Laptops and also smartphones dont last in my experience.. Too much miniaturisation imo. I dont buy them 2nd hand, I only buy new ones as they only have a limited life. Desktops on the other hand, will last forever, I buy those 2nd hand and they are so cheap but they function perfectly.. Also if something does break they are modular and its trivial to replace the broken part.
It greatly depends on the laptop, even within the same manufacturer. I have lots of old Apple gear that still works but is just too old to get security updates:
- 2012 13" MBP, works great with an SSD upgrade, and the hinge is still solid, which was not the case with my 2009 15" MBP where the screen literally ripped off.
- 2013 15" retina MBP. Great laptop, still plenty fast to use today, but runs a little hot and the battery life was never amazing.
- 2015 12" retina Macbook. Survived two glasses of water spilled on it, but the speakers and bluetooth died. It was miserably slow to use anyway.
My daily driver is now a 15" M3 Macbook, which has been amazing in nearly every way. Only minor complaints is that the ram maxes out at 24GB and I wish I had 1 more USB port on the other side.
Only for consumer-grade stuff, which is basically disposable garbage that's obsolete the day you purchase it, which is about what you get for $350 at Walmart. For any actually decent laptop designed for enterprises/businesses, this is not true, they still have steel hinge pins and plastic-over-metal hinge bodies. Doesn't really matter if you buy Dell, Lenovo, Apple, business-quality laptops don't have these issues, but they do start at around $1000/unit.
The problem with any discussion around electronics longevity is that it's a bimodal market. You have the stuff that generates the bulk of revenue, which is generally meant to be purchased as a "fleet" by businesses or MSPs, and you have the stuff that generates the bulk of the actual devices, but at most lower BOM cost (meaning lower quality) which is targeted at "consumers". Anybody who is even a little bit technical has already noticed this simply due to the difference in experience between the laptop they're issued at work vs what they may have once had at home, and likely has opted to bite the bullet and pay for quality.
Once you are on the higher end of the bimodal distribution, longevity is a significantly different challenge. I have an X230 laptop I bought new in 2012 that is still in use weekly and functions completely fine. My much newer M3 Macbook Pro is significantly more powerful, but is completely unnecessary for what that laptop is for. That's 12 years of usage without any sign of slowing down, and since that X230 is my car laptop I use in my race car for tuning and data monitoring, I can guarantee it's had a lot worse than "3-4 drops" over the last 12 years, including surviving a crash in my old race car.
If average laptop lifetime is about 5 years (for all reasons), then about 0.1% will make it to 50 years and remain operational.