I’ve just finished getting my laptop set up the way I like it, including maximising the RAM and upgrading the screen. I opened it up to use it, and the screws on the hinge tore through the plastic.
To top it off, the plastic on the bottom of the laptop, the side that’s been removed here, has also broken.
My wife definitely didn’t drop the laptop while she was tidying up though…
Machinist guy here!
Threads fail. Threads are generally the most likely thing to fail in any given mechanism. Generally, when the threads are expected to do more work than just sit there and not move, as in fastening a hinge for example, we try to make sure the threads are all the same kind of material.
I would never expect plastic threads to hold up to repeated use with an iron bolt inside. Something is going to give up, and it’s going to be the soft plastic threads, every single time.
Think about cheap as fuck IKEA furniture, any time they have a bolt to screw in, you install an insert first. We do the same thing in plastic, aluminum, shit even steel sometimes if we want the bolt to fail first.
I believe you misunderstood the problem, the threads are not usually the problem, the problem is the brass heat insert the hinge threads into, the insert just breaks off the plastic with the screw still threaded in, usually because the hinge is a bit too tight/rigid and puts a lot of force into the insert pulling it out
this seems to be the case in this picture as well