Common? Yes. Normal? No. RAM is sold by the stick in any configuration you can imagine, yet these products are designed to prevent the simplest of upgrades. It's like being told that you need a new car because you want snow tires.
>RAM is sold by the stick in any configuration you can imagine, yet these products are designed to prevent the simplest of upgrades.
Of course, but most consumers outside of tech enthusiasts have no idea which stuff in their laptop is upgradable, even when it is, so they just buy a new device whenever they want to upgrade, because that's how they've been conditioned by the industry.
>It's like being told that you need a new car because you want snow tires.
Let's not give Tesla any ideas now. Joking aside, your comparison is not apples to apples. You can't easily upgrade the engine of your car from a four cylinder to a V8 if you need more power down the line, can you? Come to think of it, even upgrading the multimedia unit is a hassle in modern cars as each unit is locked to its production vehicle. On this note, when do we go after car manufacturers for this anti-consumer practice?
You're not wrong, but there are a couple of things here that rub the me wrong way.
> Of course, but most consumers outside of tech enthusiasts have no idea which stuff in their laptop is upgradable, even when it is, so they just buy a new device whenever they want to upgrade, because that's how they've been conditioned by the industry.
While that's true, that doesn't mean it should be that way. Having everyone buy a new device whenever they need to upgrade makes business sense for device vendors but IMO we definitely shouldn't encourage regularly tossing out good hardware. Not with the ecological costs of new electronics.
We don't need to turn everyone into a tech enthusiast or a computer service person. But if part replacements and upgrades were possible and people knew about it, a local shop or someone else could do the job for them.
> Come to think of it, even upgrading the multimedia unit is a hassle in modern cars as each unit is locked to its production vehicle.
The original comparison to cars might have been unfortunate (as usual), and you may be right that things aren't that different with cars. But again, things being in a certain way with cars doesn't mean that's how they should be with other devices. Or with cars, necessarily, but I don't know much about those so I'm not going to argue about that.
>but most consumers outside of tech enthusiasts have no idea which stuff in their laptop is upgradeable
That goes for everything though, most people don't know how a car works, yet you can replace every single component. The same goes for desktop computers and household appliances.
This has been the norm across many technical devices that have become part of everyday life. How many regular users know how a radio works? The point is that regardless of how technical they are, these devices have remained repairable by anyone who is so inclined.
The movement to proprietize basic maintenance on the part of manufacturers is purely profit driven, and is carried out at the expense of consumers, the environment, and overall innovation.
Yeah, but we were talking about "user upgradeable" here. Even my local dealer won't upgrade engines and most car owners have no idea how to change their oil or a tyre, let alone perform engine transplants.
One-off custom cars are a different thing same how there are YouTubers putting headphone jacks in their iPhones or upgrading the soldered VRAM of their Nvidia graphics cards.
> most car owners have no idea how to change their [..] tyre
Is this a regional thing? In Germany changing a tire is part of the "theory" classes. It's also fairly straightforward.
Changing oil on the other hand is illegal except in places with special drainage systems (like gas stations) because of the risk of environmental damage from spills, so it's not generally something you can do yourself. This restriction also goes for washing your car I think but some gas stations have places where you can wash your car if you don't want to use a car wash.
Yes, but a lot of car owners do change their own parts, replacing various filters, adding bolt-on parts, changing out suspension, tyres and the like. Just because most people do not do this, doesn't mean that this is something that should be forbidden or designed against. Cars are built to have replaceable parts, why can't laptops be the same? There are issues with the M1 equipped macbooks burning through flash due to users swapping out of the 16 gigabytes of memory that are not expandable. I don't want hardware designers to be legislated out of being able to do interesting things with packaging, like with what AMD is trying to do with integrating memory chips vertically on top of their SoCs, but I would appreciate if there was less hardware turned into e-waste due to a single formerly-user-replaceable chip failing or being deprecated.
Likewise, I'd also like to see less e-waste due to software deprecation (looking at you, Pixel 3).
>Just because most people do not do this, doesn't mean that this is something that should be forbidden or designed against.
And where did I say that reparability must be forbidden?
I was saying hat operations like transplanting a more powerful engine into your car is rare and difficult nowadays since grandparent made a reference to cars being easier to upgrade than laptops when that's not always true.
Cars are still easier to work on than laptops in relative terms of how many parts are user replaceable relative to the total amount of parts. Regardless, changing the engine is more similar to swapping out the whole motherboard and CPU. Not something the majority of enthusiasts would ever do, but there are some boutique shops that transolant modern hardware into X60 thinkpad chassis.
Anyway, swapping an LS into a modern miata is pretty simple and it integrates well due to everything being CANBUS compatible, after a sufficient amount of adapters is applied.
Relatively speaking I guess it is true? If your system is so hard to use that only power users consider it, you’ll only have power users, but those represent less than 1% of the population.
If you make it simpler, you’ll get all 100% of users, but now 99% of them are evidently less capable of using the system.
Does the analogy really work, though? Is RAM more akin to tires or some other component like the fuel tank?
I'd argue existence of interchangeable commodity components in computing has been very abnormal and because of the direction the "computer market" is going, I'm not sure how much longer it'll persist.
For now, it's still most profitable for the manufacturers and OEMs to source cheap interchangeable parts from many sources. If the industry consolidates even more, though, it may be more profitable to vertically integrate. That was the way before the PC clone market. Hopefully not, but we'll see.
What a bunch of nonsense. These are tiny laptops, and every bit of space inside is used. Soldering on RAM chips is an obvious optimization to make the laptop thinner. What were you expecting, a DIMM slot that's taller than the actual laptop body?
>What a bunch of nonsense. These are tiny laptops, and every bit of space inside is used. Soldering on RAM chips is an obvious optimization to make the laptop thinner.
THIS is nonsense. Dell, HP, Lenovo, even Fujitsu-Siemens have been making thin laptops with upgradable RAM for years now (XPS, X1 Carbon and LIFEBOOK series come to mind). Just recently they abandoned this and moved to soldering everything. The Framework Laptop also has upgradable everything and it's not super thick now, is it?
Sure, if you want to set a world record for thinness just because, then sure, soldering everything saves you a couple of mm but it's not why they do it in most cases, but to force planned obsolescence.
> Dell, HP, Lenovo, even Fujitsu-Siemens have been making thin laptops with upgradable RAM for years now (XPS, X1 Carbon...
You're just throwing names out there without even knowing what you're talking about. The very first generation X1 Carbon came with soldered RAM and no upgrade path, and that hasn't changed yet. I know this because I've owned several generations of that laptop. I just checked Wikipedia to back up my memory before posting and yes, every X1 Carbon has had soldered RAM going all the way back to the first generation with Ivy Bridge.
I would point out though that while he might have been wrong on the X1 Carbon, you still have not really dismantled the key argument - that you don't need to embrace soldered RAM to get laptops that are thin enough. At a certain point, you're just going to end up with an experience that is objectively worse since keyboards start having more and more give the thinner you make them (not to mention far worse feel).
I'd make the trade off for more mm of thickness anyway.
> I'd make the trade off for more mm of thickness anyway.
That's great, then you can buy this modular laptop or one of many laptops that still has user upgradeable ram. Turns out you don't have to make this compromise if you don't want to and people that do can also make their own choice!
Ah yes, the "free market" argument. Remind me of how that one went with the headphone jack. Seems I have less and less choices in that department these days, especially at the flagship tier - despite it objectively being a worse device for it with almost no positives except saving a little bit of cost for the manufacturer. I do not accept the arguments on it being necessary for water resistance or providing much saving of internal storage either - since we have devices that demonstrate how these claims are bunk.
My point is that maybe there needs to be an organised pushback against this instead of pretending like customers have perfect knowledge of the drawbacks and benefits associated with a particular design decision and are not at all affected by marketing.
The free market is allowing a company like this one to exist because they're banking on there being enough people that care about this sort of thing to buy into their device rather than buying from a well established brand. That assumption will be put to the test very soon and advocates for this sort of device have a great opportunity to do so. The bitter reality though is that there might be a market large enough to sustain a company like this, but it won't make any big waves in the industry as a whole. Because people generally don't care.
> Seems I have less and less choices in that department these days, especially at the flagship tier
You're making a conscious decision about what sort of compromises you're willing to make with regards to your devices, just as everyone else is that buys electronic devices. There are plenty of phones with headphone jacks that have premium hardware specs. Sure, Apple doesn't have it. Samsung doesn't. But plenty of other manufacturers do, and people aren't buying them. Sony's top of the line smart phones have a headphone jack. LG's Vx0 line had headphone jacks and a fancy DAC built into them. ASUS's RoG phones have a headphone jack too. There's plenty of choice if it's actually that important to you. Buy those devices and hope that you can convince enough other people that the feature is as important to them as it is to you.
You don't need to shit on other people's choices nor assume that they aren't informed about the choices they make to want for the things that you do.
Which doesn't really disprove anything. Nobody is arguing that there are armed gunman that target any company that dares deviate from the chosen path of planned obsalescence. The argument though is that the market is overwhelmingly controlled by those that do practice it and furthermore, this practice has nothing to do with serving the interests of the consumer but that of the shareholder.
The fact that there are some that have been persuaded through years of concentrated marketing that bad engineering decisions are desirable is more of an example of manufacturing consent than the "free market of ideas".
It's incredibly arrogant to assume that the only reason why people might come to a different conclusion from you is that they've been manipulated into thinking that way through marketing. It's simply impossible that the indoctrination only occurred to other people and not yourself, right?
Your entire argument seems to be that "not every manufacturer's top of the line devices matches my vision for what is an ideal device, so I want to force them all to change to match that." Not everyone wants the same device as you and no, it's not just because they're all ignorant morons that've been manipulated into thinking differently from you.
Why are you so vehemently against allowing other people to make their own decisions?
I never recall being "so vehemently against allowing other people to make their own decisions". I also am not under any delusions that I have some unique ability of being immune to marketing. Nobody is a moron here and in reality the only way to truly be immune to such things is being literally brain dead. Most people are too busy to absorb tonnes of domain specific knowledge of often questionable relevance to their own lives.
However, it's honestly pretty ridiculous to pretend like marketing does not have an immense influence on the trajectory towards consumer desires or that it cannot lead to worse choices by many objective measures. See cigarettes, fast food, hell, even the stupid obsession with buying bank bustingly expensive diamonds for marriage proposals. There would definitely still be a market for all of the above (and personally I am against any regulations limiting the freedom of purchasing even cigarettes for legal adults) but it was marketing that turned it into a cultural norm, not organic consumer demand.
It also does not need to be something that starts off as a bad thing. Thinner devices are better up to a certain point, no argument there. However, it does start leading to usability and maintainability problems past a certain threshold. We have definitely reached and passed that threshold for many devices.
Customers don't exist in isolation, if you are locked in to the Apple ecosystem, you're stuck with their decision to ditch the headphone jack unless if you want to stick to phones before iPhone 7. If your family have been purchasing Samsung devices predominately, chances are you will just assume that it's best to just get one of the latest one because it's reassuring to get a familiar brand and surely the latest automatically means better, right? Feel free to strawman this as me claiming people are morons but for most normal people not preoccupied with tech, these assumptions are reasonable.
Also, pretending like blatantly unpopular decisions like removing the headphone jack and expandable storage are somehow in demand based purely on continued sales figures is stupidly reductive. Humans don't have perfect knowledge of the market and the leaders of that market will not only dominate airtime, they can afford to absorb bad PR if they deem that an unpopular decision will lead to better profits long term.
> Thinner devices are better up to a certain point, no argument there. However, it does start leading to usability and maintainability problems past a certain threshold. We have definitely reached and passed that threshold for many devices.
This is entirely subjective and I disagree. As do many other people. Some people want chonky 17 inch gaming laptops and other people want 12 inch macbooks and some people want something inbetween. Some people want products in form factors that don't even exist. I personally want a macbook with an ergonomic keyboard built in! But that's just me talking about what I want. The market for laptops is large enough to sustain a huge degree of choice, but you are insisting that there is an absolute limit on form factors as decided by... you? If not by you, then by what? The government? A standards committee?
> Customers don't exist in isolation, if you are locked in to the Apple ecosystem, you're stuck with their decision to ditch the headphone jack unless if you want to stick to phones before iPhone 7.
No one is "locked" into the Apple ecosystem. Not even remotely. You're right, if you want a headphone jack on an iPhone you'll have to live with using an iPhone 6s or earlier. It's fine to want a headphone jack on your modern iPhone, but that is entirely different from you not having a choice. There are markets where people don't realistically have a choice, but smartphones and laptops definitely aren't those markets.
> Feel free to strawman this as me claiming people are morons but for most normal people not preoccupied with tech, these assumptions are reasonable.
The entire premise of your argument is that consumers need to be protected from manufacturers. Sometimes, I would absolutely agree with that. But with laptop form factors? Or not having a headphone jack on every single smart phone that's out there? That's absurd. If someone buys a Samsung phone and finds out only after buying it that it doesn't have a headphone jack, there's plenty of actions they can take post-purchase if they find that aspect of their new device untenable.
> Also, pretending like blatantly unpopular decisions like removing the headphone jack and expandable storage are somehow in demand based purely on continued sales figures is stupidly reductive.
Is it actually blatantly unpopular? Are you sure this isn't just the false consensus effect coming into play for you? As I previously mentioned, for things like the headphone jack there are a ton of options with top of the line specs out there. Purchasing decisions are always about compromise and not every niche is always going to be accommodated by the market. My ergonomic keyboard laptop still doesn't exist, despite me very much wanting it to. I have plenty of fancy headphones I can't use with my phone without an additional external DAC. I guess that sucks, but given how I use my phone, it has had almost zero impact on my life. For people that find that feature indispensable though, then they will probably also have to think about their purchase and will rightly be upset that one of the features they valued in the lineup of phones they've been buying isn't there anymore. I encourage those people to be loud about it, just as you are. That's part of this whole market thing, and there's plenty of cases where people's voices have absolutely made a big impact on the decisions made by shortsighted companies. Just don't expect everyone to fall in line with you.
I wasn't trying to dismantle an argument, just pointing out that the parent had no clue what they were talking about, and a little research would make for a stronger position to argue from (and save some embarrassment).
I actually prefer laptops with upgradeable components and I'm definitely weighing replacing my two aging Thinkpad laptops (running OpenBSD and Void Linux respectively) with the Framework Laptop. I had briefly considered a M1 MacBook Air but I already have a M1 Mac mini and I try to stay diverse between form factors. The specs on the Framework are fantastic; even the i5 is a powerhouse, comparable to i7 desktops from just two years ago[1]. With the modular bays I could easily have Void on the main storage and OpenBSD on a module and choose between the two. I already have compatible RAM and M.2 storage laying about so the DIY SKU is a no-brainer.
As for keyboards I'm right there with you; the higher travel on the Framework's keyboard is another selling point in my opinion.
Sorry, I got the X1 carbon wrong from a list of 3 laptops off the top of my head. I must have been thinking of another Lenovo and mixed them up.
What I don't understand is why you felt the need to get aggressive and diss me in 2 different posts saying I have no clue what I'm talking about or that I'm making stuff up and calling for my embarrassment, only for a small mistake, when you could have made the same arguments without the personal dissing.
I feel like being kind to others, even if they're wrong, goes a longer way in productive discussions. I definitely will not be replying to you again. Have a good day sir.
I don’t feel that I was aggressive at all in my direct reply to you, maybe a little in my reply to the other commenter, but obviously you took it that way and I’m genuinely sorry. It’s not an excuse, but I just get so tired of people making arguments based on false statements of fact (whether from malice or ignorance) and it moved me to speak out when it seemed like that’s what you were doing. I see now that wasn’t your intention. You’re right, we all make mistakes and I made one too.
A better example would probably be the Lenovo T-series. Recent models eg. T490s have soldered RAM, but if you go back to eg. T460s there were DIMM sockets for upgrading, and the laptop was quite thin. But, that was 5 years ago already.
I too am dismayed by how older models of thin laptops lost DIMM sockets for increasingly diminishing amounts of thickness removed.
I ended up going with the below because I wanted a 360 degree touchscreen Ryzen laptop that I could upgrade the HD and RAM...and I felt like I was searching for a needle in a haystack. Shame on you Dell for never offering Ryzen in your convertibles. Shame on you HP for soldering RAM in your new Elitebook line.
Who's got the balls to disagree with Chuck Norris?
I would usually go for a smaller, lighter laptop (13"). But within that form factor, given choice over trade offs, I would put performance last (any modern system will usually do), size and weight somewhere in the middle, battery life and repairability at the top.
For the very thinnest of laptops it's probably difficult without soldering the chips on board, but many users would prefer a slightly thicker laptop where you can replace the RAM, SSD etc. I have never had a laptop where the thickness has been an issue and I have done a fair share of traveling while working in sales.
It's like a thoughtless race to make the thinnest laptop as if that is something that is useful. I bit like the megapixel race a few years ago. "We do it because it's difficult, but we can" kind of thing.
And then we have the aluminum body used on higher end laptops. Is that really better than high-end well designed plastic? When using my wife's Macbook Air M1 I suffer from the razor sharp edges while typing. (Maybe not related to it's thinness or aluminum body, but a big design issue). Has anyone noticed on the Macbook Air M1 the small vibrations it causes in the hands/palms when you slide them over the palmrest ever so slightly? Extremely annoying.
I bet these "small vibrations" are due to some kind of coupling between the mains and the case. Dunno, not an electrical engineer. See if it still happens on battery power.
No, it's nothing electrical. It's all mechanical. It's the surface which is slightly striped or bubbly or whatever and when sliding the hand or finger lightly over it, it generates a vibrating feeling. It might be less now after some months of use. Maybe the small cracks are filled with finger fat or something :).
Are you sure? I've also had this vibrating issue and for me 100% it was some sort of grounding issue with the power. Have you tried testing it when the ac adapter is disconnected? Its sort of feels like a very low amperage electrocution whenever you rest your hand on the laptop(if you know what getting electrocuted feels like)
I bought a few Acer's for my kids and upgrades were still really easy. I actually bought extra RAM and an SSD and had my daughter install them and it wasn't difficult.
Apple's? And Dell's? And Lenovo's? And every other electronics manufacturare who benefits form planned obsolescence and selling more hardware.