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Comment by awalton | Hacker News Reader

> I'd bet 99.9% of people buying PC Laptops never upgrade a single chip...

Some huge percentage of that is because many if not most laptops shipping today have wired everything down. You can't even update the Wifi chip in most laptops today, even though the whole reason we put Wifi on a daughtercard in the first place is because we knew the standards were going to have to move...

Meanwhile, I'm typing this from a five year old laptop that I would have happily upgraded by adding more RAM if possible, and I know a lot of people that would be more than happy to do the same, since CPU technology hasn't really been improving in leaps and bounds and neither has laptop design in the past five years.

Let's not be afraid to call it what it is: It's planned obsolescence. They want you to have to buy a new one in 18 months when they ship version 2.

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You are the first person I've ever heard complain about not being able to upgrade the wifi in their laptop.

Make it 2 then. I want a good chipset with good drivers, that does not crash or has bad performance for weird reasons.

Until last year, I physically removed the default cards in any of my laptops to put a "known good"" Dell ath9k in place. I bought them in bulk, and I may still have some spares

i am now investigsting "modern" alternatives

Make it three, mostly because the wifi card in my laptop was a nightmare to get working in linux

I have an 8-year-old laptop. I'd love to upgrade the wifi to something that can connect to 5GHz APs.

They do make usb wifi dongles.

Wifi and Bluetooth would both be great to be upgradable.

Ooh I actually did this a long time ago! Upgraded the Airport card in my PowerBook.

But, you know, once in 30 years of owning laptops.

> They want you to have to buy a new one in 18 months when they ship version 2.

My laptop is 4.5 years old now and I'm starting to think about replacing it. It was upgraded the week it was purchased, with a bigger hard disk and 16 gigs of memory (and a US keyboard, but that doesn't count) and that was the last upgrade it had. The next one will probably be never upgraded, as the manufacturer offers the configuration I want (at the time, Dell didn't). I expect it to last about 5 years just like this one.

Would I love to have a faster laptop? Of course I would. Can I justify the cost in terms of productivity gained? No way.

HP laptops are a huge exception to this rule. We commonly upgrade RAM and drives on our laptops.

One of the elitebooks I saw recently doesn't even need a screwdriver to open the laptop.

Same with the Lenovo T-series. You can upgrade both batteries, both RAM chips, the LTE (or additionally a second SSD here), hard disk, wifi, until a cople a years ago the CPU, the monitor, keyboard, touchpad etc. All parts are available from Lenovo.

I guess the business Dells are the same?

Lenovo x230 checking in here. I've upgraded/replaced: battery, RAM, display panel, wifi, ssd (both in mSATA and SATA slots), keyboard (x220 keyboards FTW), BIOS (coreboot). The only thing I haven't replaced is the motherboard/CPU, because it doesn't seem worth the effort, even though it's technically possible.

There's a tradeoff of laptop size/weight and expandability. The market builds what most consumers want, which is aesthetics.

Why is this comment being down voted?

Because it’s intentionally obtuse to assume the only reason you would ever sacrifice upgradeability is for planned obsolescence.

But is it really far fetched? I am certain some people somewhere have considered this a big plus and weighted in their decision more than perhaps many of the other reasons for making HW impossible to upgrade.

> But is it really far fetched?

Yes, making things upgradeable generally adds weight and size to components. Sockets aren't "free", calling it planned obsolescence is absurd. They've been designed to have wired in components for a reason. You may not agree with that reason, say size constraints, but that is the constraints it was designed under. Weighting any decision is: how much will this cost our design? (note, cost here is not just money, its time, size, weight, manufacturing cost, complexity, etc...)

Upgradeability is a feature, if nobody is willing to pay for it, guess what will happen to the feature? Same thing as happened to our own species tails, they became obsolete.

> Same thing as happened to our own species tails, they became obsolete.

And no ape had its tail cut in the name of evolution. It happened slowly, as older apes were replaced by newer models.

To hit their noise target they'll have substantially modified the gpu package to have much more passive cooling than normal for this gpu. Making that work in a way that allowed end-users to slot in another gpu from an off-the-shelf package would be really hard.

Maybe their next iteration might have replacable gpu cartridges or something? But I can totally see why they wouldn't prioritise this. Not everything companies do is done out of malice.

Curious: how exactly do you see that the comment is being downvoted?

You must be an app user, like myself. It lacks functionality. You can tell if you log into the website.

TIL that there is an app!! I always log in from the website.

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