The Lenovo Y50 Touch

    To the left you see part of my two year old Lenovo Y50 Touch. Overall, it is a great laptop, however there is a key design flaw. In the top of the image is the screen. If you look lower, right below the screen but before the hinge that connects the bottom half of the laptop you will see a plastic component. In my picture, there is also a piece of tape.
    Essentially, the piece of plastic is held by a 1 mm hook. The problem is the hook wears down, failing to hold the plastic component. Then when you go to open up the laptop, the plastic component gets caught on the corner of the bottom half of the laptop. This in turn pulls on a component called the touch digitizer and cracks it. To add to the trouble, the touch digitizer component is glued to the screen. In other words, when one needs to be replaced, so those the other.
    It's like a domino effect and all because of a 1 mm component hook. This hardware design has led to a horrible user experience. Due to the crack in the digitizer, the screen blacks out whenever it is moved. This limits usability greatly. The only way to see the screen again is to restart the computer. The user experience implications are huge. In order to fix it, the replacement of the screen and digitizer costs approximately $500. To put this into perspective, the laptop originally cost $1000.
    Whether this design flaw was intentional or not, it certainly does not bode well for Lenovo. The fact of the matter is they could have avoided all of this had they made a stronger component. A stronger component would have added minimal cost to the total as well. To conclude, the laptop is an awesome laptop with the hook intact. But once it wears thin, it will cause so much frustration.