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Comment by Const-me | Hacker News Reader

There’re upgrade-friendly laptops on the market. I’ve replaced RAM, disks, keyboard, LCD, CPU, wireless cards in my laptops. Soldered CPUs are unfortunately inevitable on modern ones, but many other components are still replaceable if you pay attention at the time of purchase. Usually voids warranty but I don’t care too much.

As a nice bonus it sometimes saves money. I’ve only picked my netbook for CPU (i3-6157U, 64MB L4 cache), GPU (Iris 550, 0.8 TFlops) and display (13.3” FullHD IPS). Upgraded to adequate amount of RAM (16GB) and larger and faster M.2 SSD. Both were too low out of the box, and even today there’re not many small laptops with 16GB RAM.

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Agreed.

> Soldered CPUs are unfortunately inevitable on modern ones...

To be fair, even on desktop replacing a CPU on the same motherboard is a pretty niche thing in my experience. Not to say people don't do this, but most of the people I know upgrade both at the same time, either because of incompatiblity or because of substantial gains with the newer MB. So soldering the two together is not as bad as glueing keyboard to the motherboard in my eyes.

On a desktop it is possible to replace the motherboard, on a laptop not so much, so not soldering the CPU would at least give you the ability to upgrade the processor to the fastest supported by that motherboard .

True, you have a point there. Of course, standardizing on a few motherboard forms would be even better... one can always dream. ;)

In some cases, upgrading a CPU prolongs useful life of the device.

The desktop I’m using now had i5-4460 at the time of purchase, eventually upgraded to Xeon E3-1230v3. Only going to upgrade motherboard after AMD releases Zen 2 desktop CPUs.

A family member uses a laptop that initially had i3-3110M. I’ve put i7-3612QM there, it’s comparable to modern ones performance-wise despite 6 years difference, e.g. cpubenchmark.net rates i7-3612QM at 6820 points, i5-8265U at 8212 points (because 35W versus 15).

I agree about glued keyboards. Keyboards are exposed to outside world and also subject to mechanical wear. The only thing worse than that is soldered SSDs. Makes data recovery very hard, and also rate of innovations is still fast for them, SSDs that will become available couple years in the future will be both much faster and much larger, upgrading them regularly makes sense for UX.

My current weapon of choice is a Lenovo y50-70. Adding RAM is super easy, but I had to replace the keyboard at one point which was a nightmare since it was all glued and had small pins to hold it together, not to mention for some reason you have to disassemble absolutely everything before you actually get to it. In the end I basically just tore the thing out semi-carefully and the new one is just "pinned-in" (the glue isn't even needed). Another adventure was the screen frame which was breaking more and more each time I opened it. For that I drilled holes in a few places and bolted it together with some really small nuts so it still closes fine. It was annoying but a fun experience, got me over my hardware tweaking anxiety for good. I doubt it gets crazier than drilling holes in your laptop.

So yes, laptops should absolutely be made easier to modify, the components get old really fast and I don't wanna buy the whole thing each time I want an extra bit of RAM or some small part gets broken. It's one of the things that make me steer way clear of Apple stuff.

> There’re upgrade-friendly laptops on the market.

yes, but very few, and going fewer and fewer as we speak. Even Lenovo which was famous for that ends up soldering RAM in their recent models and making the battery a hassle to replace while it used to be on the outside before.

Enterprise market is huge. Consumers like thin and shiny things, corporations don’t care, but they employ people with full-time job being counting expenses. Upgradeable laptops are good for them because they can get exactly right hardware without paying for what they won’t use. They rarely upgrade themselves, vendors do, but unless the laptop is designed upgradeable vendors gonna have hard time serving their enterprise customer’s requests, let alone doing it fast.

For an example what I’m talking about, see this for current-gen Intel-based 13.3”: http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c05695299.pdf

Update: and if you gonna install Linux, these laptops can always be bought without Windows license. Corporate customers use volume licensing, they don’t need these OEM Windows keys and not willing to pay for them either.

> Enterprise market is huge.

Do you have any number to compare the size of the consumer market vs the Enterprise market?

I don’t have numbers. But this article https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2018-10-1... says the PC market is driven by business PCs, both globally, US, and EMEA.

I doubt that enterprises (or even their vendors) do much upgrading. Instead, they have those machines on a refresh cycle and replace them every three years. They do, however, often prize repairability: if you have a fleet of hundreds of the same model of machine, it's easy to maintain spares of the components most prone to failure/damage.

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