Consider options like Framework laptops that let you actually own your hardware, and repair it.
None of these swappable parts are unique aside from the processor (mine is soldered), I can replace all my parts and my laptop cost under $200.
Also while this was going on, they never did any of this to Thinkpads.
The computer now lives with my mom, who needs a simple but reliable device. The i5 was sold on ebay for a few bucks to some lad or lasse who may have needed it for a cheap laptop build. Decade old computers aren't vastly different from today in terms of day to day use. Capabilities and high performance is one thing, but using devices longer, and upgrading entire systems less frequently is both better for your wallet, and better for the environment.
How often does your mother use that computer? Did the performance matter to her at all? Even if you swapped it back to the old i5 with the SSD I doubt much of a difference would be noticed.
Between the fact that many of them work without issue for years, and the fact that an new equivalent to your 2011 i3 becomes exponentially cheaper over time, repairing it will never be worth it.
A Raspberry PI 4 is a functional computer but costs less than just the CPU of that i3 based machine while trouncing it in performance and power efficiency.
https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i3-2100 https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/16396722
The assumption that tech gets exponentially cheaper over time, ie Moore’s Law, only applies to a portion of the hardware, one the CPU, GPU, RAM, and storage. It doesn’t apply to the glue that holds it all together, the integrated display, keyboard, mouse, speakers, etc. In fact, a lot of webcams are actually worse than they were 10 years ago. AND Moore’s Law has significantly slowed. Apple Silicon is a big improvement, but this is a step change, and it’s not likely to be a continuation of the 18 Month Moore’s Law doubling time of years past.
x86 isn’t what it was, MS made Windows 11 be able to run android apps, consumers don’t care about x86 software anymore. That’s been true since ChromeOS had been used more often since browsers mattered more than programs that only ran on windows.
Do developers typically use ChromeOS to do development? I don’t think it can run, say, LabView or Matlab (the latter it MIGHT be able to, with some extra work, but not natively). It’s all a pretty big headache to use a device for serious work that is optimized for passive consumption and web browsing and social media. Everything you want to do that isn’t in a web browser is a pain.
Most people don't need to run those programs, they're niche, and the normal consumer doesn't care.
And the "extras" you mention also get cheaper due to economies of scale. 4k 30hz monitors used to run just under $1000. Now 4k 60hz monitors run just over $200.
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At the end of the day you cannot compete with how much better we get at making things over time right now.
Broken hardware is only a leading cause of replacing smartphones, and even the most repair unfriendly device can generally be fixed in 30 minutes at your local mall.
Now I'm sure there are families with less money who might think differently but it's definitely not straightforward in general to hand down old computer-related stuff.
You’re stating effort like it’s hard to unscrew a laptop and seat in a new part, which you’ll need to do for framework too.
With two exceptions: - Freedom of choice over operating system - Freedom of choice over repair components
From the looks of it, there doesn't appear to be much of a detriment to it over other laptops.
Dell and HP have plenty of aftermarket parts and don’t limit my OS either.
They start at $999 and the base is 8GB, 256GB SSD, with an i5 and you need to wait with a deposit and it only has 1 year of warranty with no strong aftermarket products. None of these are incentivizing for performance, for repairable, or for cost.
Framework may not be for the purpose of upgrading a laptop incrementally for ten years, but it has the core competency of intending to let you repair every component of your laptop as needed, while having the profile of a slim but powerful machine. They are the anti-apple from that perspective.
Your $200 laptop is not as good as the Framework laptop. You either bought a Chromebook, or you bought used meaning someone else ate depreciation, or you're comparing apples to oranges.
If you're the type of person that needs the _fastest_ computer then yeah obviously you're upgrading every year. Or if you work on large codebases, etc.
But if you don't care about that, you can easily go 4+ years with your laptop. Yes computers have gotten faster, but the internet is still usable on a 10 year old machine.
I've replaced my battery once already, but consider your keyboard/screen are likely things to break at any point in time with accidents.
And we're comparing this to apple, a company that has been basically DRM'ing components - even if you can buy the replacement you can't use it without it being "programmed" by apple.
EDIT: Also note that the bare minimum models from 10 years ago are likely too slow nowadays, I mean to compare this to the medium-upper range devices of the time, potentially with relatively low cost upgrades like an SSD.
[0] https://mntre.com/reform2/handbook/parts.html#battery-packs
The thinkpads esp batteries from 2013 suck them most. DRM, and expensive, 2012 has no DRM and 2014 and up has way cheaper aftermarket.
I keep it around because it works as a kiosk in my recording studio, but that's about it.
We're at the point where computers, cars and phones are good enough and commoditized to the point where they should be lasting 10+ years. Instead, we're moving toward a 4-year maximum with everything sealed up and soldered, so you can throw it on the e-waste pile and replace it to keep "infinite" growth chugging. The iMac is particularly offensive.
What Foundation is doing should be the norm, by law.
Just because you don't personally see any benefit to the advancements being made doesn't mean others don't. They're certainly still performant enough to be useful but even something like h.264 decoding puts a huge strain on my haswell laptop, which is a trivial task to newer ones thanks to advancements in chips. This isn't even an uncommon task. Anyone who watches videos online probably benefits from this, especially when it comes to laptops which are concerned with battery life.
> We're at the point where computers, cars and phones are good enough and commoditized to the point where they should be lasting 10+ years.
Cars do last 10+ years. I'm driving around in a 17 year old vehicle and it works just fine. But I don't think that means we should halt all progress in vehicles. It's still using gasoline and not running on electric motors, after all. At some point down the road perhaps we'll see commoditization of batteries in the auto industry but that's not where we're at today, where the vast majority of vehicles on the road still run on gas.
> Instead, we're moving toward a 4-year maximum with everything sealed up and soldered, so you can throw it on the e-waste pile and replace it to keep "infinite" growth chugging. The iMac is particularly offensive.
If the iMac is offensive to you, then don't buy it. All these environmental arguments on this website always come off as extremely disingenuous when they pair it with their solution being imposing restrictions rather than creating a superior product.
> What Foundation is doing should be the norm, by law.
I can't stand these authoritarian takes. No one is forcing you to partake and there are options available to people that hold certain ideologies. The idea that you must impose that on everyone by law is absurd.
I never had that problem even before haswell. They have hardware decoding built in, thats probably caused by another issue. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Hardware_video_acceleration
I agree about not enforcing viewpoints on others. If you don't like it, don't buy it.
The X230 was having some weird power/sensor issue so I ordered a replacement motherboard for like $40 CAD in case it dies. It could be years before I need it, but like, this stuff costs peanuts and I am so much more comfortable using a computer I know I can easily maintain (and has excellent performance to boot).
Bit of a devil's advocate here, but by doing this they prevent themselves getting blamed when low quality replacement parts are cranked out on the cheap by companies who don't care if their customers' customers die in a fire.
The headline if an iPhone with a third party battery exploding and injuring someone will be "This iPhone Exploded, You Won't Believe Her Injuries", not "iPhone with Knock Off Battery Explodes".
Apple wouldn't be as profitable as they are if they weren't anticipating things like this and planning for it years in advance.
I beg to differ. I swapped my 2011 i5-2500k for a 2012 i7-3770 and it was a nice and cheap upgrade.
Used hardware is cheap, there is no reason to not upgrade it all the way.
This isn't like a desktop where all the parts are bought from different manufacturers and assembled by an OEM or by you. The laptop is a complete kit made by a single manufacturer.
It's a new company and have not been tested yet in terms of backwards-compatibility and ongoing inventory. But just because you can't swap parts in most laptops doesn't really imply that you shouldn't be able to.
Don’t be fooled by the marketing, many Dell, HP and Lenovo laptops have those benefits on top of a huge aftermarket which framework doesn’t have and can’t leverage. You can way cheaper buy a broken laptop of the same model and fix yours with it whereas framework will only have their niche market which won’t be cheaper.
suggesting that people who embrace "right to repair" have a psychopathology is the only psychological blindspot I see here.
wanting to enlarge your memory or your drive storage is completely normal in the present day as these devices increase in size dramatically well within the lifetime of a notebook computer
I put some of the old parts together with some old desktop SSD in my old E540 and gave it my gf, who previously used an x220 with upgraded SSD and RAM. The E540 already has a new display, too.
I do replace and change and upgrade all these parts to be able to use a cheap laptop over many years, just like I do with a desktop.
All my all Macs sold for great value after I was done with them or got a better one, even with an expired guarantee. It took like a week or two to sell them. I'm still stuck with Thinkpads because the used market is shit.
My last Thinkpad I got kinda impulsively as a workstation for Ableton is my deepest regret. It was a year ago, the Intel MacBooks where not cutting it, it's a great machine and was like 2600 and now I want to go back to an M1 MacBook Pro and it's impossible to sell it anywhere, I feel I just threw away money. A four year old MacBook Pro is worth more on the Apple exchange program than my Thinkpad, it's really sad.
I'm thinking about plugging it to the TV and using it as a Steam console or something like that, my girlfriend games. But it's a fucking expensive console.
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Air+13-Inch+Early+2015+...
I only comment because the jump between dual & quad core is a pretty big one, as is the presumed jump to newer chips with 6, 8, and 16 core processors in modern machines.
Dual core has remained surprisingly usable for light tasking though. Whether it is a well-loved MacBook or a battle-scarred ThinkPad from that era, Intel's dual core CPUs have held up well (even if it means they didn't feel the need to push their CPU design as much in the subsequent years.)
As for memory, DRAM doesn't really have a particularly long lifetime (iirc design life is something like 75k hours), and that certainly shows in servers - memory modules start to fail a lot after the four year mark. And here I don't think I ever had a machine where I didn't upgrade memory at least once.
Yes.
Personal laptops and desktops have become things you replace at car intervals now. And phones are starting to approach that too.
I assume that if your laptop wasn't working and all you had to do was take a single screw out then you'd do it, rather than taking it to a repair shop or buy another.
Or if the repair cost was extreme, but it was relatively easy to fix it yourself.
Your point of view is valid of course. At the same time I believe many people don't have sufficient money to allow them the luxury of never repairing anything themselves.
Having hardware that is repairable is rarely a problem for the end-user who doesn't want to repair it themselves. For users who DO want to repair it themselves, having hardware that's designed to be hard to repair is a huge burden.
Even a decade ago, the rewards for being able to repair computers were pretty substantial. Your computer was likely to have routine failures and you could probably save a lot of money doing piecemeal replacements. I think those things are still true for people who are trying to stay on the bleeding edge of computer hardware or use unusual setups, but for 95%+ of folks it is probably going to be a net loss.
For most people performing most tasks, they are better off taking the "one-screw" computer into the shop because it would take them hours and hours to do the research figuring out if it really is a "one-screw" problem. If you are wrong you could seriously damage your hardware. In addition, because hardware that is sufficient for most purposes and inexpensive is widely available - there is very limited utility in learning those skills otherwise.
If you want to learn about and repair computers as a hobby that's great! I do it and I enjoy it. But it's not a "smart financial decision."
I just leave it to the professionals because it saves me money/time. I have no doubts I could do my own repair but from this vantage point it's just not a sound investment.
Some people have more money than time, some have more time than money. And there are a million other factors too.
Not OP but I have a really high threshold for this. I don't want to own a house and rent because of this.
So the actual DIY repairability of laptops just doesn't matter for the vast majority of people. What Framework is doing is awesome amazing though and I hope it does encourage companies to make easier to repair computers to lower the actual cost of repairs.
My minimum threshold for reaching out to a repair technician is 1) the problem must not have a solution that is easily found through an internet search, and 2) the solution must require more time and effort than the time to get it to and from the repair shop.
What saddens me is how few people will do the internet search before giving up.
Yes, I'm tech-savvy so I'm speaking from a position of privilege, but if you're looking for "What's wrong with this thing?" how can you NOT think to search the internet?
Apple's laptop is really limited in this way. The older generation of Apple's laptop allowed you to upgrade RAM and HD.
Watching videos, browsing internet, sharing pictures and videos, video calling and basic spreadsheet/word processing needs no upgrades.
I use a 2015 MacBook Air and I don’t need an upgrade, and I probably do more on my laptop than 80% of people.
And also those who very frequently do backups, because restoring the data from a failed SSD would be problematic.
It doesn't matter whether you want to repair it or not, in the long term you can only lose when you don't care how hard it is to repair.
Although, true, I suspect their modern stuff will never reach the same point.
https://community.frame.work/t/free-the-ec-and-coreboot-only...
They publish a full disassembly guide[0], so I'm reasonably sure the whole thing is repairable and upgradable if necessary. Lots of options for custom build at order time including coreboot. I'm a bit hesitant about a 1920x1080 display but otherwise extremely tempted.
[0] https://support.starlabs.systems/kb/guides/starbook-mk-v-com...
It looks almost perfect, but only having a single USB-C port is a disappointing choice :(
Then again, their tower is exorbitant, so...maybe not.