Sometimes I wonder what those people are doing to their poor laptops for those hinges to become quite unhinged! 👀
#Work
@trinsec ok, so some laptops don't have metal frames, they just use the body as the structure. It's not usually the hinge that breaks but where the screws anchor into a plastic body. I'm looking at you HP pavilion,Toshiba satellite, and Dell Inspiron. On occasion, the hinge will lose lubricant in some laptops and become too stiff and fracture the body at the screen housing.
It's rare, super rare, but on this occasion, I don't think it's the users fault. 😂
@trinsec @skanman it's not that it works loose from the frame, it's that the frame itself (really just some plastic ribs moulded into the thin bottom shell) cracks away from being overstressed. The problem is that the hinge plate is only a centimetre or two wide, perpendicular to the hinge axis, whereas the screen is maybe twenty centimetres tall. So when the laptop is in use, and the screen is opened up to maybe 120 degrees, its weight has a big mechanical advantage.
I've lost two consecutive HP laptops to this failure mode. My hypothesis is that they went for parts commonality, since they have a series that runs from 13 up to 17 inch screens, and the hinges aren't deep enough to effectively distribute the weight of the larger screens.
@trinsec Lenovo still reigns in build quality.. I've been using ThinkPads for 18 years. I switched to a Dell XPS 13 2in1 last year though because it's super small and tough and I got into motorcycles during lockdown out of boredom and open roads.