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Comment by poopbutt | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I hear where you're coming from, but all of those parts are still serviceable. If your starter goes on your Ford car, you might have to buy a Ford starter (or a third party starter for a Ford car), but it can still be fixed with a commonly accessible set of relatively inexpensive tools.

If the RAM in my Macbook gets cooked, either I can buy an entire new motherboard, or a new laptop. It's throwing the baby out with the bath water, and the truck/lawnmower example you've mentioned doesn't extend to that.

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I agree; it sucks for the reason you say.

"Moore's Law" is probably part of the reason we're okay with this: by the time RAM/CPU/mobo start failing, a laptop is 5 (or 6 or 7 or 10) years old and the laptop's a dinosaur anyway. Heck, by that point a lot of us are probably hoping our laptops fail so we have an excuse to get a new one.

I wonder if we'll stop being okay with this eventually, now that desktop/laptop CPUs aren't getting faster at the rate they used to. My 2011 Macbook Pro is still plenty fast enough for me. It would be nice if it lasted a long time.

Is that actually true?

We've hit a plateau on overall compute speed. There are incremental improvements, but the difference in performance over 5 years today is much less than it was 7-10 years ago.

My 10 year old laptop is awesome, and it's a Thinkpad too. I have fixed it, replacing a fan, upgrading RAM, etc... all good, but it's performance isn't so hot. Buying new made a lot of sense.

But, my current 4-5 year old, high end, laptop is still competetive in a way that didn't used to be true.

I've a 2012 MBP, and it's still plenty fast. The newer machines are nice, but it's not like the 2012 is irrelevant, and that particular MBP is servicable. Just barely, but possible. I've done a number of things on it.

The new machines now just aren't. So even the expert user service is off the table, and I find that hard to deal with personally, because I know I absolutely do plan on running the machine for 5+ years.

Apple is still selling the old model user upgradable MacBook Pro for $1100 http://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro the same price I bought one for in 2011. Except I bought refurbished and smaller HD.

Some of the new machines Apple is selling for $1000 are actually slower at many tasks. But the market has spoken and Apple is selling hardware that suits most user's narrow tasks of email, browsing and video. It also streamlines manufacturing, as they're already focused on mobile where everything must be stuck together in one chip.

But they're enabling 4K video editing on iPhones and iPad Pros with what I'm assuming is custom hardware. And that could be a very smart approach if it was applied to more tasks on Pro computers. Performance could actually move forward again.

Indeed. Custom hardware can move us forward, and that's an interesting trend that may actually drive me to buy new machines sooner.

One of my daily driver tasks is CAD. Mechanical CAD. Due to the age and massive human investment in geometry kernels, single thread performance really matters. It is difficult to apply multi core processing to CAD problems.

It would be interesting to understand what special hardware could improve on this.

They are actually working on that. With DRM, DMCA, shitty software, etc. They want you to go back to the vendor to make sure things are fixed. Repairable? Only by authorized service dealers. At a monopolistic cost.

And in the US you can thank the EPA for helping with that.

How exactly is the EPA involved?

Probably means CARB, where states that have adopted California's emissions regulations require certain parts of the vehicles be replaced by special CARB-approved versions when they fail. Even if they're exactly the same as non-carb approved versions yet cost 2-3x as much.

Who is "they"? Apple? Because they USED to sell laptops that were serviceable, and have slowly over time migrated to once that aren't. Not because of software, but in order to reduce the size.

And EPA? What?

If you want a 1kg notebook that's 100x the power of a room-sized $40,000,000 Cray 2 from back when, you'll have to leave off things like connectors, removable covers, generalized internal interfaces, empty space (for varying-sized components), beefier batteries (to run whatever you plug in), etc. Some of us value compact over modular.

You want "repairable by user for cheap"? Such is eminently available, and will decidedly not weigh 1kg.

You're right, my Thinkpad X201t weighs 2.89 lbs. That's 1.31kg, it's so difficult to lug around but at least I can replace the hard drive, RAM, keyboard, CPU fan, battery, and fundamentally keep it maintained until the processor fails.

If your engine block is damaged in your Corvette, you'll probably need a whole new engine block. Modern engines are using increasingly exotic materials & construction that are ever less repairable.

Your RAM can be replaced by an expert with the right tools, but computing hardware has become so cheap that it often simply isn't worth hiring an expert to perform serious repairs.

Well, increasingly not even independent mechanics can fix various parts of cars, let alone enthusiasts with only cheap tools.

and a lot of that is by design, which is sad, and also is why I am buying older cars.

Amen to that. I am seriously thinking about going out and buying a 1975-1985 or so Chevy C-10 pickup with a small block V8. Those things are dead simple to work on, parts are cheap and plentiful and readily available, and there's plenty of room in the engine compartment to get in there and work.

Contrast that with my 2000 Ford Expedition where you have to jack the truck up and crawl underneath just to change spark plugs. Never mind the need for more specialized tools when you're dealing with fuel injection and messing with the ECM, etc.

Yeah, I think it's time to go back to older cars. I want something I can work on myself without needing a $5,000 tool that I'll use once, and that you probably can't buy in the first place. :-(

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