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votes
Request - Suggestions of a laptop brand or style for someone who is clumsy
I don't want to pay an extra thousand dollars for 'rugged' design suitable for military deployment, but the user in this case is not well coordinated at all and it should be able to survive being dropped.
I otherwise need sufficient memory and speed to boot reasonably quickly and to run standard text, spreadsheet and database programs without annoying lag.
I think the best answer here is a Thinkpad. Buy an old T Series on eBay.
The older ones seem like they ought to be more durable, but I haven't seen any stats on that. I assume Lenovo has some stats, but I doubt they're sharing.
Anyway, even the new Thinkpads claim to pass "MIL SPEC" testing. Other brands like Dell, Asus, and LG also sell laptops that claim to have been mil spec tested. Well, I don't have a ton a faith in the reliability of this testing, but I guess it might be better than buying a model with no durability claims.
I dropped my old T500 on a concrete garage floor, chipped a piece out of the corner and it still ran fine for another 4 years. Anecdotal obviously, but they're pretty tough.
Pretty much every time you ask for a laptop on the internet these days someone is going to recommend a MacBook.
It’s not a bad recommendation. Since I bought one I have dropped it more than I have any other computer, though to be fair it’s also because I actually use it much more than any other laptop I have ever owned. It turns out the weight and battery life inconveniences of everything else had their tolls. In spite of that it still looks fairly new.
Thinkpads are also fairly sturdy in general, according to their fan base at least. I haven’t personally owned one.
One of my family members grudgingly owned a MacBook for years. They dropped it so many times the lid was slightly bent, and it never stopped working. Of course that's just anecdote; there are legitimate concerns from the repair community about Apple products which should be considered.
Newer Apple laptops have most of their components soldered to the motherboard so you cannot swap out busted parts.
Before my 2020 macbook pro M1, I used a 2012 macbook pro for years and I swapped out the ram and hard drive and turned the disc drive bay into another hard drive bay, it was actually pretty customisable as long as you were happy sticking with the CPU. The battery was easy to replace with a brand new one as well. After 2012 they made all of this much harder.
My vote is still thinkpad even though I am a macbook user for my personal devices, we use thinkpads at work and they are pretty bulletproof, and spare parts are easy to get and install. I recently replaced the ram and the whole lcd screen on a thinkpad t490, it took about 10 minutes to do the screen repair which was surprising.
Actually going to be a problem: Latitude Rugged
Just need better build quality: Thinkpad T series/Latitude 5000+
All can be found used on eBay for decent-ish prices if you can go that route. Double check specs to make sure you're getting what you need in terms of CPU generation. Thinkpads and Latitudes will be easy to repair in-house; the Dell Ruggeds are more tedious than difficult but will certainly last longer.
I do think that Thinkpads and other sturdier frame computers are a good suggestion, but I would like to put forward Framework laptops as an option. They have a modular design and as such are easy to fix and maintain. In addition the input/output modules on the sides are not connected directly on the motherboard. If you do drop it and damage one, the motherboard is probably fine and you just replace the module. You can upgrade it as well during its life so it will last quite a long time. It's a little more expensive for the initial buy in but after that it will be cheaper over time. You can probably 3d print an external case for the 13" laptop as well to ruggedize it. There is a whole community who build third party accessories for these laptops.
Slightly unusual suggestion here, but it may be worth a look at the Panasonic Let’s Note series - they used to sell under the Toughbook brand outside Japan, as a middle ground option that justified the name while still being basically a normal laptop at a normal-ish price rather than a piece of industrial equipment like the rest of that product line.
They occasionally make the news for not having changed their physical design in about 20 years, but in this case that may well be a good thing. The internals are perfectly modern, and the build quality is exceptional, as long as you can get on board with a retro look and an unusual (but great, IMO) trackpad.
That also means I’m still reasonably confident in recommending it despite it being well over a decade since I owned one. I bought it a good 15 years ago, second hand, and threw it around in a backpack for 20,000 miles of often fairly tough overland travel across two years without once worrying about damage - and then sold it on in perfect working order a couple of years after that, to someone who was going to drop in a new battery and do basically the same all over again.
Pricing definitely has a bit of a premium, but not an unreasonable one for what you get, especially with the weak yen at the moment. Nothing remotely close to the full ruggedised ones that are priced for oil company and military budgets!
Macbook Pro or Air but make sure it has MagSafe—the adapter to make unequipped ones into MagSafe is tiresome
Any business laptop made not entirely out of aluminum would fit the bill, any mid to high end used Thinkpad or Latitude on ebay would hold up well. If you know enough to install windows from scratch onto an SSD the ones sold by businesses too lazy to wipe their drives (so they remove them instead) can be had for peanuts online when sold with tags like "no os", "no ssd", or "boots to bios".
Have you considered fitting a rugged case into a regular laptop instead? e.g. something like an otterbox case should provide some protection against drops
Good idea. thank you