changed).

RAM can be upgraded reasonably easily, so I'll ignore that, given that even my 10 year old laptop has 16Gb and assuming the choice of future laptop will most likely be 16Gb with almost all allowing upgrades to 32Gb, even if not officially supported. But yes, video editing is technically possible with 8Gb or less, but the experience will be degraded massively, especially for longer, high res videos!

CPU will be fairly different from older devices: The difference between a high end laptop from 9 years ago and a mid-spec laptop from today is the CPU will normally be up from 2 cores to 4-8 cores (or more), plus newer CPUs will have dedicated multimedia instructions sets, higher boost clocks and much higher IPC (instructions per clock). Anything that is CPU intensive in video editing will benefit from a multicore, multi-threaded laptop and the newest Intel laptops have a lot if "efficiency cores" and prop up their overall performance and Ryzen laptops have very efficient multi-core handling, with their 8 cores versions being a particular sweet spot.

There are dedicated benchmarks out there, e.g. Cinebench R15 64bit multicore should given some idea of video editing capacity and it shows the performance difference and covers most CPUs from the last 9-10years:

i7-3540M is too old for comparison , but based on the Cinebench R10 comparison it is <10% slower than the i5-4310U.
i5-4210H is 328.
i5-4310U is 326 (the 4th gen i5 laptop with the highest available boost speed)
Comparing that to modern mid-range CPUs:
Ryzen 5 7640HS is 2079 (6x faster)
Ryzen 7 7840HS is 2622 (8x faster)
i7-1280P is 2120 (6x faster)
i5-13500H is 2338 (7x faster)
i7-13700H is 2472 (7x faster)

...and way out of budget, but for interest's sake, the top laptops are:
i9-13900HX ~4500 (common)
i9-13980HX ~4700 (rare, but top Intel)
Ryzen 9 7945HX ~5500 (common)
Ryzen 9 7945HX3D ~5600 (very new, still fairly rare)

Worth noting that desktop CPU's have Intel in the lead for these tests (ignoring the 64 core AMD workstation CPUs), but the Intel CPU's have fairly obscene power and heat characteristics... so not able to be pushed hard in laptops.

But all of this only tells the CPU story.....

GPU: The bigger difference comes in with GPU acceleration and their are two/three huge differences in those.

A more modern APU/iGPU will help a fair bit (this is the graphics processor that is built into the CPU), but note that the Ryzen APU's up to their 5000-series will be slightly faster than almost any of their equivalent Intel iGPUS, then AMD made a COMPLETE mess of the latest Ryzen 7000 naming convention; there are two very, very different generations of graphics in the same generation of CPU.

The naming is completely counter-intuitive: a 0 at the end of the name means it is newer integrated graphics and a  5 at the end of the name indicates the older graphics. For Ryzen graphics, it is best understood on this page: AMD laptop CPUs
 
The thing to look out for is "Graphics Model" column for any CPU you're considering and there are two different categories here:
1) the "5" names with the Radeon 600-series: roughly equivalent to older integrated graphics in the Intel or Ryzen 5000 (and earlier).... there have been improvements each generation of CPU, but they vary - around 10% each iteration on average:  Intel HD 4000 (from an i7-3540M) = 65GFlops, Radeon 780M (from a R7 7840HS) - 560Gflops, so 8.6x faster.

2) The "0" names indicate Radeon 700-series mean it is a very different beast and equivalent to the entry level dedicated graphics cards from a few years ago (faster than a GTX1650) - almost unheard of in laptop integrated graphics. 

3) The third category and the biggest step of all is discreet graphics: this will result in 100x increase in performance for a high end GPU PROVIDED you have the right software that will leverage this... without the right software, just expect the improvement of the CPU capacity. Note that the nVidia (GTX / RTX) GPUs are normally better supported, but on some software the AMD (Radeon "RX") can provide a better experience, IF supported.

Once you step into this discreet/dedicated graphics category, expect huge potential benefits, but some compromises: laptop cost, weight, mostly due to the heat/cooling requirements and also power consumption.

As with all things, the first step into these gets you some of the benefits but not the massive improvements - the true high-end video editing GPUs will be WAY out of this budget.