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It's really sad to think about how far we've fallen in terms of hardware customizability since the desktop PC era. It was once a given that you could build your

It's really sad to think about how far we've fallen in terms of hardware customizability since the desktop PC era. It was once a given that you could build your own device from scratch and change out any part you wanted to. You could keep systems usable for 10+ years this way and we got a generation of hardware hackers and enthusiasts who went on to make cool things. Now our corporate overlord announces a way to let you replace a few basic components like your camera and battery and when they later cancel it the dominant reaction is "no big surprise there." Replace the magic candy bar in your pocket every 2 years, don't look inside, don't think about how it works, just embrace your new role in the modern tech industry as part of the top 1%'s recurring revenue strategy. The big money won, consumers lost, hackers lost. Sure it's business and you can never expect corporations to be altruistic, they have a profit motive. But that's never meant that you should give an anti-consumer attitude a free pass either. Every year that goes by now drives me deeper into the open source camp and Stallman's welcoming embrace.

Dobbs 10y ago
I'm not sure what you are talking about. The consumers won, hackers lost. My mother (or father if he wasn't an engineer himself) doesn't care about replacing the camera, how much ram it has or replacing the battery. She wants it to work. She wants it to have an efficient battery. And when it breaks she wants to take it to the store and have them fix it or replace it. This is what Apple provides. By removing connectors between replaceable parts they are able to reduce the size and increase battery size. So on so forth. Hackers lose the ability to swap out parts and customize it to their liking but your average citizen has no clue how to replace a DIMM stick and doesn't want to care. They don't care about managing files on their phone or any of that. They want the phone to be safe from malware, they want the device to work and to be easy to use. They have chosen to specialize in something else. To understand fashion, chemistry, politics, something. Their brain power is spent on something other than how computers work. And that is ok. Our job as technologists is to empower them in that. To allow them to achieve more in their love without getting in their way by managing device drivers.
- apatters 10y ago
  You're reducing the entire market to fools and nerds. There's plenty of room for people in between. You didn't have to be an engineer to add more RAM to your system, you just had to be the geeky kid down the street who wasn't afraid to open up the box. Or you can at least create something open enough that a third party can service the engine, install an aftermarket exhaust upgrade, whatever. We've been making things that could be hacked since the beginning of time and the current crop of mobile device manufacturers is against it.
  - uniclaude 10y ago
    This. Heck, even my mother is able to change the battery of her Samsung phone when she's out all day taking pictures, and she's as far as it gets from an engineer. Bringing the argument of "consumers want something that works" every time some are looking for a repairability/upgradeability path only leads to this false dichotomy of splitting the world between nerds and fools.
  - NoGravitas 10y ago
    Yep, it's not necessarily that every customer needs to be able to upgrade/customize. It's that every customer should be able to go to the local computer shop to upgrade/customize.
- Nullabillity 10y ago
  > but your average citizen has no clue how to replace a DIMM stick and doesn't want to care. Sure, but it'll still be far cheaper to pay someone to replace the DIMM stick than to buy a new phone/computer/whatever. Plus there's the environmental aspect, too.
- marcosdumay 10y ago
  > Hackers lose the ability to swap out parts and customize it to their liking Economy of scale means that it's cheaper to include every kind of hardware anybody may want than to customize. Hackers lose the ability to swap parts, but didn't lose any single kind of (hardware) functionality that is available on the market. (Still lose anything that we invent by ourselves.) I don't call that a loss, at least not on mobile devices. We still have desktops and development boards for hacking.
usaphp 10y ago
> "You could keep systems usable for 10+ years this way" Every custom PC maker friend keeps telling me that but realistically - have anybody ever used the "upgraded" pc for 10+ years? By the time the cpu needs an upgrade - there is a new motherboard needed and your case and power supply also becomes obsolete, never mind graphics card, so you end up getting a whole new pc instead.
- nipponese 10y ago
  Truth.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- ikt 10y ago
  I don't think it's just a static set, eg. use the PC for 10 years with completely upgradeable components or it's not worth it. I purchased my current PC case/graphics card, cpu and motherboard 5 years ago, have replaced the CPU cooler, and the SSD drives and added an audio card, upgraded the RAM and added an extra HDD. I think part of the problem is that despite smartphones being similar to desktops, they're not the same at all and have complementary but ultimately different purposes. One is suited to being upgradeable, the other isn't.
- flukus 10y ago
  No, I've had laptops and it's annoying not being able to fix or upgrade anything. In the last 10 years I've had a gaming laptop that I had to replace because just disassembling it was a several hour ordeal. It was a fairly simple fan/heatsink issue but asus support is completely useless. Now on the replacement the wireless card has crapped out but I can't replace that. They are gaming laptops too, a 5 year old one would be just fine with an upgrade to the video card. Lesson learned though, when the current one get's replaced it will probably be with something more modular.
- omni 10y ago
  > your case and power supply also becomes obsolete I've never found this to be the case, maybe it's because I try not to skimp on power supplies during my initial build. The last time I upgraded my CPU/mobo, I didn't change my case, power supply, video card, RAM, SSD, disk drives, sound card, SATA cables, or network card. Plenty of my "old" computer still works just fine.
btgeekboy 10y ago
That's one way to spin it. On the other, we're putting millions of transistors in your pocket, and connecting them with a few radios to base stations all over the world, working as one massive network. I wouldn't say we've fallen, just advanced. Components are much cheaper than they used to be, and far, far more complicated. As this project demonstrated, making interchangeable components simply isn't economical.
- apatters 10y ago
  The engineering feats are indeed remarkable! But so were the engineering feats of the desktop PC era. Previously it was unbelievable that you could make a computer small enough to sit on somebody's desk. So those guys were learning how to miniaturize things too -- and somehow, along the way, they ended up building systems that had interchangeable parts. The current crop of device manufacturers, on the other handed, punted on this goal. Is it really because this generation's engineers aren't good enough to solve an engineering problem? Is it coincidental that failure to solve this engineering problem results in higher profits? I don't think that's the case -- I think the business planners in the current generation of manufacturers saw interchangeable components as a feature which would results in consumers saving money and buying fewer new phones, gave us the middle finger and never bothered to do it.
  - pjc50 10y ago
    The history of computers is one of higher and higher levels of integration. Single transistors -> gate ICs on wiring boards -> processor with support chipset on PCB with peripherals on daughterboards -> system-on-a-chip. Each time it's improved performance and reduced cost. > failure to solve this engineering problem results in higher profits? Ultimately all engineering in a capitalist business is value engineering. Cost is not something that can be removed from the metric in people's heads which they use to choose solutions. There are only two ways I can see out of this: a move towards lease-like arrangements for phones, where the manufacturer has an incentive for something other than obsolecence; or the EU pushing WEEE harder.
    - 10y ago
Yaggo 10y ago
> You could keep systems usable for 10+ years If you change everything but the case and PSU, is it still the same system? Especially in the "golden desktop era" the pace of development was so quick that in 10 years multiple new CPU/RAm/storage standards were introduced, forcing you to upgrade pretty much everything to keep the system modern. The same applies for mobile: the hardware is so cheap and gets "old" so fast that it's not commercially viable to offer modular upgrades. E.g. if you upgrade display, you likely need to upgrade the SOC as well. PS. FairPhone is nice effort but not a modular system, they just offer easy repairability and spare parts.
- apatters 10y ago
  There's a bit of truth to this for sure but the usable life of a desktop PC was and still is much longer than that of a smartphone. A desktop PC can get a memory upgrade, a new hard drive, maybe a new graphics card, in five years it wouldn't be top of the line anymore but it'd still be something that you could put in your kid's room to hack on. In 8-10 years it might get donated to a local school. Think of that happening with a smartphone. Or even a Chromebook - Google has a 5 year end of life policy!
- zouhair 10y ago
  How much modularity do you need for the Fairphone 2 to be called modular? iFixit thinks it is quite modular[0] with it's 10/10 score. [0]: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Fairphone+2+Teardown/52523 https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Fairphone+2+Teardown/52523
izacus 10y ago
It's the tyranny of the average - just look at the responses here: "LOOK AT THAT AVERAGE USER! Yes that one! The average Joe! THIS IS what you'll use and nothing more. You don't need anything else!" -- This is the argument you hear in these kind of topics. If it's not usable for an "average user" it doesn't need to exist. No tolerance for choice on modern "free" market of electronics. It's pretty much the endgame of the hoteliering effect (Is that the right translation?) - the market converges to the point where all the players offer pretty much copy-paste services and the choice for consumer is lost, because the differences between competitors are too small. At that point the market simply ceases to function properly.
danielhooper 10y ago
> It was once a given that you could build your own device from scratch and change out any part you wanted to. You could keep systems usable for 10+ years this way and we got a generation of hardware hackers and enthusiasts who went on to make cool things. The only thing we've been able to customize to the level of extent you're talking about is desktop PCs and they have't gone away. The chances of you being able to replace your phone's battery or upgrade your laptop's RAM yourself has gone down but there is still a ton of demand for build your own PCs met with a supply of ever-improving products.

Dobbs 10y ago

I'm not sure what you are talking about. The consumers won, hackers lost. My mother (or father if he wasn't an engineer himself) doesn't care about replacing the camera, how much ram it has or replacing the battery. She wants it to work. She wants it to have an efficient battery. And when it breaks she wants to take it to the store and have them fix it or replace it. This is what Apple provides. By removing connectors between replaceable parts they are able to reduce the size and increase battery size. So on so forth. Hackers lose the ability to swap out parts and customize it to their liking but your average citizen has no clue how to replace a DIMM stick and doesn't want to care. They don't care about managing files on their phone or any of that. They want the phone to be safe from malware, they want the device to work and to be easy to use. They have chosen to specialize in something else. To understand fashion, chemistry, politics, something. Their brain power is spent on something other than how computers work. And that is ok. Our job as technologists is to empower them in that. To allow them to achieve more in their love without getting in their way by managing device drivers.

apatters 10y ago
You're reducing the entire market to fools and nerds. There's plenty of room for people in between. You didn't have to be an engineer to add more RAM to your system, you just had to be the geeky kid down the street who wasn't afraid to open up the box. Or you can at least create something open enough that a third party can service the engine, install an aftermarket exhaust upgrade, whatever. We've been making things that could be hacked since the beginning of time and the current crop of mobile device manufacturers is against it.
- uniclaude 10y ago
  This. Heck, even my mother is able to change the battery of her Samsung phone when she's out all day taking pictures, and she's as far as it gets from an engineer. Bringing the argument of "consumers want something that works" every time some are looking for a repairability/upgradeability path only leads to this false dichotomy of splitting the world between nerds and fools.
- NoGravitas 10y ago
  Yep, it's not necessarily that every customer needs to be able to upgrade/customize. It's that every customer should be able to go to the local computer shop to upgrade/customize.
Nullabillity 10y ago
> but your average citizen has no clue how to replace a DIMM stick and doesn't want to care. Sure, but it'll still be far cheaper to pay someone to replace the DIMM stick than to buy a new phone/computer/whatever. Plus there's the environmental aspect, too.
marcosdumay 10y ago
> Hackers lose the ability to swap out parts and customize it to their liking Economy of scale means that it's cheaper to include every kind of hardware anybody may want than to customize. Hackers lose the ability to swap parts, but didn't lose any single kind of (hardware) functionality that is available on the market. (Still lose anything that we invent by ourselves.) I don't call that a loss, at least not on mobile devices. We still have desktops and development boards for hacking.

usaphp 10y ago

> "You could keep systems usable for 10+ years this way" Every custom PC maker friend keeps telling me that but realistically - have anybody ever used the "upgraded" pc for 10+ years? By the time the cpu needs an upgrade - there is a new motherboard needed and your case and power supply also becomes obsolete, never mind graphics card, so you end up getting a whole new pc instead.

nipponese 10y ago
Truth.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
ikt 10y ago
I don't think it's just a static set, eg. use the PC for 10 years with completely upgradeable components or it's not worth it. I purchased my current PC case/graphics card, cpu and motherboard 5 years ago, have replaced the CPU cooler, and the SSD drives and added an audio card, upgraded the RAM and added an extra HDD. I think part of the problem is that despite smartphones being similar to desktops, they're not the same at all and have complementary but ultimately different purposes. One is suited to being upgradeable, the other isn't.
flukus 10y ago
No, I've had laptops and it's annoying not being able to fix or upgrade anything. In the last 10 years I've had a gaming laptop that I had to replace because just disassembling it was a several hour ordeal. It was a fairly simple fan/heatsink issue but asus support is completely useless. Now on the replacement the wireless card has crapped out but I can't replace that. They are gaming laptops too, a 5 year old one would be just fine with an upgrade to the video card. Lesson learned though, when the current one get's replaced it will probably be with something more modular.
omni 10y ago
> your case and power supply also becomes obsolete I've never found this to be the case, maybe it's because I try not to skimp on power supplies during my initial build. The last time I upgraded my CPU/mobo, I didn't change my case, power supply, video card, RAM, SSD, disk drives, sound card, SATA cables, or network card. Plenty of my "old" computer still works just fine.

btgeekboy 10y ago

That's one way to spin it. On the other, we're putting millions of transistors in your pocket, and connecting them with a few radios to base stations all over the world, working as one massive network. I wouldn't say we've fallen, just advanced. Components are much cheaper than they used to be, and far, far more complicated. As this project demonstrated, making interchangeable components simply isn't economical.

apatters 10y ago
The engineering feats are indeed remarkable! But so were the engineering feats of the desktop PC era. Previously it was unbelievable that you could make a computer small enough to sit on somebody's desk. So those guys were learning how to miniaturize things too -- and somehow, along the way, they ended up building systems that had interchangeable parts. The current crop of device manufacturers, on the other handed, punted on this goal. Is it really because this generation's engineers aren't good enough to solve an engineering problem? Is it coincidental that failure to solve this engineering problem results in higher profits? I don't think that's the case -- I think the business planners in the current generation of manufacturers saw interchangeable components as a feature which would results in consumers saving money and buying fewer new phones, gave us the middle finger and never bothered to do it.
- pjc50 10y ago
  The history of computers is one of higher and higher levels of integration. Single transistors -> gate ICs on wiring boards -> processor with support chipset on PCB with peripherals on daughterboards -> system-on-a-chip. Each time it's improved performance and reduced cost. > failure to solve this engineering problem results in higher profits? Ultimately all engineering in a capitalist business is value engineering. Cost is not something that can be removed from the metric in people's heads which they use to choose solutions. There are only two ways I can see out of this: a move towards lease-like arrangements for phones, where the manufacturer has an incentive for something other than obsolecence; or the EU pushing WEEE harder.
  - 10y ago

Yaggo 10y ago

> You could keep systems usable for 10+ years If you change everything but the case and PSU, is it still the same system? Especially in the "golden desktop era" the pace of development was so quick that in 10 years multiple new CPU/RAm/storage standards were introduced, forcing you to upgrade pretty much everything to keep the system modern. The same applies for mobile: the hardware is so cheap and gets "old" so fast that it's not commercially viable to offer modular upgrades. E.g. if you upgrade display, you likely need to upgrade the SOC as well. PS. FairPhone is nice effort but not a modular system, they just offer easy repairability and spare parts.

apatters 10y ago
There's a bit of truth to this for sure but the usable life of a desktop PC was and still is much longer than that of a smartphone. A desktop PC can get a memory upgrade, a new hard drive, maybe a new graphics card, in five years it wouldn't be top of the line anymore but it'd still be something that you could put in your kid's room to hack on. In 8-10 years it might get donated to a local school. Think of that happening with a smartphone. Or even a Chromebook - Google has a 5 year end of life policy!
zouhair 10y ago
How much modularity do you need for the Fairphone 2 to be called modular? iFixit thinks it is quite modular[0] with it's 10/10 score. [0]: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Fairphone+2+Teardown/52523 https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Fairphone+2+Teardown/52523

izacus 10y ago

It's the tyranny of the average - just look at the responses here: "LOOK AT THAT AVERAGE USER! Yes that one! The average Joe! THIS IS what you'll use and nothing more. You don't need anything else!" -- This is the argument you hear in these kind of topics. If it's not usable for an "average user" it doesn't need to exist. No tolerance for choice on modern "free" market of electronics. It's pretty much the endgame of the hoteliering effect (Is that the right translation?) - the market converges to the point where all the players offer pretty much copy-paste services and the choice for consumer is lost, because the differences between competitors are too small. At that point the market simply ceases to function properly.

danielhooper 10y ago

> It was once a given that you could build your own device from scratch and change out any part you wanted to. You could keep systems usable for 10+ years this way and we got a generation of hardware hackers and enthusiasts who went on to make cool things. The only thing we've been able to customize to the level of extent you're talking about is desktop PCs and they have't gone away. The chances of you being able to replace your phone's battery or upgrade your laptop's RAM yourself has gone down but there is still a ton of demand for build your own PCs met with a supply of ever-improving products.