If they're only breaking down after three years I would consider that a stellar victory for the engineers that designed them. My kids are very careful with their gear. So they say. And yet, it develops mysterious faults, cracked screens, broken keyboards and pulled out sockets. And nothing, absolutely nothing ever happens in my presence. Weirdest thing.
Stellar victory for their IT system also: no backups, no local data, no malware, just chuck the thin client and replace, the user is back working in minutes. If you can salvage a few with light repair, great, but the labor saving is substantial.
I wouldn't blame your kids. I've had several chromebooks (that only I used) go down for various reasons including a cracked screen I could't explain.
One of my kids devices is an old Thinkpad and I don't think we'll ever be able to get rid of that.
I have a whole collection of laptops bought over the years, the ones that have seen the most use (and abuse) are a ThinkPad and a Macbook Air 13", they're both still doing fine after many years of service. They're both on extremes of the spectrum portability vs other specs, and depending on what I'm doing I'll pick the one or the other. Neither would work for me for all use cases. Zero repairs on those two.
The Thinkpad X1 Carbon and MacBook Air are likely the most resilient laptops, except for rugged models. However, there is one notable difference: the Thinkpad is water-resistant, whereas the MacBook Air is not.
Once, I inadvertently left my Thinkpad near an open window, and it was rained on overnight. The next morning, the keyboard was wet, and the touch screen was unresponsive, causing me to assume it had died. After shutting it off and leaving it in a bowl of rice for a few hours, it functioned normally again.
My X1 Carbon gen 6 (not the one I left under rain), served me more than 6 years, during which it fell maybe once every several weeks. Eventually it screen cracked after it fell from the table, it's still working with an external display.
On another occasion, I spilled some coffee on my MacBook Air's keyboard while working on a train. While most of the laptop remained operational, certain keys, including the Power button, did not function. As a result, I had to wait for the battery to run out to power off the device since the Power button was not a dedicated button but a standard keyboard key. Even with an external keyboard, I was unable to use the Power button to turn it off/reboot.
I took a laptop to school for the entire year in 1996 (year 10 at school) -- a Powerbook 190. It was a great machine, a grayscale sceen (16 grays) and a CPU with 33Mhz -> 66Mhz depending on whether it was on power, and a 500MB HD.
It went into the shop twice that year. Both times because I had tripped over the power cable. I would say I cherished it and yet as a teenager you're just not as careful with items as you should be. That PowerBook 190 was a rugged beast, and that's probably the only thing that kept it running as well as it did.
To be fair that Powerbook (I had a 160 a few years before and it costed a lot) didn't cost you (or your family) the equivalent of 200 or 300 US dollars, it was more like 2,000 (at the time, so something like 4,000 dollars today):
So, besides being really tough, you probably cared a lot about it or at least your parents told you to be careful with the thing that costed so much money (and you still managed to break it a couple times), think at how you would have treated something that was given to you by the school.
I think my parents spent about $1600AUD on it, which seems cheaper that the originally priced $2200USD. My very vague memories are that I got it in January 1996, so about 6 months after release.
I don't think, for me at least, it was the price tag so much as it was priceless. It wasn't replaceable, but your point is valid. Attitude to technology in much of the developed world is that it's disposable. We don't repair things like we used to.
The thing about young humans is that they don't yet fully understand all practical, everyday corollaries to the laws of physics.
Like, for example, it might not occur to a child that if you stack 10 textbooks on top of your backpack in your locker — where your laptop/tablet is held in a vertical pocket inside the backpack, and everything else in the backpack is just clothes or something, and so the laptop/tablet is acting as the load-bearing support for all those textbooks — then if you've got an all-plastic device, its chassis will probably flex apart and crack; or if you've got a metal-and-glass device, it'll probably buckle and bend.
Learning a basic corollary to a law of physics by breaking something usually feels really embarrassing, though — a "why didn't I expect that that would happen? I must be stupid!" kind of feeling. So kids really don't like to admit it happened.
But they really were being careful! They were trying as hard as they could! They just didn't have all the information on what they need to pay attention to to avoid breaking a thing, yet.
(And, to be clear, an opaque warning to "never do X" doesn't give them that information, because there's no backing intuition, so while they might remember it in the moment for that specific case, they won't be able to translate it to any related case. What they need is the backing intuition itself — the understanding of the causal process that makes bad things happen, such that if they imagine doing X or Y or Z, then they'll picture the causal process that applies, and so automatically infer for themselves that [unwanted consequence] will follow.)
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Tangent, in the mode of a game designer:
There are many "practical, everyday corollaries to the laws of physics" that a child will just learn from interacting with the world. And for others, there are common "learning toys" you can buy for children that teach them certain principles.
But there are rather a lot of these physical principles that are more niche — plastic deformation under stress of seemingly-rigid bodies being one of them — where you just won't personally observe them in a regular childhood (unless your parents are nerds who like watching "historical failures of engineering" documentaries), and where it's hard for regular physical toys to model them. (A physical toy demonstrating plastic deformation would necessarily be single-use!)
Growing up myself, I (subconsciously) learned a lot about these more niche corollaries in my tween years, from playing with physics-sim computer games in my middle-school computer lab. I feel like physics-sim games were a great supplement to my ability to predict the physical world.
There are real simulational "set things up and see what happens when you press Go" sandbox 'games' that should be standard issue for every school-issued laptop/tablet, because kids can play with them and end up learning getting a feel for these principles that are hard to end up with personal experience with otherwise.
There are also real games, that actually gamify the process of developing intuitions around more specific principles. Games like Kerbal Space Program, Poly Bridge, etc. They won't teach you the math, but you'll be very ready to learn the math, far ahead of the kids who just see opaque formulae without the intuitive sense for what it's doing.
But, as far as I'm aware, there's no physics-sandbox that models plastic deformation of materials, let alone a game that gamifies the process of developing an intuition for it. (Poly Bridge might simulate stress/strain and buckling at the joints, but it won't give you any sense for the fact that a seemingly rigid body like a steel girder can end up crumpling like a wet paper bag under enough compressive stress, or pulling like taffy under enough tensile stress.)
And that's a shame. Someone should develop one. Maybe then kids would stop stacking books on their backpacks.
My daughter (11) has to constantly be reminded not to pick her laptop of by one hand, by the edge, holding it horizontally. She just doesn't "get", no matter how often I tell her, that it results in stress on the hardware and kind wind up breaking it.
I do this all the time. Out of a dozen laptops around here (Apple, Dell, Lenovo) none have broken over the years. I usually just outgrow them, or the batteries lose their ability to hold a charge.
Thinking about this, I realize that all of my laptops fall into four categories: (1) MacBooks ——these are made of metal and are quite rigid and strong, (2) large screened Dells, too heavy to pick up comfortably with one hand, (3) Lenovo Thinkpads that are thin but very lightweight, and (4) a couple of Chromebooks that sit permanently on a desk for web use only and don’t get picked up. In all of these cases, there is little danger that I will injure them by handling them as you’ve described.
I had an HP laptop provided by work that bent when picked up by the edge, such that four pads on the bottom no longer contacted and it had a tilt. I personally believe this should not happen, even if it costs an ounce.
The white plastic iBooks, especially the G3s, were incredibly prone to damage this way. I think I went through three G3s (on warranty) before they replaced it with a G4, and then swapped out a busted G4 still on the original warranty. Never occurred to me to change how I was using the system; it was clearly a design defect that was on them to handle. And none of the metal laptops ever gave me problems, although the TiBook certainly felt a bit fragile due to its size.
That's really not on her though, or her understanding of physics but simply that the designers of this stuff should have foreseen that this is exactly how people will handle the gear, just like a book. If you can grab it by something you should be able to lift it. It's not as though you're trying to lift a car by a mirror.
> If you can grab it by something you should be able to lift it.
I disagree with this completely. I can pick a reasonable sized mirror up by the edge, and it has a chance of breaking. I can pick a table up by one of four legs, but it puts stress on the connections. I can pick lots of things up in ways that would do damage to them. And the people that made them _could_ make them stronger to avoid that, at the cost of a higher price. Or they could not spend the money and just say "don't pick it up in a way that puts unreasonable stress on it". It is a compromise and, for many items, there is a point beyond which it's not worth spending more money on it.
It really is just unfortunate how squishy LCDs are but it's not like laying sheets of digitizer glass across the same screen makes them particularly more durable.
It's almost hard to imagine how many laptops break in that exact same stop near the top center of the screen from being picked up like that.
Maybe I'm buying more sturdy laptops than your daughter gets, but I've never broken anything by doing that, and I have laptops well over 10 years old, and have been doing that for some 25 years.
I understand the theory, but I think significantly more laptops are broken by e.g. squishing them against a non-flat object in a bag, or dropping.
Think of a modern tablet. Would you seriously say one must not hold a tablet by an edge?
(Me personally, I destroy all my laptop hardware by spilled drinks...)
I've never knocked a computer off the edge of a table because it was left with part of it extending beyond the edge. But leaving it like that does make increase the risk of that happening. The same idea is true of picking it up by the edge; it increases stress on the hardware, which can cause damage. The fact that it hasn't happened to you just means it's isn't _sure_ to cause a problem.
My daughter (11) has to constantly be reminded not to pick her laptop of by one hand, by the edge, holding it horizontally.
Back when day trading was a thing and Starbucks was packed with people on laptops, I used to see people pick up their computers by the top of the screen all the time. I never understood that.
I couldn't learn that either when my laptop weighed 3.5kg. Even the feeling of my wrist getting nearly twisted out of socket couldn't teach me anything.
You also have to run around school carrying tons of stuff all day, or at least I did. My 2006 MacBook's HDD died when I was running to English class with my backpack on and fell down a short flight of stairs.
These are descended from laptops and 20 years ago laptops had already perfected the engineering for a two-year target lifetime.
The further back you go, portables were still mainly business machines not expected to be affordable to most students, and businesses really didn't want to send their people out with more than a two-year-old laptop or wearing a suit much older either.
And a new Windows version was coming out every 2 years.
