Look into Clevo/Sager resellers. Places like System76. They can be hit-or-miss - I've had one excellent machine that lasted 6 years, but also one terrible experience with a borked GPU that put me off of them more or less permanently. Getting any sort of support or repairs for parts that you can't replace yourself is difficult.

Still, they tend to have highly modular, easy-to-swap-out parts. Hard drives, wireless cards, RAM, keyboards, battery, it's usually all removable and they sell spares for custom parts like the keyboards. Many of their devices even have a full CPU socket on the motherboard, so you could keep a good one running for a very long time.

If you luck out and get a good one.

Those also tend to be very large, gaming-oriented, desktop replacement "laptops", so not ideal for everyone looking for something they can actually keep on their lap for any length of time. They're so modular because they're designed like a desktop, with lots of full-size parts and little emphasis on thinness.

If by "borked GPU" you're referring to the nVidia BGA failures, those weren't the fault of the laptop manufacturer. HP and Toshiba, among others, were affected severely by that too.

It's been a little while since I looked, but they did used to make smaller and more portable models even though their lines definitely skew towards hulking powerhouses.

I remember the 11" W110ER fondly; it was tiny, but it still had a discrete GPU. Those were the days...as much as I love the small ARM Chromebooks, they do lack power for most sorts of realtime rendering applications.

I'm not sure what the exact issue was, but I got a new machine with a card that hung under reproducible conditions (as well as seemingly random ones) over several operating systems and use cases. I thought that BGA issues mostly came after a little while of thermal stressing on the boards and the footprint. But you never know; shit happens.

In general, it has to be a "regular" laptop, and not an ultrabook. The ultrabooks have gone to soldered in RAM and SSDs to save space.

Try looking at ifixit for repairability scores. They take the laptops apart and show you the internals on the reviews they do. https://www.ifixit.com/laptop-repairability

Of course, cross reference the repairability score with your desired performance and price. Pick any one.

Thinkpads still seem to be the best. The documentation is still amazingly thorough, and there is a wide range of models from ultraportable (parts soldered on) to "portable workstations" (big thick chassis).

They are coming out with an "anniversary edition" Thinkpad that looks like it's a refresh of a T400 series chassis. It seems promising.

I have a Thinkpad T-430 and the thing's great. I can strip it down to just the motherboard and display in less than 5 minutes.

I don't know if suggesting a laptop from a company that uses DRM to lock out 3rd party batteries is something suitable in this thread.

You can 'fix' that at least: https://github.com/hamishcoleman/thinkpad-ec

I don't think there is a company on that market that doesn't do something anticonsumer. It's a "pick the least bad" problem.

If you're not scared of dropping some more cash on it, you should look into the Dell XPS line. The basics are very serviceable and it has very decent specs and performance.

Mine's been running Arch for almost a year without any hardware issues so far. I also manage to pull roughly 8 hours of development out of a full battery.

I can recommend my HP Elite X2 1012 G1. Clunky name but user-replaceable SSD, battery, and screen, along with no moving parts, makes me a happy camper. They have a newer faster version now too.