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Comment by smilekzs | Hacker News Reader

+1. The serviceability of ThinkPads had always been a great (if not hidden) feature, almost allowing Ship-of-Theseus-ish rolling upgrades like a desktop. Even though the build quality has generally declined since the T410 era, this at least has been preserved (I have a company-issued P50 and it's still a few screws away from changing RAM and SSD).

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This is part of why I bought an E4xx instead of a T4xx, the RAM isn't soldered on in the E4xx line, so that's at least one thing I can fix that I can't on a T4xx.

Only the TXXXs models come with soldered memory. I can easily change memory, SSD, keyboard etc on my T470.

The t490 not s has soldered ram. I think even rhe 590 has soldered ram (at least one slot)

Yeah, non-s versions are better in that regard, because t490s has RAM soldered (and t480s had one chip soldered + one upgrade-able module), I have it and no way to upgrade that. I really hope EU will pass a law that will forbid soldering RAM and SSD to the mainboard, because it starts getting ridiculous and increases garbage.

I replaced the trackpad on an x240 and it took me 2 hours and a few broken spudgers. I would have been able to swap everything else out first, as the touchpad was buried under motherboard, keyboard, hard drives etc.

That is essentially the feature of the “good” thinkpads. You can replace almost anything, but the whole thing is built in this weird upside-down way and replacing anything that you really want to replace means that you have to take the whole thing almost completely apart. On the other hand if you read the official procedure for that and take inspiration from that, the only tool you really need to take it completely apart and assemble back is literally an cheapest swiss army knife which includes philips screwdriver.

I replaced the AC barrel connector on an x220, which required removing every single part from the chassis. It took me probably four hours all told, and a few gray hairs (it was my wife's laptop, and yes I had a backup of everything on it, but didn't want to need to replace it).

An Apple laptop would have been shipped off who knows where for three weeks, if fixing that part were even possible.

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