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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

I really dislike labeling repairability as user-friendliness.

I never ever bought a device with intentions of repairing it, I always hope that I will never have to repair it and just use it.

Yes, it is nice to be able to repair it but if it fails, next time I'm buying a laptop I will avoid it and stick with the brand that did not fail and sits in my drawer because it's too slow by modern standards.

Repairability is probably useful for enterprises but enterprises are not users despite that sometimes they can be described as such(they are customers).

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But it's not just repairing, it's being able to upgrade.

I have a 6 year-old Lenovo and it's still performing amazingly. Since buying it I have upgraded the HDD twice (to an SSD and then to a slightly larger and faster SSD), upgraded the RAM once and even upgraded the screen (to a higher resolution IPS display that was backwards compatible).

If I had bought an un-upgradable laptop I'd probably already have had to buy a new one (no matter how well it is built).

Yup. It's also surprisingly hard to find a decent new laptop these days.

About a week ago I started at a new company, and was asked to find a laptop that I wanted. The cheapest one with a 1TB SSD was ~$2000, and the cheapest one that would be decent out of the box was a $1300 Dell.

Instead I ended up getting a $600 gaming laptoo with a decent CPU, and installed the RAM and SSD myself for $450, ending up with a far better laptop that was still hundreds cheaper than that Dell.

Try doing that with a Mac.

I can certainly see doing that if it's your own money. But if I start a new job and the first thing they do is make me cobble together a laptop of spare parts so that they can save a few hundred bucks, then I'm sending out my resume later that afternoon.

They didn't ask me to cobble something together, they asked me to find a good laptop below $1500.

I don't know. In my experience if a company won't buy me the laptop I need on day 1, it's a good sign I'm going to be spending the rest of my time there having to fight every time I need a new screen, or hard drive or mouse or just about anything else.

The only gaming laptops I’ve seen that weren’t vastly inferior to both every Mac currently sold and also the EliteBook line from the OP in terms of battery life and portability costs between 3.5-5 times what you said you paid. Mind sharing what make and model you got? Thanks.

Many developer laptops probably live on a desk most of the time, so these two things are easy to sacrifice for many.

MSI GV62 7RD-2030NE.

The battery time seems to be ~3-4 hours, which is more than fine when it's connected to an outlet 99.9% of the time. I prioritize decent screen size and a comfortable keyboard far higher than "portability".

Upgradeability, in most cases, is just a cost-saving feature.

In some industrial settings, upgradability can be crucial indeed. For example, where cutting-edge performance is needed you might want to be able to upgrade the CPU of your workstation when a new version is released but this is hardly the case for Laptops except for some extreme cases like laptops used at the ISS.

Upgrading isn't just about saving money. It's also a more environmentally responsible thing to do. People are "upgrading" to new iPhones just because their glued-in battery is end-of-life.

iPhone batteries are easy to replace by a shop or by the user. iFixit(the article source) sells batteries and screwdrivers to do it.

Your claim doesn’t seem to have grounds.

People have only recently found out that Apple have been slowing down the iPhones in software to lessen the load on older batteries. I also disagree that changing the battery is "easy", I suspect some people may not even realise it is an option.

Well, Apple just recently slowed down the phones with poor battery conditions.

As for the easiness of battery replacement, you can check out iFixit as they literally rate devices on that metric.

Here is the rating for the iPhone 6s: https://www.ifixit.com/Device/iPhone_6s

As for the uninformed public, that’s not really a future of the iPhone :) The public is misinformed about many things. For example, up until now, you were among those people.

None of your ifixit links disprove my claim that "People are upgrading to new iPhones because their glued-in battery is end-of-life".

> The public is misinformed about many things.

No, this is different. There is a conflict of interest here, it is not in Apples interest to promote battery replacement.

> For example, up until now, you were among those people.

Please try to debate with politeness and good manners.

I didn’t mean to be rude, i just think that you’re not well informed about the repairability of the iPhones.

Oh and you’re the one who needs to prove your claim. We can’t assume that claims on the internet are true until proven otherwise.

I provided the links to inform you about the repair options and the difficulty of those.

I think it is well known and proven that people upgrade every two years when the contract expires. My claim is only that the built-in battery contributes to this, you are free to disagree, but it is difficult to prove either way. Your ifixit links certainly do not prove battery replacement is easy. Specialist tools are involved, this is how iFixit makes its money.

Upgrading and repairing is cost-saving in absolute terms by using less resources.

It may not be you who repairs it. It may be a local shop. That its repairable is friendly to users.

One of the problems I have with my iphone is its getting old and the battery is rubbish and its slowing down. And I can do nothing about it except splash out on a new iphone.

How about upgrading your components to extend the life of your hardware? Or reducing the cost of recycling.

Laptops (and electronic devices) are generally an ecological disaster.

I love Repairability:

-Then the device stays 100% under my control (don't have to wipe it before sending it to technician etc.)

-I know I am repairing it. (You won't get it back with the notice it is fixed, but then nothing changed)

-Tinkering is fun

-Faster to get it repaired if you can get the part.

Tinkering with laptops is fun until you have better things to thinker with if that laptop was working in first place.

This logic does not make sense. Do you never repair anything in your home? Do you always just only buy a home if everything will always work 100%?

The typical life of a Li-Ion battery is about 2/3 years or less if cycled often enough. This is at least one component that should be user replaceable. Most of us cannot justify or even afford buying a new machine every 2/3 years.

Batteries are deplating resources and I agree that they should be replaceable.

The thing is, it should be design priority as many techies would root for. Apple’s approach is perfectly fine in that regard as batteries are replaceable but you need tools.

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