I have been surprised to find that over 80 percent of the repair work that I do on laptops is one to two year old models. The business class laptops are a little better but far from the quality of four to six year old models. My clients would say “it’s only a few years old, how can it go bad so soon.? My research shows that there are really two major problems that I see over and over with these newer laptops. China (where 95% of the motherboards are manufactured) have started skipping steps during quality control. There is no real person that does the final check before the boards are certified. It is all left up to the robots now. Robots do a good job at what they are programed to do, but they have no way of checking the board before it arrives in their section. Humans had the responsibility of checking the basic condition of the boards before the robots did their part. There are many steps that a motherboard goes through before they can be printed and soldered. Last year Best Buy alone stated that 23 percent of their laptops were dead on arrival.
Dead on arrival is not bad for the customer, They can be returned, but the one year warranty is too short. If a board goes bad it usually does not make sense to have it repaired. It’s cheaper to buy another new one. The other problem I often find is just a lack of quality in the parts. These days they use plastic screws and hinges to hold things together. When you have a plastic screw going into a plastic hinge damage can be impossible to repair. Laptop screens are another issue that I often find as a problem. The manufacturers have a newer, cheaper process of making screens. Some of the newer laptops have some really cool features, now if they can get the quality back everything would be great for the end user.