I'm sure it's been said before by many, but I'd have a few extra mm of thickness to get back replaceable ram, ssd, wifi, etc.
The post yesterday about moving back to an old Thinkpad has me motivated to do something like that for my next computer. A Thinkpad chassis with an updated mainboad, screen, and battery would make me happy.
Framework gets us a long way in the right direction; still lacking things some of us need - admittedly a minority:
1. Standardized keyboard. For some reason modern laptops hate Home/End/PgUp/PgDwn buttons; but I use them literally every minute of my typing. Arrow keys too are tiny, up and down look to be sharing the same key - so basically unusable on regular basis.
2. Trackpoint/Nub/Nipple. If you're trying to make a small laptop, rather than crippling keyboard for the sake of massive giant trackpad, Trackpoint is the way to go. Granted, higher learning curve for many, but very rewarding in the end.
Again, understanding we are now talking a niche of a niche - "want standard keyboard and trackpoint" subset of "want practical modular laptop"; but that's why old school Thinkpads are still so prized for some.
They did give feedback a a while ago that they are looking into the thinkpad style trackpoint/mouse-button interface as a purchasable option in the future.
> still lacking things some of us need - admittedly a minority:
Can't you and a few 100/1000 like-minded people crowdfund a custom Framework keyboard with full-sized arrow keys and and track point? It's designed to have bits of it customized/upgraded (including the keyboard).
I mean, that's kinda sorta how the Lenovo T25 got to be - a one-of, 5000 copies run of basically T470, but with old-school Thinkpad keyboard. It's what I'm typing on right now (Glee!:)
Interesting thing to ponder though; I have no idea what manufacturing is like so I assumed that would be much too small of a run to be viable... but I'm completely ignorant.
Trackpoint/Nub/Nipple. If you're trying to make a small laptop, rather than crippling keyboard for the sake of massive giant trackpad, Trackpoint is the way to go. Granted, higher learning curve for many, but very rewarding in the end.
Yeah, this is the current issue I'm having. I can't bring myself to by a laptop without some form of Trackpoint, which rules out pretty much all but a very small subset.
1. Keyboards that have non-standard Home/End/PgUp/PgDwn, also tend to have crippled/unusable up & down arrows.
2. I don't believe that shortcut works in any editor I tend to use; it is when typing text that Home/Ctrl-Home, End/Ctrl-End come in super-handy.
(yes, we can now start discussing Vim-style editors etc; but my point is at higher level - we had a standard keyboard layout for literally decades, and now its again a no-man's land of bespoke crippled layouts, presumably in service of thin laptop and vast trackpad)
Agreed. I think the disassembly video of the Surface SE is pretty impressive (kudos Microsoft!), but Framework still blows the Surface SE out of the water in terms of internal accessibility and modularity of the laptop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AV2umY3R0vw
Lenovo P15 series would be example of laptops that have not gone crazy in light and thin direction, so it has m.2 slots for ssds, and sodimms for RAM as you'd expect, all accessible by undoing few screws and lifting the back cover: https://laptopmedia.com/highlights/inside-lenovo-thinkpad-p1...
Absolutely love my Thinkpad X1 for running linux; it's pretty much the same design but without the awful number pad. The fingerprint scanner even got support recently!
These machines exist. They’re just not usually stocked at your local big box store because that’s not a mass-market priority. Mass market customers would rather have a machine that is thinner, lighter, cheaper, and with better battery life.
Hoping more companies like frame.work[1] come up and succeed. They have shown it is possible and the laptop need not be bulky or very expensive and still be repairable.
[1]: https://frame.work
The HP video is much less entertaining, much longer, and the narrator is likely a text-to-speech software. However, I think it’s more informative, for instance it shows how to assemble the device back.
> I'm sure it's been said before by many, but I'd have a few extra mm of thickness to get back replaceable ram, ssd, wifi, etc.
This is the exact opposite of what manufacturers want so I don't think there is any hope of reversing this crazy trend. The vendors copying Apple don't understand that Apple controls their users as they are already hooked to their ecosystem so they have no choice, but people outside of this ecosystem do have a choice and when presented with a thin plate with everything glued and irreplaceable and no useful ports, they will simply look for another solution. Not to mention environmental problems created by this craze.
On the other hand, socketed parts are prone to corrosion at the contacts in adverse conditions. My old x61 had some issues with the SO-DIMM socket corroding from all the time in my bike bags.
Soldered-down ram and an add-on socket has seemed like a nice compromise to me.
Soldered parts are prone to fractures in BGA solder balls which are more annoying and expensive to repair compared to cleaning up sockets and rubbing pads with a pencil eraser one in a while.
Socketed RAM modules have more solder joints than the alternative. The packages on your socketed RAM are attached to the module the same way they would be attached to the motherboard. BGA has been used across the board since DDR2.
Of all of the parts of your laptop to break and leave you without the availability of a replacement, your RAM is the least of your worries. Damage prone parts that are replaceable are already hard enough to find replacements for. And of all the parts on your mainboard to break, your i/o is going to be the likely culprit. And few laptops modularize those.
How did you get a reliable new battery for a 10 year old laptop? Lenovo doesn't appear to make batteries for old laptops, and I've had bad experiences ordering from random sellers on Amazon.com.
Nobody is moving DRAM on-die. Apple puts DRAM on-package, and x86 laptops using LPDDRx solder it on the main board next to the soldered-down CPU/SoC. The advantage of doing so is not latency (which is still dominated by stuff that happens entirely within the DRAM die) but rather that LPDDR allows for lower power draw for the same bandwidth.
I think that's a more-or-less acceptable compromise for now.
Who knows, I wouldn't be surprised to see someone add on-board RAM back in to allow for cheaper expansion. Most operating systems support NUMA, this approach seems similar to that idea.
The post yesterday about moving back to an old Thinkpad has me motivated to do something like that for my next computer. A Thinkpad chassis with an updated mainboad, screen, and battery would make me happy.