My Investment is in TROUBLE (SPONSORED)

[Sveeno]

 

Thanks to HP for sponsoring this video! you can learn more about the HP 845 G9 at: https://bit.ly/3ztZIJp

 

For years, there’s been an unfriendly trend of replacing socketed, swappable components like RAM and SSDs for ones that come soldered to the motherboard. Great for keeping device thickness to a minimum, but not so great for reparability. Let’s see what HP did to buck that trend.

[swimtome]

Great video - thank you for inserting corrections into audio!

[rcmaehl]

We're running HP Elitebooks at the office (actually typing this from an 850 G8). They've been great for repairability since around their 2018 G5 / "9th Gen" lines (although our G5s like to have an extremely high spicy pillow rate). It's great being able to get a user up and running in under 10 minutes for almost any hardware issue.

[BiotechBen]

31 minutes ago, rcmaehl said:

We're running HP Elitebooks at the office (actually typing this from an 850 G8). They've been great for repairability since around their 2018 G5 / "9th Gen" lines (although our G5s like to have an extremely high spicy pillow rate). It's great being able to get a user up and running in under 10 minutes for almost any hardware issue.

The many HP laptops I've had over the years have all had great serviceability and repairability, which is one of the reasons I have continued to stick with HP. until something comparable is available at a competitive price with equivalent or better customer service, I'll stick with HP. the only bad customer experience I've ever had with them was when windows purged a proprietary driver for Bulldozer APU crossfire to which AMD didn't have a driver for it, and it was far beyond the support life from HP. Coincidentally, the laptop ended up spectacularly killing itself with a Christmas tree display and the drive becoming completely corrupted. 

 

If looking for comical reference the Fine Dining episode of SpongeBob with the "we threw out his name scene"

[mariushm]

You know what would be awesome and may be a good episode ?

 

6-9 months from now, go through the parts store and see how many are still available, and see how many are in stock. Contact agent but make sure you're anonymous and see how trained the agents are to tell you if those parts are available or not and maybe even try to order a part.  I have a suspicion you wouldn't be able to order one.

 

Also, it would be great if you can get some people from other countries that are less "important", like let's say Greece or Estonia or Latvia or why not, even my country .... it wouldn't surprise me if the agent will say the 20$ part is in stock, but they can only ship it through DHL from US for $60 shipping.

 

Personally, I'm impartial to HP when it comes to laptops, but they really annoy me when it comes to desktops ... seeing lots of A320 chipset motherboards and systems that only support first generation Ryzen processors because they refuse to release updated bios for them.  That's waste ... throw out perfectly good system because you can't update a CPU.

Also, really frustrating to see people throw out these systems when they find out they have 240w power supplies and can't install a dedicated video card due to proprietary power supply and insufficient wattage.

 

[Senzelian]

2 minutes ago, mariushm said:

6-9 months from now, go through the parts store and see how many are still available, and see how many are in stock.

Agree. But let's make that 5 years, when it actually matters and parts start to fail. Within the first year or two the device will be under warranty anyway.

 

And as long as HP continues to manufacturer their printers the way they do now, I don't trust them one bit. 

[poptonite]

It looks like HP's configurator is wrong about something. The IGP on the 6800u, 6850u and 6850HS is the 680M NOT the 660M.

[wANKER]

HP's website and HP support assistant are the sole thing pushing us away from their devices.

The reliability and serviceability of them has been decent the last few years, but everything else about HP is just trash. They also seem to do battery recalls like they're going out of fashion. 

If you need to source drivers from their website directly, rather than say bulk downloading for provisioning, their website is barely functional and download speeds are just shocking. 

There's one thing about HP Support Assistant which makes me rage to this day: on the initial start up the option to not share data (I can't remember off the top of my head what it's for) is hidden for like 5 seconds, you have to wait and then it appears in the lower right. In an attempt to make you think you had no choice but to agree to it.. What the fuck? 

It also seems to want reboots randomly and prompts to install driver updates which then fail or suddenly says it doesn't require. 

Having been purchasing hundreds of their devices over the last 5 years or so, I'd say the quality has definitely gone down hill lately. Whether that's due to the market, I don't know. But our number of DOA units increased dramatically, and stupid things like film covers not being removed from the internal webcams at the factory. 

 

Also the thumbnail and title is just fucking RETARDED.

The meaning of the video should be clear from the title and thumbnail, not the other way around. 

 

 

[noob0saur]

Great to see that there's still honest & genuine people, even though Linus is invested in the "same" business, he stays in line with his philosophy about repairability, good job

[Luscious]

Dell could take a page out of HP's playbook here. As a XPS13 user now for many years I struggle to get replacement batteries for the damn thing. Dell absolutely refuses to sell them and go out of their way to lock down their BIOS/UEFI to make using ones sold elsewhere a PITA to get working.

 

WHY??? Laptop batteries are the first thing to fail when everything else is still working fine on the machine. Battery replacements are the most common thing on these laptops, pretty much because the batteries they use in these are also the cheapest quality ones and die in as little as 2-3 years. Similarly, replacing a battery shouldn't void a warranty. And locking down the BIOS/UEFI to make battery replacements that much more difficult is totally anti-consumer.

 

I will now be looking at a HP Enterprise laptop to replace my XPS13, rather than splurge on the XPS17 I was originally going to buy this Christmas.

 

I also have a friendly message for Michael Dell - go take a long walk off a short pier!!! 

[Virixiss]

HP laptops have always been low on the headache scale for serviceability for me when I was in the repair world; actually getting parts for anything older than 3 years was the the pain started to show up. For popular models, there was always a plethora of OEM or 3rd party replacement parts, but for some of the more uncommon models it was usually hopeless.

 

2 hours ago, mariushm said:

6-9 months from now, go through the parts store and see how many are still available, and see how many are in stock. Contact agent but make sure you're anonymous and see how trained the agents are to tell you if those parts are available or not and maybe even try to order a part.  I have a suspicion you wouldn't be able to order one.

 

This has been my experience, though starting at 3 years on average. It's still very hopeful to see all this nice and easily accessible documentation though.

The real bite is whether or not enough people give a crap to purchase these serviceable laptops to make it worth HP or any other laptop OEM to continue to produce and support them. If the sales aren't there, the concept will be abandoned and we're back to step one. I want to see these OEMs make a hard push to market these models and get them front and center of the average consumer's mind when looking for laptops.

[kuro68k]

I've had so many bad experiences with HP machines, I can't bring myself to buy one now. It's a shame that Lenovo don't do this for their new Z series. ThinkPads used to be very easy to work on, but now they have soldered RAM...

[hishnash]

The statement in the video that there are no-tradeoffs is not quite correct.

The chose of memory used (so that is can be modular) means that it is not just slower but also draws more power than LPDDR5 options.

[wanderingfool2]

It's a good first step...although I think it was missing a glaring oversight be HP.  The keyboard.

 

Lookup up the repair video it seems as though the way to replace it is effectively removing everything inside the laptop, but the repair guide actually doesn't specify replacing the keyboard.  I find that keyboards tend to get broken a lot (especially if working in areas that is naturally wet or super dusty).  Always wish the keyboard designs would lend themselves to easier replacement.

 

Although Framework looks like it's pretty involved as well...but Framework in general seems like it would be easier to replace the keyboard

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

11 hours ago, rcmaehl said:

We're running HP Elitebooks at the office (actually typing this from an 850 G8). They've been great for repairability since around their 2018 G5 / "9th Gen" lines (although our G5s like to have an extremely high spicy pillow rate). It's great being able to get a user up and running in under 10 minutes for almost any hardware issue.

Even their G1 series of EliteBooks have been relatively easy to service. Anything outside of a board, fan, or screen replacement and all you needed to do was to unlock the latch for the panel and slide the whole cover off. 

 

The G3s is where you really start to see the roots of the current G9s 

 

The G5s introduced the captive screws to really wind up the whole package and looks exactly like today's G9s. 

 

We've also had spicy pillows with our fleet of 830 G5s as well but it seemed it mostly stemmed from the devices being plugged in 24/7 once people got sent home to work remotely due to Covid. The batteries already had a few years of use and HP BIOS at the time did not have any health charging features. Therefore, batteries were pegged at 100% continuously thus the spicy pillows. Thankfully HP dealt with this quickly with a BIOS update soon after to add the health charging features and their essentially 4-year warranty for swelling batteries meant these were all replaced at no extra cost. They are even willing to send a tech over to replace the battery for every single unit affected. 

 

It's amazing how long HP's EliteBook and ZBook lines have fallen under the radar. Though it might be cause of the abomination of HP's Pavilion line going the same route as Dell with their all front I/O on the motherboard designs. 

[Just that Mario]

Why does it take Linus 15 seconds to remove a screw that has like five threads? Overall screws > plastic clips any day.

[Bramimond]

You know how bad things are when Linus is happy that there are only five screws. Meanwhile, my Dell Latitude E6510 only has a single screw for everything. And the screw is hold in place in the plastic, so you can't even lose it.

 

It's sad how bad things have gotten.

 

On my Latitude, I don't even need a screw to swap the battery and every replaceable part is only one screw away. Maybe two for things that are screwed in inside.

[f222]

I don't know how it is for you in America / Canada but in France sometimes the spare parts can be really expensive. 

At work we have Zbook fury g8 (even better than current elitebook for serviceability, just pull a latch and it's open, it was the same for the first elitebooks so bad they changed it... ). 

 

On the zbook I have one stick of 32Gib DDR4 3200 RAM ( reference: M09713-001) and wanted to add a second one. 

Went to HP spare-parts websites and... 555€ for just one stick. Are they serious? 

[Falafels]

For a 4 year old HP ProBook 440 G6, HP doesn’t sell any spare parts on their European store anymore. Not only do they not sell them, they don’t even say they’re out of stock, they’ve simply removed them all from the store. It’s laughable. Without replacement parts this laptop does very little for the most consumers. I’m honestly a little disappointed for LTT to brush other the fact that their store right now doesn’t have any parts availability for THIS laptop.