Really? They consistently seem, in my experience, to have thew worst build quality, and parts die regularly. Ive never seen a single one that had a solid hinge on it after 6 months of use.

My last three laptops, going back to 2004 or so, have all been Toshiba. By and large I've been pleased with the quality and support on all of them. I'm typing this now on super-cheap, low-end Toshiba that I bought as an emergency replacement a year ago (I dropped my other one and busted the screen) and it has been fine. Well, as "fine" as you get when you're running Linux anyway. Almost everything "just worked" out of the box with the only big exception being suspend. If you try to suspend this machine, it bricks it (but you can unbrick it by taking the battery our for a couple of minutes). But hibernate works OK, so I get by with that. Still, for < $400.00 for a 17" widescreen, I'm not complaining.

> My last three laptops, going back to 2004 or so, have all been Toshiba.

My current laptop is a 2007 MacBook. Not the solid-looking Pro aluminum kind. The cheap-looking plastic kind. It still runs everyday, all day long, and gets roughly 7h of battery life (with a spare battery) when I run XCode 4 (with real-time compilation going on) all day.

I can't seem to recollect PCs coming even close to that. Do they nowadays, or is the fact that you bought three devices as if this was normal clouding your judgement?

For what it's worth, my current laptop is a 2007 Lenovo ThinkPad T60 that still runs perfectly. I've never had any problems with it, and I only upgraded the hard drive a few years back because I wanted more space. The extended battery gets about 8 hours, no spare needed. I can even play Dota 2 on it.

Has the bit of plastic right at the front by the trackpad and opening notch for your finger to get into chipped yet?

Not at all... Looks and works just fine...

I know a guy who's still using a 7 year old Toshiba laptop. He installed an SSD, added some RAM, and upgraded Vista to 7. It still runs like new.

I'm still actively using a low end 6 year Toshiba laptop. (All original components, no ssd.)

Runs 24/7. Super reliable. You just have to keep it cool - I underclock.

Most brands are made in Foxcon anyways. I think it is the support and service that makes the brand.

I can't speak to the support/service (which seems to be lacking here). I'm just saying they were, by far, the most reliable machines we bought/sold.

This has been my experience as well. Bought a Satellite A205 that got left near a window in the rain, so got all wet on the back. Wiped it off, let it dry, and it was fine. It's been through hell and back over the past 5 years and is still kicking. Recommended them to my family and they're all still operating fine years later.

This is not to say whether or not their service sucks- I've just never needed to interact with their service department.

I've got a Toshiba Satellite 320CDT (Pentium 233MMX, 96 MB RAM) from 1998 that still runs -- I installed Debian Wheezy on it last November. Toshiba went through a really bad spell a few years later, but now their machines don't seem much less reliable than HP or Dell's consumer laptops.

Interesting. Even compared to the hallowed Thinkpad?

Thinkpad was #2.

Hon Hai Precision Industry (Foxconn).

And then there are ODMs and OEMs: ODMs provide the designs, OEMs mostly just stuff boards.

It's common to find products of different brands that look almost identical, because the chassis are the same while the bezels are different.

Dell for example is basically just a sales force with a catalog, not much different in principle from CDW.

They still vary widely on parts selection and, for portables, mechanical design.

The sad thing is that OP's single datapoint as a David vs Goliath story will get far more attention than your experience. Even on HN, drama carries the day.

The problem is the warranty literally says, "Latin America" as one of the areas it supports and is telling the OP that they do not support said country. It isn't about their reliability, it is about the fact that they don't honor their warranty.