What's the most repairable PC laptop released in the last year?

In my opinion Thinkpads have always been the most repairable series of laptops. I recently tore down my X120e, took apart almost everything. It was really easy because of the maintenance manual that accompanies each Thinkpad model, easily available online.

I believe reparaibity is also about availability. In a way, like Miroslav said, having very fragmented brands will make it less likely to find parts.

Take a MacBook Pro. The classic one with DVD reader built-in.

That would be the most repairable in my opinion since almost everything is detachable from the board.

Enters the display cable for that model, or the LCD: break them and you have to remove the glass from the frame to replace them. Very very few PCs will require that.

But since Apple have been using the same form factor for that model since at least 5 years, you can find every single screw, bracket, cable, and part second-hand. And parts manufacturers/suppliers find it economical to manufacture, stock, and supply parts. They may be expensive, but they are available.

Take that L50 Toshiba with touch-screen. My client paid for it circa $1200 and broke the digitizer. The distributor wants $450 wholesale for it. It's just a piece of glass that I can't seem to find in any other place. I have a Toshiba P45t with the sme issue. On the other hand, Sony digitizer for an expensive model is $25-$40, available everywhere on eBay and in China by the piece.

My point is, if models are popular, not fragmented, and their form factor not changing a lot every year, and a bit expensive, it will be easier to source for them parts and find people who fix them for reference. Keep that in mind.

I tend to lean towards 2 machines: ThinkPads and Latitude E6XXX machines. The advantage to the E6 machines is they have a full access panel, which the E5 series does NOT. To access the processor on an E5 series machine, you need to do a partial teardown. I get why the processor is buried in the E5 series, but I need access to it so I can repaste it to replace the 3+ year old TIM.

Both machines have widespread parts availability and are easy to work on as well, so repair isn't a major problem. However, after ~3 years the machines usually depreciate off of a cliff due to market flooding so the price drops like a rock very quickly. This means some repairs no longer make economic sense after Year 3-4, like motherboards and sometimes processors (although processors rarely fail, this may come into play if you buy an i3 machine and need a feature only found on the i5 or the i3 your E6420 came with failed and you want a better processor, for example).

While repairability is very easily affected by rampant depreciation in an economic way rather then being difficult for no good reason, the machines are still easy to repair if you need the part and managed to find it in a parts machine that was totaled out due to the cost vs resale.

I think you need to looking at the question backward. What parts are most readily available at a reasonable price . Can I purchase the screen in my laptop can the machine be upgraded with ease . I agree there are too many different models but we are a people who want choice and complain when we don't get it . But it would be nice if laptops were more like desktops were you could pick and choose the parts you want to be in your machine. As far as recommending a machine Ive stopped doing that . My son just finished 3 years of IT training using a Lenovo y500 ideapad we upgraded it right out of the box with an ssd and 16gb of ram .it worked great for him all the way through school he was able to run VMs and virtual servers . It was an expensive machine and so you should expect good performance. So i made the mistake of recommending Lenovo to some people I do repair work for . Three of them picked up the machines that had the Superfish Malware crap. I formatted all machines for them for free as a way of apologizing for the bad recommendation. Macs are one brand to say any one brand of PC is more repairable at any one given moment in time would be impossible. Lenovo is great one minute and crap the next .Compile a list would be a large and tiring read. Thanks for letting me vent

Its simply a matter of doing your research and being willing to pay more for better and seeing who has manuals or online pdf of there machines I myself have an old Asus and have upgraded it several times with ram and ssd replaced video screen and have no intention of replacing it any time soon. I've cracked it open so often the screws back themselves out between teardowns. I dont think I would by Asus now knowing they've cheaped out in the last couple of years. Companies go in cycles ,solid for a while then cheap out and ride your rep for a while ,then solid rebuild rep , its a cycle.