I got my ThinkPad E14 Gen 5 on Aug 13 2023. It was my first own laptop that wasn't a hand-me-down that was gifted to me by my grandfather for studying engineering. Today it's almost 2.5 years old and I've gotten a really good use out of it so far.

The SSD right now is at 88% of health, the battery is around 80% in health but thats fine as I had a very intense usage over the past 2.5 years. What troubled me however was the sudden decrease in performance. At some point back in May 2025, I played Red Dead Redemption 2 on this same PC, a game that's known to be very intense even on higher end hardware and I used to get a decent playable framerate.

But suddenly, I tried to play some games around Sep 2025 and noticed severe performance downgrade even on older titles. It turns out that my ThinkPad has a battery anomaly where I get better performance on battery but choppy powerpoint-like framerates when plugged in. It's supposed to be quite the opposite.

I also suddenly lost the ability to stream games to Twitch because it suddenly somehow started giving me low framerate even in the streams, for context I used to stream a lot of my gameplay in the past and it ran flawlessly.

As of January 17 2026, the performance has degraded even more in just 2 weeks with bad frame rates and stutters even on older games like Mad Max and Grand Theft Auto 4.

This however isn't very new to me as I had similar issues with my both older HP laptops which had issues that can never be diagnosed and failed within a year.

My family bought a Sony Viao back in 2012, it was a budget consumer laptop that had a dual core i3 2nd gen CPU and that thing literally outlasted every piece of tech we ever owned. It's been more than 13 years since we had that laptop and it only has a display and a battery replacement pending and if we do that, that laptop is still gonna work and run just fine. This raises serious concerns about the quality of modern electronics.

We're living in the era of enshittification of everything and that didn't spare hardware either. All electronics now are less durable and more prone to failures because companies now like to cut costs and make people buy things more often. Most of my friends who ended up buying consumer grade HP 15s laptops, had their laptops unusable in just a year of purchase.

This ThinkPad would be my last modern non-Apple purchase for the time being. Once it breaks down even more I'm just gonna get a used older Intel Macbook Air and flash Linux on it or just get an older T series ThinkPad. I'm quite fed up with the premium prices that I need to pay for newer devices to ensure that they last long.