HP Hewlett-Packard — Planned obsolescence and after-sales service

10 months ago, I bought this laptop from HP named 15-g002AX. Why this model? Well it was called the most affordable gaming laptop at Rs 34, 000 by several sites and seemed like it would fulfill my basic needs too like a little programming and photo editing. Sadly the person for whom the gaming part of the device was meant disappeared just a few months later. The laptop worked OK mostly, but never ran like it was the big bad machine it was advertised to be. And when it didn't work fine. I would open up HP software and select chat support and just sit there, waiting. Nobody from their side ever joined and I would let it run for hours or complain through the feedback. Eventually I would just give up and go to any popular non-HP PC forum and get help in a day at most. This whole process happened three times. But that wasn't the last time the laptop glitched. I thought I should use the forums from HP themselves this time. My eyes bled. It was the worst designed website I had ever seen. The registration process was really bugged and had to be repeated a couple of times before it worked. And the ways the forums was divided into topics was so confusing that I decided to go back to my previous choices. Though they have redesigned it a bit you can still see how terrible it is. The above services require you to be in warranty to be free. Let me explain to you how the laptop's screen is made. It is composed of a REALLY cheap, weak and brittle plastic. The toys you played with 10 years ago are still more sturdy than this crap. Two pieces of plastic that hold the screen together are snapped to each other by small buttons and the rest is just glued to each other using fevistik. I believed it cannot get any worse from there. But starting from mid-september the display decided to give up. There are no screws and consequently it would often need to be snapped back because it cannot handle the lid being opened at normal speed. One day the lid just wouldn't open, and using force would start making the plastic pieces separate and the fevistik to come off. I saw that the inner plastic had broke off from one of the hinges in a suspiciously straight line . So I let it remain closed and took it it to an HP authorised seller+service-centre because it wasn't far. The main old bald dude there welcomed me in as if I were the PM. When I told him I had come to get my notebook fixed which was in the car at that time, he was a completely different person. Well I took it in and a bunch of young guys just started to look at. I told them what the problem was and warned them not to use force to open the lid(I had to prevent one of them from doing just that anyway later and he said he forgot). The main guy went silent, asked If I had accidential-damage-warranty. I told him that it comes under normal warranty which I was careful enough to update after I bought it online. He began by saying that it was a physical damage therefore it won't be covered under normal warranty. I laughed. Then he decided that it was accidental damage instead and therefore I have to pay. I gave the following facts: The plastic broke from inside and in a very obscure place. Very unlikely to happen from a fall or anything. There were zero scratches or cracks or any kind of marks anywhere, which should have been if there were any kind of accident. The screen is just too thin to hold by(he was trying to accuse me of i.ytimg.com/vi/iUh-FmUImKo/maxresdefault.jpg) and the lower part is much much heavier. The rest was just me telling him that I only opened and closed the lid normally and I'm very careful with such things and this could have only arisen from a manufacturing defect. "Dekhiye aap meri baat sun nahi rahe(You're not listening to me)" He repeated this same line God-knows how many times. He would never reply to my points or queries. Then at one point he called me a miser for buying it online. I asked him how that invalidates the warranty or reduces the amount of money HP gets through the sale. "Dekhiye aap meri baat sun nahi rahe". I asked him to give me one possible way in which the laptop could have broke exactly the way it did and by accident. "Dekhiye aap meri baat sun nahi rahe". At the end all the "technicians" decided to join in and mumble at the same time. I was debating with children. Bald guy gives me the HP customer care number and warns me that I'm making him angry. I went home. It won't be surprising but the customer care helpline was terrible too. I held for an hour and then someone told me that the department that would deal with this was on holiday and I should submit a case. I booted up my 9 year old desktop with an even older CRT monitor and decided to do it online. It took some time but I submitted it through chat. Every HP website is badly designed. Anyways so a technician came two days later, completely opened up the display and both hinges, and took some pictures. I asked him what his verdict is. He would just hint that he believed I broke it myself. I gave him the above facts, he said everyone who breaks something finds an excuse but it is not him that has to decide weather it comes in warranty or not. He said that if I had ADP he would have fixed it right there immediately. Yeah I remember getting "special" offers for ADP and extended warranties every week on my email. I still think both of those things are bullcrap. A week later I lose my patience and call to ask when somebody would come and fix this. They said it wasn't covered in warranty and I have to submit a new case. They said it was the technician who decides if it is an accident or manufacturing defect. Nobody wants to hold any responsibility. My hands hurt so I'll just skip by saying that they wanted 10, 000 Rs for the job. Which is completely insane and nearly 30% of the cost of laptop, just for glueing a new crappy plastic cover on the screen. This is Planned obsolescence/failure and pure evil at it's worst. You don't know how bad I feel. I have to be compulsively obsessive about keeping all my devices clean, bugless and without even scratches. I did everything I could to keep it safe because I valued it very much. Warranties seem to have no meaning, God-knows what they cover. And that's not the only device we had that behaved this way. The android I bought 5 months ago is mysteriously getting sluggier and it's battery too quickly depleting even though I barely have a handful of apps on it, most of them disabled, even thought it is advertised "built to last". The other two androids of my siblings are even worse off. I have nothing against people who love buy new a new model for their phone every sunday and a new PC whenever the weather changes, But I want my things to last. My needs are few and I haven't yet seen a technological breakthrough or some actual innovation in these things that I actually needed. None of that matters because all devices have a timer of some kind and there's nobody on my side who objects to this obviously widespread corporate greed. There's barely any point to write a review specifically for the model because it is "old" under a pile of new models that came every other day after I bought it and nobody is going to see it. HP is supposed to be like the top company and their products and services are no different than that of chinese brands. The laptop is working for now but I have a strong feeling it won't for long, because it is not supposed to. I don't know where I'll go from there, which brand to try next and I'm scared I won't see much difference. HP has sent me atleast 5 emails asking for my feedback after this. Just google around and see how much the company is hated for these exact things(which I didn't know about before buying). If none of them made HP change anything, I guess they are just sadistic and like angry feedback as their food.