PSA: Keep social media trends away from your laptops, unless you want broken hinges

Listen, I've not always been a paragon of common sense; I once managed to bend pins on not one but two CPUs when upgrading my then-partner's PC and my own—a two-for-one in sheer-faced idiocy, all within the space of an hour. So don't consider this me preaching from on high. But seriously, not everything you see on social media needs to be tried.

A case in point is something I had my attention reluctantly dragged towards by Wccftech: a Redditor who has broken their gaming laptop hinge by standing it upside down, per Instagram reel and video setups they'd seen. Whatever could go wrong?

Snapping, that's what. Laptops aren't usually designed to support resting on the top of the screen. "The other hinge," the Redditor says, "also broke but it snapped back in. This one does not."

Mind you, I'm not sure any of my pleas would have been listened to even if they were uttered beforehand. The Redditor explains:

"People on Reddit on my last post were saying that the hinges could break, but I didn’t really pay attention to that. Yeah it might be ggs and this laptop ain’t even mine."

The laptop is presumably an Asus TUF laptop of some kind, given it's on the Asus TUF subreddit. I use a TUF laptop every day, so seeing this gives me a particularly sharp pang of pain.

Anyways, I won't belabour the point given it's a simple one: try not to do things you're not supposed to with your expensive devices. And if you do, don't be surprised if it goes awry.