A year back, my daughter’s laptop broke. At that time I could not afford to replace it with the same MacBook Air she had and so I looked for a cheap replacement. I found one on Amazon, Jumper EzBook.
If you look at the specs, the laptop is a steal. Though the CPU is not the fastest, it comes with a good amount of RAM and enough disk (considering everything is kept on the cloud these days) for normal duties. Even the screen is not so bad, with a standard 1080p resolution.
My daughter used it without issues for the first month or so. Soon thereafter the battery issues began. And this makes sense if you think about it. These days, CPU, RAM and Disk have become commodities. But batteries are a bit trickier. How tricky? Well ask Samsung about their Note 7 exploding battery issues.
Initially the battery would last 4 to 5 hours, depending on use. Which was very well within acceptable range considering the price. The battery time reduced exponentially with use. By the 3rd month my daughter had to have it plugged in continuously if she wanted to avoid sudden shut-downs.
At some point, the laptop would not work without it being plugged in at all times, even though it would “reach full charge” at some point. For this reason I finally gave in and got her a MacBook Air (I like Apple computers a lot).
I put the Jumper EzBook away and to my surprise, I found it had exploded during storage (unplugged).
So next time you see a cheap laptop on Amazon, consider the overall risk. If my daughter had continued using the laptop as she had, I am certain it would have exploded on her. One can only hope it would have done this while not-in-use, but who knows. Sometimes the extra money (not only for Apple, but Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc) is worth the safety factor.
