Over the past few years, I've owned an Asus laptop (thin/light), two Lenovo laptops, and an HP. Before that, a large Dell gaming laptop.
Most recently, I had bought the HP Omen 15, but realizing that the screen used PWM below 100% brightness, I sold it and bought a Lenovo Legion 5.
The previous Lenovo is a Y540. The Y540 is arguably "good but not great" build quality. If you squint, it looks kind of like there could be a slight curve to the bottom of the monitor where the two side hinges support it.
The Legion 5 is really well built. No unusual give, very smooth running fans, etc. It's also been super reliable, better than expected battery - really nothing to complain about.
Now I imagine if you spend $2-3k on laptops, you probably think these $1k laptops are garbage quality, but they seem better than the HP Omen 15, and certainly better than the Asus and the $1700 Dell I bought 8 years ago.
I had a bad run of three Lenovo laptops and gave up on the brand completely after years of being an IBM/ThinkPad fan: a ThinkPad P40 (pen digitizer and power connector failures), a Yoga 720 15" (SSD, touch digitizer, and internal wi-fi failed), and a Legion 7 (known hinge design issue leading to failure).
I know the Legion 5 is good, which is why I (foolishly) thought the Legion 7 would also be good. It's the inconsistency within and across their product lines, and their god-awful depot support, that's made it a game of Russian Roulette to buy a Lenovo device — some people still swear by them because they either luck into, or do the deep research to find, the very specific models within certain lines that aren't failure-prone.
The 720 and Legion 7 failed within weeks, not months, and the 720 went to the depot twice and had at least one repeat or new failure within weeks after returning each time.
The P40 broke my heart the worst, though, because it had every feature I wanted and I paid through the nose for it thinking it'd be a 5-year device, minimum. It didn't make it to 2, couldn't get a refund, and didn't have the heart to sell it even for parts.
The 720 and Legion, though, failed so quickly that I got refunds from their retailers; I couldn't possibly resell them, and with the Legion 7 in particular I wasn't going to gamble with their depot service rejecting warranty coverage for the fault as people were reporting on Lenovo's own forums, and especially after the touch digitizer failed after the _second_ depot service for the 720.
Some screens use DC dimming. It isn't an issue for most people, but post-concussion I've had to be pickier about screens. The HP gave me a headache with the 200Hz PWM. The Legion lets me use brightness levels other than 100% without a headache!
Yes, it's about the frequency and filtering. Some screens use ridiculously low switching frequencies that mean the resulting signal can't be filtered out with anything that would fit in a thin laptop.
Over the past few years, I've owned an Asus laptop (thin/light), two Lenovo laptops, and an HP. Before that, a large Dell gaming laptop.
Most recently, I had bought the HP Omen 15, but realizing that the screen used PWM below 100% brightness, I sold it and bought a Lenovo Legion 5.
The previous Lenovo is a Y540. The Y540 is arguably "good but not great" build quality. If you squint, it looks kind of like there could be a slight curve to the bottom of the monitor where the two side hinges support it.
The Legion 5 is really well built. No unusual give, very smooth running fans, etc. It's also been super reliable, better than expected battery - really nothing to complain about.
Now I imagine if you spend $2-3k on laptops, you probably think these $1k laptops are garbage quality, but they seem better than the HP Omen 15, and certainly better than the Asus and the $1700 Dell I bought 8 years ago.