Dell's easy-to-repair Luna Concept laptop aims to reduce waste, carbon emissions | Hacker News Reader

Dell's easy-to-repair Luna Concept laptop aims to reduce waste, carbon emissions

dpreview.com

16 pointsjseliger7 comments

It appears Framework is having some effects.

It's a good side effect that a large manufacturer is considering building an easy-to-repair laptop, but don't wait with baited breath for it to be a reality. I feel that the average consumer doesn't care about things being repairable, and that this is more of an enthusiast/niche issue.

All of that said, I love the concept of the Framework laptop and it may be the on my list of considerations the next time I am looking to upgrade my laptop.

But how many corporate IT purchase decisions are made by the 'nerds' in IT?

I know that in my former F500 company, I sat next to the person who made those decisions, Dell was sending him free stuff all the time.

If Framework can nail down a lot of the Enterprise-y stuff (a lot of work I assume), he would have been very interested in it.

Allowing tech agents to swap out everything, means ALL repairs can be done onsite. No sending laptops back to dell for warranty, shipping things back and forth.

Cracked screen? Fixed in the office in 1 hour. Dead laptop? swap motherboard, cannibalize the rest of the parts for the next fix.

I think there is a real market in the Corporate world for that. People hate giving up their laptop, even if your backup / restore / sync solution is good.

Speaking from my experience at my former eployer (a F500) we used all HP laptops across the entire org and our help desk staff were HP certified repair people. So, when we had issues with our hardware we would drop it off at the help desk and they could do a lot of the repairs that sending the machine back to HP would get us.

it goes beyond repairability though – look how much apple upcharges for SSD and RAM.

The majority of their profit margin comes from overpriced DRAM and flash storage:

RAM:

  - 16GB -> 32GB: +$400 (+$75 retail)
  - 16GB -> 64GB: +$800 (+$200 retail)

SSD:

  - 512GB -> 1TB: +$200  (+$40 retail)
  - 512GB -> 2TB: +$600  (+$150 retail)
  - 512GB -> 4TB: +$1200 (+$350 retail)

Since you can't upgrade it yourself, buyers are paying more at point of purchase, and a high end machine depreciates significantly more over time. With something like framework, you can buy a base model and upgrade it as needed, and resell value of all models is higher because they can easily be repaired and upgraded.

I love it, but it's a shame that there is only a handwavy promise that parts of the design will be for sale in coming years. Is there a modular laptop available today?

Yes the Framework can be purchased now and is getting positive reviews in general.

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