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Comment by irusensei | Hacker News Reader

I'll probably wait one or two years before getting into anything with DDR5. I've blew some money on an AMD laptop in 2021. At the time it was a monster with decent expansion options: RX 6800m, Ryzen 9 5900HX. I've stuck it with maximum 64GB DDR4 and 2x 4TB psi 3.0 nvme. Runs Linux very well.

But now I'm seeing lots of things I'm locked out. Faster ethernet standards, the fun that brings with tons of GPU memory (no USB4, can't add 10Gbe either), faster and larger memory options, AV1 encoding. It's just sad that I bought a laptop right before those things were released.

Should had go with a proper PC. Not doing this mistake anymore.

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It sounds like you need a desktop workstation with replaceable extension cards, and not a mostly immutable laptop, which has different strengths.

Agreed but it will need to wait for now.

You will find that this is the cost of any laptop, any time you buy it there is always new tech around the corner and there isn't much you can do about it.

(disclosure I own a 13in one)

Yea closest I see to being better about it is Frame.work laptops, and even then it's not as good a story as desktops, just the best story for upgrading a laptop right now. Other than that buying one and making sure you have at least two thunderbolt (or compatible) ports on separate busses is probably the best you can do since that'd mean two 40Gb/s links for expansion even if it's not portable, but would let you get things like 10GbE adapters or fast external storage and such without compromising too much on capability.

The idea of Framework sounds so good but their actual implementation has really been lacking so far, especially when you consider total price of the laptop + upgrades vs just buying cheaper devices whole but more often. E.g. wired Ethernet is a USB C 2.5 Gbps adapter that sticks out of the chasses because it doesn't fit.

Waiting for CAMM2 to get wider adoption could be interesting:

https://x.com/msigaming/status/1793628162334621754

Hopefully won't be too long now.

Either it was a shitty investment from the beginning or you actually use it very regularly and it would be worth it anyway to slowly thinking about something new.

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