Comment by philistine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by philistine | Hacker News Reader

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You are so right, and I blame some of the thinking on this very website. People are adamant that they need to upgrade the RAM, change the storage, and replace the battery on their laptops. Adamant. All that means that you need a separate memory controller, a separate this and that. It adds up, and PC makers are forced to put in a fan.

On its face, it doesn't sound stupid at all. The thinking that you need to be able to upgrade and maintain your laptop sounds elegant. But those people, they never argue that they must be able to change the CPU. Why not? It used to be that upgrading the CPU in a laptop was a common occurence. Why don't they throw a fit that they can't upgrade the CPU?

Because technology caught up with them. CPUs are now soldered on the board, for multiple very good reasons. Coupled with the fact that a good CPU is good enough for a very long time, and no one feels the need to upgrade their CPU on a laptop. Same thing with the math co-processor, no one's arguing to be able to change that!

> Because technology caught up with them..... a good CPU is good enough for a very long time

This is an excellent point but surely it lampshades that the exact opposite case is true for RAM. How many of apple's laptops become unusable when we know they would be fine for years more with the single addition of increasing the ram? Aside from those ruined by physical damage, it feels to me that this is the way the majority of those devices end their productive life years earlier than they would with a single change.

My opinion regarding RAM is meant to in no way dispute your excellent points about CPU soldering.

You're right that more RAM would help when RAM is already low. But a good amount of RAM is good enough for a long time. But Apple solders its RAM directly on the chipset nowadays. Again, not because they're preventing you from upgrading; because that's the way they decided to achieve the performance they want without having to over-engineer their logic boards.

It’s not this websites thinking, it’s every tech person’s thinking.

Apple is an example of great consumer focus vs tech requests of “but I want to run Kubernetes on my iPad it’s powerful enough”.

That’s thanks to Steve Jobs. iPhone was a #1 smartphone for a decade without ever mentioning the RAM or CPU MHz in the announcements or marketing material. Even if there was less RAM or worse specs than the Snapdragon at the time, iPhone was still faster and sold more.

This philosophy is still at the core of Apple.

I wish more companies worked this way, but I don’t know anyone even close.

> Even if there was less RAM or worse specs than the Snapdragon at the time, iPhone was still faster and sold more.

iPhone had worse display for a _very_ long time.

The Galaxy S1 had an OLED display. It took Apple 7 years to introduce that technology in their premium lineup, and 10 years to introduce it to their regular lineup.

You make my point

> The Galaxy S1 had an OLED display.

A quick web search told me that this was introduced in 2010 (could be Google AI lying, I didn't look further). If that's accurate, there's really no comparison. A better screen on an OS that was catching up at the time… I'm not really sure when Android became a good competitor, but I don't think it was quite there in 2010.

I remember trying out Android tablets at a store ~2017. They were all trash. I couldn't believe it. I don't know where they are now, but IMO both the iPhone and the iPad shipped with high quality 1.0 software, despite deficiencies like a lack of copy/paste on iPhone 1.0.

Other companies were shipping devices with lackluster software for a good amount of time. Android became a real smartphone OS a long time ago. I assume it's reasonable on tablets today. But there was a period of time where it was a pretty terrible regardless of hardware specs. Kinda like the iPad now.

What I'm adamant about being able to upgrade is my software. The big problem with the apple ecosystem is that, while they've been pretty good about it, you are still at their mercy to receive regular software and operating system updates. Once apple is done with your hardware, that's it, you own an insecure brick.

It's not the upgradable ram, cpu, or storage which is eat into the power consumption budget. Instead, it's the interface and the standard that can become dated. Apple gets to choose all the voltages and interfaces for each generation which allows for a tightly coupled integration with their firmware and hardware all around. A PC user is stuck with the likes of ACPI and UEFI coordinating everything. And of course, they have to play with the current DDR standard of the time which may not give the power profile they want.

However, the benefit of the PC route is that there is really no EOL for the hardware/firmware support. A 20 year old computer can run an operating system with the 7.2 linux kernel perfectly fine. Your IPad from that era is a brick. You can't do anything with it. But your laptop from that era? You can slap in a brand new SSD and it'll accept it and boot up just fine. (The one caveat is you'll be SOL if you have an nvidia device).

> What I'm adamant about being able to upgrade is my software. The big problem with the apple ecosystem is that, while they've been pretty good about it, you are still at their mercy to receive regular software and operating system updates. Once apple is done with your hardware, that's it, you own an insecure brick.

The insecure bricks hold their value weirdly well though, so if you care about the software limits, you can just sell at the end of the term to someone who doesn't, and it makes up for you not being able to keep the hardware longer yourself. Like I just sold off a low-spec 2012 macbook and 2013 iPad Air for a combined $140.

What are you even talking about. Every M1 Mac and earlier runs Linux. Even all the way back to PowerPC.

Granted, the M1 and up are not 100% covered yet (driver-wise), but they aren't EOL either. And if they were, Linux would still run anyway. Take a 20 year old Mac and you'll run Linux just fine. 10 year old Mac, Linux still runs fine. Take an M1 and it's a joy to use with Linux. Taken an M2 and it will boot and you can be pretty sure it will run very well long before it's EOL too. And even if it's EOL, it's not going to prevent you from running Linux later.

As for the PC example: definitely EOL problems there. Try getting your EDK2-based UEFI stack patched on an old computer. At some point you won't be getting certificate updates and if you either forget to install a local override or if the vendor didn't add it, you're SOL, especially on laptops where you can't disable secure boot.

Counterpoint: storage and ports should be upgradable. Ram and CPU both last forever, but drives die and ports wear out.

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