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> 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
by 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 agoThere'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 agoHow 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