I took a dremel to my $20 case to install a front fan to cool my NAS drives. Taped that sucker right to the front bit of the face, and ran it that way for years.
It's not quite as hardcore as this, so I'm not sure if I qualify for the second or third type.
Any time I get a new toy, I do try to keep it a shiny as possible for as long as I can, but yeah eventually the battle scars come through and then it's a different story.
Hey treat your stuff however you want. But generally tools are meant to wear out from their intended use. Ususlly, the better you treat your tools the more use you get out of them.
My Thinkpad has survived drops from the countertop, kids standing on it, and the USB-C charge port is wearing out from years of kids fighting over it. It's still running fine, though there's certainly some surface damage.
It's going on 8 years now and still running fine. Sucker refuses to die, and I refuse to replace it until it does.
So I started going to University recently, and the amount of people I've had actively chastise me for how I treat my laptop has been shocking.
This is a tool to get things done, it's not some precious gem, I bought a cheap laptop with the expectation that it's going to get gross and crusty and I'll have to hose it down once a year, I'm going to wing it around and drop it and clean the screen with my sleeve.
My tap and die set sit on a shelf, my lathe is in the shop. I've dropped my hammer from 150 feet because the tether broke and the most upsetting part was climbing the ladder down and back up.
It depends on whether you view it as a lathe or a hammer. My nice computer is at home, my computer that I sit in the park under a tree and code on, then set it on the grass while it compiles is in my bag.
I ran over mine with my car (by accident, of course) and it survived, I'm still using it even though I had to take some acrews out to relieve the pressure from the fan because it was hitting the case and sometimes I have to fold it a bit to the other side so it doesn't make noises.
My old MacBook was first too shiny and new to put stickers on, then it lived so long that I didn't want to waste stickers on a machine that I'd need to retire. It made it ten years before having weird bootloop issues.
To try to counteract my own neuroses I went sticker mad on its replacement immediately. It also helps with easily telling which way is up at a glance (I don't know how many times I had to rotate the old one when I went to open it).
You know, aside from the i9 MacBook pros, these are really resilient machines that will last quite a while. They don’t deserve the hate they get. They easily outlast gamer laptops that bake themselves to death.
That's why I buy 'em. All other personal laptops I've had over the years don't make it past the two year mark but I've been really impressed by Macbooks. I expect there's probably some amazing Linux machines with similar hardiness but I've not had reason to roll the dice on that front.
ThinkPad with a generator? Nothing wrong with that --- maybe add LoRa, get a ham license and add some packet radio or digital modes and you have a neat disaster setup.
MacBook that you don't want to scuff? Well, I'm not that precious with my gear, but you do you. Many Mac laptops last a very long time, and the performance of modern Apple silicon is really, really impressive --- and you have UNIX out of the box. Plenty for a tech enthusiast to like.
this is not funny. the computer on the right is using windows. put both of those pieces of shit in the same left panel and on the right put a logo that isn't linked to some closed-source piece of trash
Use a mouse like a smart person? The only people who use the track pad have no alternative at the moment, or are brainwashed by apple ads.
Laptops have terrible ergonomics. Hunching over a desk like that is pretty bad for you. Use an external monitor, mouse, and keyboard and you'll remember how useless a tiny 16" screen and shitty unmoving glass pad can be as an interface.