> There’re upgrade-friendly laptops on the market.
yes, but very few, and going fewer and fewer as we speak. Even Lenovo which was famous for that ends up soldering RAM in their recent models and making the battery a hassle to replace while it used to be on the outside before.
Enterprise market is huge. Consumers like thin and shiny things, corporations don’t care, but they employ people with full-time job being counting expenses. Upgradeable laptops are good for them because they can get exactly right hardware without paying for what they won’t use. They rarely upgrade themselves, vendors do, but unless the laptop is designed upgradeable vendors gonna have hard time serving their enterprise customer’s requests, let alone doing it fast.
Update: and if you gonna install Linux, these laptops can always be bought without Windows license. Corporate customers use volume licensing, they don’t need these OEM Windows keys and not willing to pay for them either.
I doubt that enterprises (or even their vendors) do much upgrading. Instead, they have those machines on a refresh cycle and replace them every three years. They do, however, often prize repairability: if you have a fleet of hundreds of the same model of machine, it's easy to maintain spares of the components most prone to failure/damage.
yes, but very few, and going fewer and fewer as we speak. Even Lenovo which was famous for that ends up soldering RAM in their recent models and making the battery a hassle to replace while it used to be on the outside before.