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Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop

(geohot.github.io)
224 points cspags | 1 comments | 01 Dec 25 01:08 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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forty ◴[07 Dec 25 08:57 UTC] No.46180249[source]▶
I think the kind of laptop this person wishes should simply be made illegal to make. We cannot sustain having all electric devices being thrown after a year or two, these things need to last, to be repairable and make it easy to grab pieces and materials when they die anyway
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maccard ◴[07 Dec 25 11:18 UTC] No.46180912[source]▶
I agree with him. My personal laptop is an m1 MacBook Pro, and 5 years on it’s still a better experience than my work laptop which is a high spec dell with an i9 and 32GB ram. I’m more likely to chuck the dell than upgrade it because whatever combination of stuff it’s doing just doesn’t work.

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.

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hshdhdhj4444 ◴[07 Dec 25 12:07 UTC] No.46181157[source]▶
The assumption here is that the MacBook is better because of soldering components rather than because Apple simply made a better chip and has a better OS than Windows.

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?

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1. buildbot ◴[07 Dec 25 17:33 UTC] No.46183407{3}[source]▶
Yes, if they did not solder on the memory it would use more power. The longer the lines are to your DRAM, the more impedance there is and you need higher drive power on your memory controller. LPDDR has been soldered forever as far as I know, though with the introduction of CAMM (compression attached memory modules), this has changed. I don’t know but I would bet money CAMM is still higher power for less bandwidth than DRAM packaged on the SoC base die or however apples does it.