9 ms·

This is a good time to bring up the fact there was never an industry-wide standardization effort for laptops. A standard form-factor means components would be r

This is a good time to bring up the fact there was never an industry-wide standardization effort for laptops. A standard form-factor means components would be re-usable between upgrades: the laptop case, power supply, monitor, keyboard, touchpad could all be re-used without any additional effort. This improves repairability, is much better for the environment, and means higher-end components can be selected with the knowledge that the cost can be spread out over a longer period. For desktop PCs, the ATX standard means that the entirety of a high-end gaming PC upgrade often consists of just a new motherboard, CPU, RAM and GPU. A 2007 Lenovo ThinkPad X61 chassis is not that different to a 1997 IBM ThinkPad chassis (or a 1997 Dell Latitude XPi chassis). If the laptop industry standardized, manufacturers would produce a vast ecosystem of compatible components. Instead we got decades of incompatible laptops using several different power supply voltages (and therefore ten slightly-differently shaped barrel power plugs), many incompatibly shaped removable lithium-ion batteries, and more expense and difficulty in sourcing parts if and when components break. A little bit of forward thinking in the late 1990s would have saved a lot of eWaste.

O_H_E 8y ago
Maybe we could try and write an open letter to companies and promise support even for less value at first. Chances are slim, but at least we would have done our part.
saagarjha 8y ago
Nobody is going to do this, because good components are a competitive advantage. I can’t see any good manufacturer wanting their good {trackpad, keyboard, case} either being put in a computer that undercuts them or being forced to dumb down their computer to fit the “lowest common denominator”.
- shasheene 8y ago
  To successfully define a laptop standard, it would have taken a consortium of companies. Likely companies which aren't necessarily in the business of selling integrated laptops themselves, but would benefit from the existence of a laptop standard. It's likely companies like Microsoft (pre-Surface), peripheral manufacturers (eg, Logitech) and motherboard manufacturers (eg, Gigabyte) would have gladly got on board in that era. It's likely too late to start this in 2019 (but I may be wrong). Certainly the late-1990s would have been the ideal time for this.
  - lapinot 8y ago
    This doesn't work if the peripheral manufacturers are themselves big players (which they are): they can already afford fighting to secure a place in the oligarchy of big players and it's not in their interest to open up space for direct competitors. Whenever you become big enough, you start to share some substantial interest with any other big company: the one of not allowing smaller producers to step in.
  - oneplane 8y ago
    Because most money is in pandering to the lowest common denominator and scale, most manufacturers are starting to make their own hardware/software integrated combo. Apple did this, Microsoft is now doing it as well. Razer is going there, and all of them are (commercially) better for it. On the other hand, it's bad for 'us' (the more hacker-y users) as we have less options. It's why so many stick with sub-optimal solutions like Apple MacBooks (they are not ideal but the other off-the-shelf options are so much worse) or custom stuff (modified Thinkpads and Dell laptops). While the former isn't ideal, it's at least standard and scalable, while the latter isn't. Not really at least.
  - hakfoo 8y ago
    As I understand it, only a handful of firms actually design their own laptops. Most of them buy from firms like Clevo or Quanta and maybe do final configuration (CPU/RAM/discs). So you'd really only need to convince them. In a way, this is much like the situation with desktops-- Dell and HP was/is big enough to come up with their own custom mainboards and cases, but most smaller shops are going to go ATX. I suspect part of the reason we didn't see much laptop standardization was that the second-tier manufacturers are weaker in the laptop sector than desktop, as well as being weaker as a whole than they were in 2000 when ATX was becoming a thing. Outside of a few narrow gaming and workstation niches, there are few use cases where you can't find a suitable big-brand laptop, so the second-tier brands (and the manufacturers that supply them) are in a position of fighting for scraps, not one where they can start promoting the benefits of standardization. This is likely worsened by the mindset that laptops are unupgradeable-- people bought ATX desktops figuring they'd buy new mainboards in 3 years, but generally assume the laptop is going to be stuck in place.
- elif 8y ago
  Incorrect. That happens with desktop PC's. The reason it hasnt happened in laptops is you would have to compromise size and form
ekianjo 8y ago
> A standard form-factor means components would be re-usable between upgrades We don't even have to go that far. Just ensuring that laptops can be serviced by their own users would go a long way to reduce e-waste. i.e. not soldering RAM chips to the motherboard, making it feasible to remove every single part (not gluing the keyboard to the MB for example), etc... instead of pursuing an ever thinner laptop design, which has practically no use.
- hopler 8y ago
  Consumers prefer super-thin soldered machines, sadly. The proof is in the shopping.
  - pilsetnieks 8y ago
    Not always, sometimes you cannot see the proof because a company just doesn't offer any other options. If there was a modern laptop that ran macOS that was user upgradeable, I would absolutely get it in my next upgrade cycle. Alas, there isn't one. Also companies aren't always superrational logic machines that have coldly calculated their every more; there's sometimes a lot of collective delusion going on that can leave their consumers in the cold, who then just make do with the best out of a bad lot that's offered. Recall the recent iPhones - suddenly every other phone had a notch even when it served no purpose; or the removal of audio jacks, for example. There was NO consumer preference expressed there, just one company that decided it that way for its own purposes, and others blindly copying it.
    - sharno 8y ago
      I'm not by any means knowledgeable on the hardware design front. But I think the notch was a hardware design solution to a problem (I'm not sure what it is but probably to fit more components or save space inside the phone for something) and all the others copied it because it was a clever solution to an existing problem and it didn't appear to affect users much.
  - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    Consumers "prefer" what the billions of pounds spent on marketing tells them to prefer. If companies spent money telling consumers to value upgradability and not to buy new stuff all the time, then we'd value that more .. but that doesn't sell more stuff, it just helps save the planet, so why bother ....
lapinot 8y ago
This would allow smaller players to step in and to start grinding some market shares of the big players. It would also turn the laptop market from a high margin market to a low margin one. Standardization is just not in the interest of any big player so it's probably never gonna happen. If you are a small player and want to go that direction you're probably gonna be bought out. The only way i see would be to somehow get pervasive open standards and libre schematics implementing them, and then cut out the big players and get several manufacturers to produce them. But that too is hardly gonna happen because of geopolitical problems: most of these manufacturers are domiciled in china and thus this move would cut to much income from western (and korean, japanese) countries. So for that to happen we would have to relocate some manufacturing industry and somehow not put them in the hands of any of our local big players. The problem here is not some problematic business decisions by companies, it's how we organized our economy. It would take radical changes in the economic/industrial policy to make that happen: much stronger anti-trust laws, which would keep companies smaller and force cooperation; public- instead of private-regulated prices so that you don't die to foreign companies' exportation when you start doing that; etc. This would drive cooperation up in all of the economy, take power away from multinationals, reduce waste, hinder "useless innovation". Long road ahead but i think that's what we need and that's what gonna happen at some point anyway: the capitalistic class may still be floating currently, but at some point the systemic crisis (financial instability, natural disasters, political instability, scarcity of energy and other basic resources) is gonna hit them too. What we have to make sure is that they don't get more out-of-sync with that than they currently are.
- dd36 8y ago
  It’s interesting how competition used to be encouraged in the U.S. and now it’s pretty much the opposite. It’s all about consolidation, oligopolies and monopolies. If standards lower margins and make entering easier, that’s what should be regulated for.
  - lapinot 8y ago
    Adding more competition isn't an answer, because competition is about individual profit, thus monopoly. Neo-liberalism, global free market etc do encourage a world-wide competition: it's already the current trend. What you probably mean is some kind of "healthy/fair competition": the fact we need to add another adjective hints that this is about doing something to balance it. I argue this is about encouraging cooperation. A good balance between both leads to interdependence, which is exactly what we would like: a state where everyone has some possibility of moving around a bit, but where nobody is free to ignore what people they interact with have to say. A ref i really want to push: "Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution" (1902, Kropotkine). There is a whole part mostly about the evolutionary analysis of altruism (the rest is about analyzing several human social orders throughout history: pre-medieval villages, medieval cities and 19c industrial cities).
peterwwillis 8y ago
There was a trend for a while of making business/power laptops much more configurable (I have an old Dell with a hard drive cage that swaps out without removing any screws). But most laptops are more about form rather than function; their design requires reworking all the internals to prevent getting a big clunky heavy box that overheats. For very low-power machines you might have tons of internal space free, but more powerful laptops need complex heat management in addition to reducing size and weight. It's only now that we have very advanced fabrication techniques and energy-saving designs that we no longer have to hyper-focus on heat exchange. If size and heat and weight weren't a factor, you can bet that a standard would have arose to manage interchanging parts. But soldered ram is a good example of why that's just not necessary, and can be counter-productive for reducing cost and maximizing form factor.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
hopler 8y ago
The LG Gram teardown on iFixit was amazing. It's "moderately difficult" to remove almost everything including the trackpad and parts I forgot existed. https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/LG+Gram+15-Inch+Repairability+Assessment/79142 https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/LG+Gram+15-Inch+Repairability+A...
- duado 8y ago
  That’s crazy. I have one and it seems impossibly light for its power. It’s an absolutely nuts achievement.
Pamar 8y ago
It did not happen for phones either. Why should this be different? Maybe laptops now are mature enough as a product that what you suggest could be feasible but it is too late for business reasons, now.
reaperducer 8y ago
For desktop PCs, the ATX standard means that the entirety of a high-end gaming PC upgrade often consists of just a new motherboard, CPU, RAM and GPU. And that's great, if you're into generic beige boxes. It's been years since I put together my own IBM compatible computers. But in the time since then, I haven't really seen any innovation in desktops. Yes, for a while the processor numbers ticked up, but then plateaued. Graphics cards push the limits, but that has zero to do with the ATX standard, and more to do with using GPUs for non-graphics computation. The laptop and mobile sectors seem to be what is driving SSD adoption, high DPI displays, power-conscious design, advanced cooling, smaller components, improved imaging input, reliable fingerprint reading, face recognition for security, smaller interchangeable ports, the move from spinning media to solid state or streaming, and probably other things that I can't remember off the top of my head. Even if you think Apple's touchbar was a disaster, it's the kind of risk that wouldn't be taken in the Wintel desktop industry. All we've gotten from the desktop side in the last 20 years is more elaborate giant plastic enclosures, LED lights inside the computer, and...? I'm not sure. Even liquid cooling was in laptops in the early part of this century. Again, I haven't built a desktop in a long time, so if I'm off base I'd like to hear a list of desktop innovations enabled by the ATX standard. But my observation is that ATX is a pickup truck, and laptops are a Tesla.
- jchw 8y ago
  >And that's great, if you're into generic beige boxes. >All we've gotten from the desktop side in the last 20 years is more elaborate giant plastic enclosures, LED lights inside the computer, and...? Have you ever built an ATX computer? I assure you, there are plenty of different standard form factor cases out there. The beige box thing was in vogue in the 90s, but today the big trends are sleek black with tempered glass. And standard form factor desktop does not equal giant tower. You could also do a mini ITX build, a standard that's been around since 2001 for what it's worth. High DPI displays? This implies high end displays weren't available to desktops first (they were.) A decent CRT could produce much higher DPI than LCDs could (in that era.) Part of the reason why Windows DPI independence sucks is because Microsoft implemented it super early in, without all of the insights Apple had to do it right, and now there's like 4 different DPI mechanisms in Windows. All in all I'm not sure what really needs "innovating" so badly with desktop form factor. Do we need to solder our RAM to the main board, is that "innovation?" You kind of say it yourself: >that has zero to do with the ATX standard, So would be the case for any form factor standard. It only dictates how things interoperate.
alfonsodev 8y ago
At least for phones there is Phoneblocks[1] they are now part of Google's project Ara. Maybe it could evolve to a laptop experience if blocks get powerful enough and somebody develops compatible chasis. *update: The project Ara was cancelled in 2016 [2]. [1] https://phonebloks.com https://phonebloks.com [2] https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/2/12775922/google-project-ara-modular-phone-suspended-confirm https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/2/12775922/google-project-ar...
- shinryuu 8y ago
  Project Ara is no more...
  - alfonsodev 8y ago
    :( exactly I was coming to update my comment https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/2/12775922/google-project-ara-modular-phone-suspended-confirm https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/2/12775922/google-project-ar... Seems they cancelled it.
benbristow 8y ago
How are the laptop companies meant to force you to buy a new one every so often if you can just keep upgrading them?
ako 8y ago
Because size and weight is an important distinctive feature for laptops. Customers pay more for smaller, lighter laptops. Using standardized components and chassis would mean a big competitive disadvantage.
alkonaut 8y ago
Some parts such as batteries, storage, ram etc should at least be a standardized. Manufacturers probably don’t want to standardize on the remaining motherboard/graphics/chassis/cooling because a laptop isn’t like an atx computer where you get modularity at the expense of wasted space. A laptop is basically a 3D puzzle with thermal components. Few consumers would buy a laptop with even a little wasted volume or weight, even if it meant better serviceability and upgradeability. Same with phones. We aren’t going to see modular phones beyond the concept stage either.
- ryacko 8y ago
  I just wish there was a portable all-in-one PC with modular components (since vertical parts don’t need as much testing as horizontal). But surplus laptops are in such quantity that I’d be fine replacing my tablet with a laptop.
  - WrtCdEvrydy 8y ago
    You can get mini-ITX cases that are smaller than console sized with full sized graphics cards inside... they cost like $300 bucks though :(
    - Kurtz79 8y ago
      Not really, they are mostly around 100 bucks, some have integrated PSUs and might be >200, but 300$ seems like a lot to me. I'm using a Silverstone ML08 (about 100$ at the time), which is slightly bigger than a PS4 pro but fits a full length, double slot GPU. The ML05 is even smaller, costs about 50$ but fits only a single-slot GPU.
      - WrtCdEvrydy 8y ago
        I might be getting one of these.
  - hakfoo 8y ago
    There's always beem a trickle of machines like that. The problem is that they're targeted towards industrial usage and RIOTOUSLY expensive. https://www.bsicomputer.com/products/fieldgo-m9-1760 https://www.bsicomputer.com/products/fieldgo-m9-1760 for example (the first vendor I saw that actually shows prices, as opposed to just request-for-quote) It starts at nearly $2400 for a low-spec Celeron, and I'm not sure it even has an onboard battery. What I could see as viable would be a micro-ATX case of similar dimensions, sold as a barebones for like $300-- use the extra volume from not accommodating ATX mainboards to store batteries and charging circuitry, which can be off the shelf because space constraints are minimal. Pop in some reasonably priced desktop components, and you'd have a competent luggable for under $1000.
caycep 8y ago
My experience has been limited by the fact that components increase at the same rate, and to get everything to place nice(r) with each other, you have to upgrade everything. "A new motherboard, CPU, RAM and GPU" is almost buying an entirely new computer. You save a few hundred bucks by keeping the PSU (or maybe change it too after 5 years) and casing, assuming the ports didn't change.
- shasheene 8y ago
  Being able to continue to use the display, keyboard, mouse/trackpad means you can choose higher-end components. Even if you don't want to keep your widescreen DVI display from 2008, the interoperability means that when you drop it off at a e-waste center, it's more likely to be reused in its current state for a few more years, rather than immediately recycled (reduce, reuse, recycle!) I do agree there is some degree of changes in interfaces overtime (like IDE to SATA to NVMe M.2), but if you build a system for a similar intended use case the changes within any given 5 year period are small. This means the upgrades you do over a 15 year period will go from a 2.5" platter drive to a 2.5" SATA drive, or from 800x600 to 1024x768 resolution display, but not both at the same time (with a different but significant set of components being shared every upgrade)
ssnistfajen 8y ago
Novel form factors are often how laptop manufacturers distinguish themselves from their competitors. There is enough space within a desktop PC case to formalize a standard. As laptops get thinner and thinner, however, many engineering/layout tweaks are used to fit stuff within a thin chasis. Standardizing across different device models would be asking OEMs to stop putting efforts into competing with each other. And I say this as someone who has just had a catastrophic motherboard failure on their 8-months-old laptop and had to do a replacement that would've cost me a new laptop if outside warranty.
twblalock 8y ago
Standardization limits innovation. If we had standardized on laptop form factors in the late 1990s all laptops would still be an inch and a half thick, and all screens would still be 4:3.
- uxp 8y ago
  I doubt this. The standard ATX form factor has been upgraded to reduce size over various years with the vast majority of accepted iterations maintaining the same mounting hole and IO panel locations. I literally have a mini-ITX board sitting in a case I purchased in 1999. This probably fits more into the fear you state in your comment with a reasonably new technology "forced" to consume more space than is necessary, but I think it argues for the opposite by showing that incremental changes to a standard format can allow for wide ranging compatibilities. For an example, when ATX was altered by squaring the board to the shortest length (microATX), it didn't require a new case or a new power supply to be placed on the market in order to be consumed because it fit within the "too big" ATX case. Then when cases that only fit microATXe became abundant and another incremental change to the motherboard size to DTX, we again didn't have to release new cases or power supplies or IO cards to start to consume this version. It allowed consumers to purchase and use the boards until they decided they wanted to reduce their case size, amortizing the upgrade costs over months instead of requiring larger up front payments.

O_H_E 8y ago

Maybe we could try and write an open letter to companies and promise support even for less value at first. Chances are slim, but at least we would have done our part.

saagarjha 8y ago

Nobody is going to do this, because good components are a competitive advantage. I can’t see any good manufacturer wanting their good {trackpad, keyboard, case} either being put in a computer that undercuts them or being forced to dumb down their computer to fit the “lowest common denominator”.

shasheene 8y ago
To successfully define a laptop standard, it would have taken a consortium of companies. Likely companies which aren't necessarily in the business of selling integrated laptops themselves, but would benefit from the existence of a laptop standard. It's likely companies like Microsoft (pre-Surface), peripheral manufacturers (eg, Logitech) and motherboard manufacturers (eg, Gigabyte) would have gladly got on board in that era. It's likely too late to start this in 2019 (but I may be wrong). Certainly the late-1990s would have been the ideal time for this.
- lapinot 8y ago
  This doesn't work if the peripheral manufacturers are themselves big players (which they are): they can already afford fighting to secure a place in the oligarchy of big players and it's not in their interest to open up space for direct competitors. Whenever you become big enough, you start to share some substantial interest with any other big company: the one of not allowing smaller producers to step in.
- oneplane 8y ago
  Because most money is in pandering to the lowest common denominator and scale, most manufacturers are starting to make their own hardware/software integrated combo. Apple did this, Microsoft is now doing it as well. Razer is going there, and all of them are (commercially) better for it. On the other hand, it's bad for 'us' (the more hacker-y users) as we have less options. It's why so many stick with sub-optimal solutions like Apple MacBooks (they are not ideal but the other off-the-shelf options are so much worse) or custom stuff (modified Thinkpads and Dell laptops). While the former isn't ideal, it's at least standard and scalable, while the latter isn't. Not really at least.
- hakfoo 8y ago
  As I understand it, only a handful of firms actually design their own laptops. Most of them buy from firms like Clevo or Quanta and maybe do final configuration (CPU/RAM/discs). So you'd really only need to convince them. In a way, this is much like the situation with desktops-- Dell and HP was/is big enough to come up with their own custom mainboards and cases, but most smaller shops are going to go ATX. I suspect part of the reason we didn't see much laptop standardization was that the second-tier manufacturers are weaker in the laptop sector than desktop, as well as being weaker as a whole than they were in 2000 when ATX was becoming a thing. Outside of a few narrow gaming and workstation niches, there are few use cases where you can't find a suitable big-brand laptop, so the second-tier brands (and the manufacturers that supply them) are in a position of fighting for scraps, not one where they can start promoting the benefits of standardization. This is likely worsened by the mindset that laptops are unupgradeable-- people bought ATX desktops figuring they'd buy new mainboards in 3 years, but generally assume the laptop is going to be stuck in place.
elif 8y ago
Incorrect. That happens with desktop PC's. The reason it hasnt happened in laptops is you would have to compromise size and form

ekianjo 8y ago

> A standard form-factor means components would be re-usable between upgrades We don't even have to go that far. Just ensuring that laptops can be serviced by their own users would go a long way to reduce e-waste. i.e. not soldering RAM chips to the motherboard, making it feasible to remove every single part (not gluing the keyboard to the MB for example), etc... instead of pursuing an ever thinner laptop design, which has practically no use.

hopler 8y ago
Consumers prefer super-thin soldered machines, sadly. The proof is in the shopping.
- pilsetnieks 8y ago
  Not always, sometimes you cannot see the proof because a company just doesn't offer any other options. If there was a modern laptop that ran macOS that was user upgradeable, I would absolutely get it in my next upgrade cycle. Alas, there isn't one. Also companies aren't always superrational logic machines that have coldly calculated their every more; there's sometimes a lot of collective delusion going on that can leave their consumers in the cold, who then just make do with the best out of a bad lot that's offered. Recall the recent iPhones - suddenly every other phone had a notch even when it served no purpose; or the removal of audio jacks, for example. There was NO consumer preference expressed there, just one company that decided it that way for its own purposes, and others blindly copying it.
  - sharno 8y ago
    I'm not by any means knowledgeable on the hardware design front. But I think the notch was a hardware design solution to a problem (I'm not sure what it is but probably to fit more components or save space inside the phone for something) and all the others copied it because it was a clever solution to an existing problem and it didn't appear to affect users much.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  Consumers "prefer" what the billions of pounds spent on marketing tells them to prefer. If companies spent money telling consumers to value upgradability and not to buy new stuff all the time, then we'd value that more .. but that doesn't sell more stuff, it just helps save the planet, so why bother ....

lapinot 8y ago

This would allow smaller players to step in and to start grinding some market shares of the big players. It would also turn the laptop market from a high margin market to a low margin one. Standardization is just not in the interest of any big player so it's probably never gonna happen. If you are a small player and want to go that direction you're probably gonna be bought out. The only way i see would be to somehow get pervasive open standards and libre schematics implementing them, and then cut out the big players and get several manufacturers to produce them. But that too is hardly gonna happen because of geopolitical problems: most of these manufacturers are domiciled in china and thus this move would cut to much income from western (and korean, japanese) countries. So for that to happen we would have to relocate some manufacturing industry and somehow not put them in the hands of any of our local big players. The problem here is not some problematic business decisions by companies, it's how we organized our economy. It would take radical changes in the economic/industrial policy to make that happen: much stronger anti-trust laws, which would keep companies smaller and force cooperation; public- instead of private-regulated prices so that you don't die to foreign companies' exportation when you start doing that; etc. This would drive cooperation up in all of the economy, take power away from multinationals, reduce waste, hinder "useless innovation". Long road ahead but i think that's what we need and that's what gonna happen at some point anyway: the capitalistic class may still be floating currently, but at some point the systemic crisis (financial instability, natural disasters, political instability, scarcity of energy and other basic resources) is gonna hit them too. What we have to make sure is that they don't get more out-of-sync with that than they currently are.

dd36 8y ago
It’s interesting how competition used to be encouraged in the U.S. and now it’s pretty much the opposite. It’s all about consolidation, oligopolies and monopolies. If standards lower margins and make entering easier, that’s what should be regulated for.
- lapinot 8y ago
  Adding more competition isn't an answer, because competition is about individual profit, thus monopoly. Neo-liberalism, global free market etc do encourage a world-wide competition: it's already the current trend. What you probably mean is some kind of "healthy/fair competition": the fact we need to add another adjective hints that this is about doing something to balance it. I argue this is about encouraging cooperation. A good balance between both leads to interdependence, which is exactly what we would like: a state where everyone has some possibility of moving around a bit, but where nobody is free to ignore what people they interact with have to say. A ref i really want to push: "Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution" (1902, Kropotkine). There is a whole part mostly about the evolutionary analysis of altruism (the rest is about analyzing several human social orders throughout history: pre-medieval villages, medieval cities and 19c industrial cities).

peterwwillis 8y ago

There was a trend for a while of making business/power laptops much more configurable (I have an old Dell with a hard drive cage that swaps out without removing any screws). But most laptops are more about form rather than function; their design requires reworking all the internals to prevent getting a big clunky heavy box that overheats. For very low-power machines you might have tons of internal space free, but more powerful laptops need complex heat management in addition to reducing size and weight. It's only now that we have very advanced fabrication techniques and energy-saving designs that we no longer have to hyper-focus on heat exchange. If size and heat and weight weren't a factor, you can bet that a standard would have arose to manage interchanging parts. But soldered ram is a good example of why that's just not necessary, and can be counter-productive for reducing cost and maximizing form factor.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

hopler 8y ago

The LG Gram teardown on iFixit was amazing. It's "moderately difficult" to remove almost everything including the trackpad and parts I forgot existed. https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/LG+Gram+15-Inch+Repairability+Assessment/79142 https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/LG+Gram+15-Inch+Repairability+A...

duado 8y ago
That’s crazy. I have one and it seems impossibly light for its power. It’s an absolutely nuts achievement.

Pamar 8y ago

It did not happen for phones either. Why should this be different? Maybe laptops now are mature enough as a product that what you suggest could be feasible but it is too late for business reasons, now.

reaperducer 8y ago

For desktop PCs, the ATX standard means that the entirety of a high-end gaming PC upgrade often consists of just a new motherboard, CPU, RAM and GPU. And that's great, if you're into generic beige boxes. It's been years since I put together my own IBM compatible computers. But in the time since then, I haven't really seen any innovation in desktops. Yes, for a while the processor numbers ticked up, but then plateaued. Graphics cards push the limits, but that has zero to do with the ATX standard, and more to do with using GPUs for non-graphics computation. The laptop and mobile sectors seem to be what is driving SSD adoption, high DPI displays, power-conscious design, advanced cooling, smaller components, improved imaging input, reliable fingerprint reading, face recognition for security, smaller interchangeable ports, the move from spinning media to solid state or streaming, and probably other things that I can't remember off the top of my head. Even if you think Apple's touchbar was a disaster, it's the kind of risk that wouldn't be taken in the Wintel desktop industry. All we've gotten from the desktop side in the last 20 years is more elaborate giant plastic enclosures, LED lights inside the computer, and...? I'm not sure. Even liquid cooling was in laptops in the early part of this century. Again, I haven't built a desktop in a long time, so if I'm off base I'd like to hear a list of desktop innovations enabled by the ATX standard. But my observation is that ATX is a pickup truck, and laptops are a Tesla.

jchw 8y ago
>And that's great, if you're into generic beige boxes. >All we've gotten from the desktop side in the last 20 years is more elaborate giant plastic enclosures, LED lights inside the computer, and...? Have you ever built an ATX computer? I assure you, there are plenty of different standard form factor cases out there. The beige box thing was in vogue in the 90s, but today the big trends are sleek black with tempered glass. And standard form factor desktop does not equal giant tower. You could also do a mini ITX build, a standard that's been around since 2001 for what it's worth. High DPI displays? This implies high end displays weren't available to desktops first (they were.) A decent CRT could produce much higher DPI than LCDs could (in that era.) Part of the reason why Windows DPI independence sucks is because Microsoft implemented it super early in, without all of the insights Apple had to do it right, and now there's like 4 different DPI mechanisms in Windows. All in all I'm not sure what really needs "innovating" so badly with desktop form factor. Do we need to solder our RAM to the main board, is that "innovation?" You kind of say it yourself: >that has zero to do with the ATX standard, So would be the case for any form factor standard. It only dictates how things interoperate.

alfonsodev 8y ago

At least for phones there is Phoneblocks[1] they are now part of Google's project Ara. Maybe it could evolve to a laptop experience if blocks get powerful enough and somebody develops compatible chasis. *update: The project Ara was cancelled in 2016 [2]. [1] https://phonebloks.com https://phonebloks.com [2] https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/2/12775922/google-project-ara-modular-phone-suspended-confirm https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/2/12775922/google-project-ar...

shinryuu 8y ago
Project Ara is no more...
- alfonsodev 8y ago
  :( exactly I was coming to update my comment https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/2/12775922/google-project-ara-modular-phone-suspended-confirm https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/2/12775922/google-project-ar... Seems they cancelled it.

benbristow 8y ago

How are the laptop companies meant to force you to buy a new one every so often if you can just keep upgrading them?

ako 8y ago

Because size and weight is an important distinctive feature for laptops. Customers pay more for smaller, lighter laptops. Using standardized components and chassis would mean a big competitive disadvantage.

alkonaut 8y ago

Some parts such as batteries, storage, ram etc should at least be a standardized. Manufacturers probably don’t want to standardize on the remaining motherboard/graphics/chassis/cooling because a laptop isn’t like an atx computer where you get modularity at the expense of wasted space. A laptop is basically a 3D puzzle with thermal components. Few consumers would buy a laptop with even a little wasted volume or weight, even if it meant better serviceability and upgradeability. Same with phones. We aren’t going to see modular phones beyond the concept stage either.

ryacko 8y ago
I just wish there was a portable all-in-one PC with modular components (since vertical parts don’t need as much testing as horizontal). But surplus laptops are in such quantity that I’d be fine replacing my tablet with a laptop.
- WrtCdEvrydy 8y ago
  You can get mini-ITX cases that are smaller than console sized with full sized graphics cards inside... they cost like $300 bucks though :(
  - Kurtz79 8y ago
    Not really, they are mostly around 100 bucks, some have integrated PSUs and might be >200, but 300$ seems like a lot to me. I'm using a Silverstone ML08 (about 100$ at the time), which is slightly bigger than a PS4 pro but fits a full length, double slot GPU. The ML05 is even smaller, costs about 50$ but fits only a single-slot GPU.
    - WrtCdEvrydy 8y ago
      I might be getting one of these.
- hakfoo 8y ago
  There's always beem a trickle of machines like that. The problem is that they're targeted towards industrial usage and RIOTOUSLY expensive. https://www.bsicomputer.com/products/fieldgo-m9-1760 https://www.bsicomputer.com/products/fieldgo-m9-1760 for example (the first vendor I saw that actually shows prices, as opposed to just request-for-quote) It starts at nearly $2400 for a low-spec Celeron, and I'm not sure it even has an onboard battery. What I could see as viable would be a micro-ATX case of similar dimensions, sold as a barebones for like $300-- use the extra volume from not accommodating ATX mainboards to store batteries and charging circuitry, which can be off the shelf because space constraints are minimal. Pop in some reasonably priced desktop components, and you'd have a competent luggable for under $1000.

caycep 8y ago

My experience has been limited by the fact that components increase at the same rate, and to get everything to place nice(r) with each other, you have to upgrade everything. "A new motherboard, CPU, RAM and GPU" is almost buying an entirely new computer. You save a few hundred bucks by keeping the PSU (or maybe change it too after 5 years) and casing, assuming the ports didn't change.

shasheene 8y ago
Being able to continue to use the display, keyboard, mouse/trackpad means you can choose higher-end components. Even if you don't want to keep your widescreen DVI display from 2008, the interoperability means that when you drop it off at a e-waste center, it's more likely to be reused in its current state for a few more years, rather than immediately recycled (reduce, reuse, recycle!) I do agree there is some degree of changes in interfaces overtime (like IDE to SATA to NVMe M.2), but if you build a system for a similar intended use case the changes within any given 5 year period are small. This means the upgrades you do over a 15 year period will go from a 2.5" platter drive to a 2.5" SATA drive, or from 800x600 to 1024x768 resolution display, but not both at the same time (with a different but significant set of components being shared every upgrade)

ssnistfajen 8y ago

Novel form factors are often how laptop manufacturers distinguish themselves from their competitors. There is enough space within a desktop PC case to formalize a standard. As laptops get thinner and thinner, however, many engineering/layout tweaks are used to fit stuff within a thin chasis. Standardizing across different device models would be asking OEMs to stop putting efforts into competing with each other. And I say this as someone who has just had a catastrophic motherboard failure on their 8-months-old laptop and had to do a replacement that would've cost me a new laptop if outside warranty.

twblalock 8y ago

Standardization limits innovation. If we had standardized on laptop form factors in the late 1990s all laptops would still be an inch and a half thick, and all screens would still be 4:3.

uxp 8y ago
I doubt this. The standard ATX form factor has been upgraded to reduce size over various years with the vast majority of accepted iterations maintaining the same mounting hole and IO panel locations. I literally have a mini-ITX board sitting in a case I purchased in 1999. This probably fits more into the fear you state in your comment with a reasonably new technology "forced" to consume more space than is necessary, but I think it argues for the opposite by showing that incremental changes to a standard format can allow for wide ranging compatibilities. For an example, when ATX was altered by squaring the board to the shortest length (microATX), it didn't require a new case or a new power supply to be placed on the market in order to be consumed because it fit within the "too big" ATX case. Then when cases that only fit microATXe became abundant and another incremental change to the motherboard size to DTX, we again didn't have to release new cases or power supplies or IO cards to start to consume this version. It allowed consumers to purchase and use the boards until they decided they wanted to reduce their case size, amortizing the upgrade costs over months instead of requiring larger up front payments.