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Comment by sputknick | Hacker News Reader

This sounds to me like a specific instance of the "most users don't want it, so we won't provide it" problem in computing. Similar to the lack of MacBook for power users. People who want to open their laptop are a tiny minority of users, and thus, not a population worth addressing.

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That is very untrue. In most places in the world (and with most classes of people), the standard is to repair your laptop if it breaks, not buying a new one. Among certain people, and probably within the bias group you and I are coming from, the norm is to replace laptops every 3-4 years, but that is so not the case for a lot of the other groups of people and geography.

At least in the UK, I've never been unable to sell or give away an old laptop, even if it's "broken". There's always someone willing to repair it, whether a student with plenty of time, or someone who runs a small repair shop and buys broken electronics from eBay to repair and sell.

Surface and MacBook are not marketed to those people. They haven't been marketed to those people since the removable battery was killed off.

How many of your MacBook Pros shipped with removable batteries?

That's a very fair point. Maybe what those people need is a laptop that looks more like the ones we had 15 years ago that are larger, and easier to manipulate. However, the universe of people who will get rid of a laptop once it stops working is large enough, that a company can be very successful addressing just those people. Maybe the answer to your statement is someone needs to make low cost laptops that are thick, heavy, cheap, and maintainable? The problem is whatever company that is will not be marketing themselves as "cutting edge".

Why do they need to be thick and heavy? Mine has a 15.6" screen, Weighs around 5lbs (slightly under), and is under 3/4" thick. It could be lighter if the case were made out of plastic instead of aluminum. It's about half the thickness and 60% the weight of my previous laptop, but still has user-replaceable components (I upgraded the RAM and added an HDD after purchasing it).

Also thick doesn't really need to be heavy. My Thinkpad x230 weights less than a pound more than a current macbook pro. Everything is easily accessible and replaceable, and it has a bevy of ports. It cost me about $250 bucks to upgrade it to contain 2 256gb ssds and 16gb of ram. -- edit -- just checked, current x260 actually is lighter than the current macbook pro.

I've taken apart MacBooks (it was cheaper to put in a custom SSD than buy Apple's overpriced one .. and at the time they didn't offer 16GB of ram so I manually changed out the 8GB chips) and I'm often on the road a lot in a nomadic fashion, so ship-in based warranties are often a not-an-option.

I've found Dells, Lenovos and even MSIs aren't too bad to take apart; even their incredibly thin version too. Most have replaceable parts (Carbon X1 has soldered on ram .. grr, but you could get an adapter to M.2 for the first gen weird/custom SSD).

You can make super thin laptops that are serviceable, and with high end developer laptops running upwards of a grand, yes, people do service them. At most shops I worked at, if your Dell went bad, the desktop support team would take it apart get a replacement screen, bezel, battery, whatever, and send the original back as part of their service contract.

Whoa, did you document the RAM upgrade process somewhere? That sounds fascinating/terrifying.

Nah I didn't, but it was a 2012 era MacBook. There was nothing special; just standard laptop memory sockets. You unscrewed the back and they were right there.

Oh okay, I misunderstood. Yeah, I upgraded one of them too— I was thinking you were saying you re-soldered the 2013+ BGAs.

The problem with that reasoning is that everybody has different needs and wants. If you take the intersection of the sets of features that are needed by all potential users, in an attempt to reach the least common denominator, you tend towards the null set, and your products tends towards uselessness.

A practical example of the curse of dimensionality if you will. Seems to be a pretty common problem.

I am confident that most users would choose upgradability over Aesthetics if that means reducing e-waste, even if they won't use that feature.

What do you make of Macbook sales then, since they say the exact opposite?

What do you mean? I am sure many people would be happy if you could upgrade the RAM in the iMacs and Macbooks instead of having to buy a new one and create more waste if everything else works just fine.

Who doesn't want to repair a broken laptop that is just out of warranty, but maybe still have a few good years to go?

There is a debate raging over "right to repair" and the consumer is losing. Honestly, I can't continue buying $1000 smart phones. It's just not worth it. And no, I'm not going to insure them, either. That whole concept is a bag of dicks.

Does "right to repair" have anything to do with "repairability"? There are definitely some things, like iPhones, that might not be possible to build in a repairable way without decreasing the quality of the product. Perhaps Surface is like that, too.

This is the biggest conundrum for me. Every engineering decision is a compromise. There are very few cases where making a choice by going down one path isn't a compromise where you're getting one thing but giving up something else. Obviously user-serviceability is a good property for a device to have, but that has a cost as well (a device that is lower quality or less desirable in other ways).

I think right to repair is a separate debate. The right to repair movement is about a company being able to sue you for attempting the repair at all. This is about the company doing its darndest to physically prevent repairs. As iFixIt shows, you're welcome to try.

Right to repair is also usually centered around software, since that's the crux of the argument used by companies like John Deere. JD technically isn't telling people they can't repair things, just that they can't "hack" their software (an "IP infringement"), which so happens to be a necessary step in repairs.

There's no differences in end effect if you're prevented from fixing your own stuff due to law or deliberate engineering.

Yes there is. One is by force of law, the other is simply a reverse engineering problem. If you can put it together, you can take it apart, it doesn't mean it will be easy though.

It goes beyond software, I'm more than capable of replacing dead SMT components on a board - but I can't get board layouts or official replacement parts for anything these days.

I have a legal right to repair my own products or have a third party do it, but because the manufacturer is under no obligation to make it easy everyone gets screwed.

depends what's broken. If it's a key on the keyboard, definitely. If it's the screen, maybe. If its something internal... maybe not.

In my laptops, I have replaced internal hard drives and RAM many times. Sometimes a wireless module or CPU. Neither of them was broken, though, just upgraded stuff.

Honestly, like 95% of people.

Practically, even if Microsoft did want to make the device disassemble friendly and was even willing to spend the engineering dollars to make that happen, I think they'd be turned away by the fact making a "polished" device that's easily disassembleable would increase failure rates. The bonded materials greatly increase strength over a set of spaced screws/latches into thin material.

I'm the 95%! Honestly, if something is going to take me more than 10 minutes to do, and the risk of breaking something is higher than none, I'm of the mindset to either pay to have a professional fix it (or break it for free), or rip out the hard drive and buy a new laptop.

All these higher end laptops all come with pretty decent warranties so for a couple hundred bucks you get it either repaired or swapped out. Then again, I'm a tone deaf American with a large amount of disposable income...

I am proudly of the '5%'. Some things I have done include: Thinkpad (some ancient Pentium-133 model) motherboard (30 min), Fujitsu T4020 fan (4 hours), Fujitsu T4200 SSD (2x, 10min max each), various hard drives, HP Pavilion 17 fan (3 hours), Motion M1400 memory and hard drive (converted to a PATA SSD after much research, 30min), and the M.2 SSD on my HP Elite X2. The fan replacements in particular were not fun but it seemed wrong to throw them away for something as basic as a $11 fan (buried in the internals as it was), which is why my current laptop (Elite X2) has no moving parts whatsoever.

Sometimes you really don't want to wait for a professional.

> Honestly, like 95% of people... @Raidion

If you have to use the word /honestly/ in your communications, this leads readers to believe that the remainder of your information is falsehoods.

Also, please link to the studies & polls that show %95 of users do not want serviceable, fixable, or user upgradeable laptops.

I doubt the veracity of your claim.

95% wouldn't want to repair their 1 year old (default warranty) mac if it breaks? What kind of bubble are you living in?

I'd pay a professional to do it or sell it for parts/repair. Working on small mobile electronics requires skills and experience. It's very easy to accidentally cause damage that's worse than the problem you were trying to fix in the first place.

Hard to open cases with intrusion detection really seem like a great thing to have.

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