Jesus christ. What a wasteful and selfish way to look at things.
Not in defense: This is a customer who sees itself as an ultra pro user that only wants the best on all dimensions regardless of economics. Nice that there are about a few hundred of these customers in the world. This is a market that doesn’t exist and frankly, give this customer their wish and they only have other or more wishes.
The main obstacles to repairability in such devices are intentional: part serialization, lack of documentation, and so on. Those don't help making the device any more compact or easier to manufacture, it's pure greed.
Address those problems and you can happily have your ultra-slim, tightly integrated laptop. It may be slightly less repairable, but as long as repair isn't intentionally being prevented, life will find a way.
It's hard to recycle electronics, because separating materials that are chemically bonded together is very labor intensive and isn't worth it from the price of aluminum, copper, lithium, etc alone.
It would have to cost more to dispose of a laptop for this to work out financially.
Whether repair of such devices is economically viable is one thing and that's up to the market to decide, but making repair intentionally harder is a choice of the manufacturer and has nothing to do with how slim the laptop is.
You can have a somewhat repairable laptop even if it's slim and tightly integrated, and you can also have a completely unrepairable one even if all components are modular and accessible but then use strong cryptography to authenticate to each other.
Form factor is not the primary reason current tech is hard/impossible to repair, though the industry loves that people believe so, since it diverts attention from their intentional efforts to hinder repair.
Give me something solid that will last 5 -6 years with a serviceable (I don’t care if it’s glued or torx’ed or whatever in, just as long as it’s replaceable) battery, and I don’t care if the RAM and SSD is soldered to the chipset.
In the past I’ve replaced spinning rust with SSDs and that’s given that machine a lease of life but those kinds of upgrades don’t really exist anymore - adding an extra 8GB ram isn’t going to turn my stupid dell machine into something that works.
Nowadays? A techpriest that can take apart Apple's iPhone stacked PCB assemblies, replace large BGA components in there, and then put them back together and have it work is a rare specimen. And "rare" means "expensive".
A hour of labor of someone who does neurosurgery on electronics isn't going to be cheap.
Not that Apple has any good reasons to make it even harder on the madmen who attempt and learn such repairs.
Is there a reason to believe that if Apple didn’t solder memory on, it would make the performance/battery worse, as opposed to making the device slightly heavier/bigger?
Microsofts support for these is still kinda bad ime, which is easily the biggest impact on their battery longevity.
Furthermore, Most super intrusive and performance hindering spyware aka antivirus is only deployed on windows, hence it gets double-punched by having subpar processor support and wastage in the processes running in corporate environments. The latter being the biggest performance impact.
These are however all software, not hardware bound issues
Things like PCB manufacturing? Putting those BGA chips where they go? Done entirely by machines.
Now, a notable exception to this rule is the "rework" or "remanufacturing" lines - where actual human specialists take devices that failed QC, or used devices, diagnose them, and bring them up to standard.
Those can be very involved. But official manufacturing still has strict limits on how far are they willing to go - and unofficial refurbishment lines have them beat on repair complexity.
If the consumer was responsible for the real cost of disposal and someone said “I don’t care about repairing it” then it wouldn’t be selfish at all.
But it’s extremely hard to do that. Because if you price proper disposal higher you’ll just get improperly disposed stuff.
A tax on the products to account for this is highly regressive. It’s a complicated muddle.
My work laptop with a high(ish)-end AMD laptop CPU and reasonable hardware quality drains the battery in a couple of hours. It also doesn't feel any faster than my personal three-year-old more lightweight (also AMD, same brand) laptop. In some cases the private device is faster despite its lower specs. Its battery would also easily last 5 times longer than the work one, probably, if I used it on the road.
(Incidentally, the poor battery life isn't much of a practical concern with the work device either because I need to use it at the desk 98% of the time anyway. But I can certainly see how crappy software and configurations can make using those devices a pain.)
> Give me something solid that will last 5 -6 years with a serviceable (I don’t care if it’s glued or torx’ed or whatever in, just as long as it’s replaceable) battery, and I don’t care if the RAM and SSD is soldered to the chipset.
I'm okay with that, even if I'd personally prefer the serviceability. But I'm honestly not okay with the idea that it's fine to just toss a laptop after two years. I want people who do that to get their own planet.
Also, an 8 GB RAM upgrade makes little sense nowadays but a 16 -> 48 GB or 32 -> 64 GB or 32 -> 96 GB upgrade can actually make an otherwise reasonable device better if the amount of RAM becomes a bottleneck.
And if there's not enough to go around to begin with, it might as well be a niche of some kind, you can't expect everyone to choose the most expensive option by any means.
Now if the user base is nowhere near the majority, and you're already in a high-dollar niche anyway because of the desired performance level, might as well escalate from the merely expensive, to the glaringly overpriced in addition. That's a well-worn playbook.
When the sweet spot is hit with loads of customers striving to afford the top-shelf items, while in actuality everyone is settling for a shadow of what should be offered by the biggest business machines companies, it's not the hardware that's the problem. Too few people are grumbling and accept they just have to make do with what they have.
Most buyers do not use consumer electronics as money-making machines, the genres and cost-structures have undergone generations of evolution to be optimized for consumption of the electronics, as actually opposed to the business machines they once were.
If you want to use yours as a money-making machine, it will probably pay for itself even if the purchase price is a small multiple of the popular budget consumer version. But way more money is being put into making it difficult to tell the difference, more money than most small companies are even worth.
>supported by a company that is user aligned.
Interestingly, you can't buy that with money, even from the most financially-oriented of companies.
That's your assumption - my point is that I don't care as long as it's actually good. The only part I really care about is the battery because it has a limited number of cycles that is shorter than the lifetime of the rest of the components.
I work for a small org, the laptop was bought from Dell and shipped to me. It's running vanilla Windows 11 with OpenVPN and Windows Defender, with a decent sized dev drive. There are so many issues with it - keypresses being 10-20 seconds delayed, random window tearing/partial display updates, the machine deciding to ignore sleep and just dying while the lid is closed. These aren't things that will be solved by replacing the SSD, or the RAM, they're likely CPU (and as a result motherboard) replacements.
> Also, an 8 GB RAM upgrade makes little sense nowadays but a 16 -> 48 GB or 32 -> 64 GB or 32 -> 96 GB upgrade can actually make an otherwise reasonable device better if the amount of RAM becomes a bottleneck.
There's practically no devices (framework is the only one that comes to mind) that will ship with that little RAM and allow an upgrade by that much, even in the desktop space. My 2015 Macbook pro (the device before this) has 16GB RAM , giving it an extra 32GB isn't really going to help it much, the problem is that it's "i7" is an order of magnitude slower than a 3/4 year old replacement device (and ironically probably closer to the Intel® Core™ Ultra 7 258V which is in my work machine)
Apple laptops I have that boot include a 2007 iBook (my folks used it until this Summer and then bank websites would stop working with the Chrome browser they could get working on it), which I'll be putting a BSD or Linux distro on over Christmas, a 2012 Intel MBP that has Linux on it and a couple of 2015-2017 era MBPs that I inherited via one means or another.
I'm typing this on an M4 MacBook Air I picked up cheap during Black Friday sales. I fully expect it to still be functional in 10 years.
I don't think I've ever had a PC laptop last close to that.
Also I see no reason why a non-upgradeable laptop would also be non-repairable.
I presume most of the people on this site make enough to make purchases based on values instead of solely economics.
Alternatively, you can run for government on policies to price in externalities like this. Good luck winning your election!
Every time I see this comparison its always "My $3000 apple laptop is still usable after 5 years while my $700 chromebook is slow after 4 years".
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
"Put your money where your mouth is", come on. That's not acceptable and it's provoking. How can you defend bullies like this?
If they were required to make things long lasting and repairable, they would put the effort into designing things this way, and you'll probably have laptops as perfect as you require, probably not much more expensive if at all in a few years but also have the required properties to f*ck our planet less.
That's the main issue with our current system, companies are only incentivised to maximize their profits, so they will happily f*ck our planet if they can save 1 cent in r&d on a 4000€ product.
Don't get me wrong, I like the approach, but if you want a laptop, it's the wrong tradeoff and not one that 90% of the users will take. Sure, _some_ will choose this, and small companies can do well to sustain themselves but it probably won't do a dent in ewaste numbers and you won't see iphone like adoption numbers, relegating it to just a niche product.
> as a result laptop makers have no incentive to making long lasting repairable laptop and our planet will look like a giant electric waste (not counting the problem will producing the required minerals etc).
And yet pretty much every windows machine on the market right now has user replacable RAM, storage and batteries.
My point is that hardware is not changing at the same pace as it was - a laptop from 2015 with a fresh battery is absolutely perfectly usable in 2025. A laptop from 2005 would be unusable in 2015. An SSD would help you get from 2010 to 2015, but going from 2GB to the chipsets maximum 8GB is going to do nothing for the longetivity of the machine - that 2005 laptop processor is unlikely to even be able to boot a web browser.
My laptop from 2007 with an old core 2 duo cpu can boot a web browser fine. Some websites with "modern" web tech might not work well (ie it's slow), but I don't think the CPU is the issue here :)
Still, someone else breaking the rules doesn't make it ok for you to do so, and pointing the finger at others instead of taking responsibility is not a helpful response.
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