When many consumers approach the process of buying a new laptop they try and find the best product that will last for as long as possible. This is still a viable strategy but can be difficult to determine and, based on your budget, may not be feasible. With the recent development of extremely cheap, basic laptops, another strategy should be considered: buy cheap and buy often.

Problems with Buying for Long-Term Use

In a perfect world, you would invest in a laptop that would suit your immediate needs and those for 3-5 years to come. It may degrade in performance over time, but steadily so and still be usable for most tasks.

Of course, we all know this isn’t the case with many laptops we’ve purchased in the past. Sometimes, after only a year or two, our machines seem to grind to a halt. Parts fail seemingly just outside of warranty coverage and newer programs may come out the require more processing power than we initially anticipated, causing significant usability issues. Suddenly, that machine that felt so snappy just a year ago feels like molasses.

How To Buy For the Long Haul

Unfortunately, the adage “You get what you pay for” is something you should keep at the forefront of your mind when buying for years to come. Many websites advertise deals on laptops that seemingly have good specs for a great price, but buyer beware on these products: it might not be the deal you think it is. The build quality on many of these machines is subpar, if not outright awful. Bad hinges, plastic casing, and cheap components mean there is a good chance these machines were designed to fail - right after that 1 year warranty expires, of course.

So how can you you find a laptop that won’t fail soon? While price is a good indicator, there are other things you can look for to try and determine build quality. Manufacturer warranties (direct from Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc) can indicate the confidence the manufacturer has in its products. The manufacturer isn’t going to want to provide a stock warranty for the product beyond what they believe it will last for. For truly long lasting laptops, you should consider enterprise laptops or laptops from companies who support their products at least for 3 years under warranty.

A Different Strategy

If you’ve taken our above advice, you might find that the laptops we’d recommend for long term use are going to be priced at $1,000 and above - not an easy price to swallow for most of us. A different strategy might be to buy at the very low end with the expectation that you buy more often. There are many low end laptops right now, Chromebooks and Windows machines, that are priced around $200.

Spec wise and build wise these are not fantastic machines, but they might serve their purpose for the next year or so. They may not be able to handle high end processing tasks, but for most they will allow for checking of email, Office productivity (Word, Excel, etc), browsing the internet, and streaming audio and video.

When these machines inevitably fail or become unusable after a year or two, repeat the process with another $200, but now 1-2 years improved, laptop. Even if the very worst happens and you have purchased a laptop every year for 5 years, you’ve still only paid $1000 over that 5 year period for always having a usable and current machine.

Of course, a few problems still exist with this strategy. While usable and current, you will always have a budget machine. If you use intensive programs that require more processing power, this strategy might not be for you. Many of these laptops also will not have large storage for a lot of video, picture, and music files.

Perhaps the most disconcerting aspect of this strategy is the wasteful consumerism it promotes. It is incredibly wasteful to be purchasing and disposing of a new laptop every year, but unfortunately manufacturers have decided to build many of their products to be disposable quickly. If you do decide to use this strategy we would recommend trying to resell or donate old laptops to friends, family or charities.