Timothy Murphy wrote:
> You are assuming that because your colleague's HP cost €800
> it is of "higher quality" than my daughter's under €300 Asus netbook,
> where by "higher quality" you apparently mean "will last longer".
>
> From my - very long but not broad - experience
> there is little or no correlation between the price of a computer
> or computer component and how long it lasts.
Absolutely. In some cases a high-end piece of equipment (say, a graphics
card) is going to run hotter and be more power-hungry and be more likely
to fail than a low-end one, not least because there will be more fans to
fail.
Fortunately, this is no longer the case, but ten to fifteen years ago,
unless you bought carefully, when you bought a cheap desktop you got a
cheap processor on a cheap motherboard with a dodgy chipset, and if you
spent a bit more you got a faster version of the same processor on the
same dodgy motherboard.¹
I bet that Asus netbook is based on an Atom processor and an Intel
chipset, and whatever else you might say about Intel (and who doesn’t?),
they still (mostly) remember the twenty-year-old Pentium lesson that if
it’s got their name on it, it ought to be reliable.
A couple of related quotes from people who can say it better than I can:
All Hardware Sucks, and yesteryear’s professional-grade stuff?
Consumer-grade $#!=€ where they’re worried about losing their thin
profit margin to a few too many returns can be a lot more reliable
than professional gear where they were drooling about gouging you on
support. Caveat emptor.
– Anthony de Boer
Tandy went bust about a decade ago due to high prices, bad customer
service, and punting crap that nobody wanted. Maplin saw that market
niche and repositioned themselves into it, without asking the
obvious question as to why said niche didn’t have competition.
– Peter Corlett
¹ And back then, if the CPU fan did fail, it was more likely to be fatal
for faster, hotter processors.
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