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> I literally can think of no reason I personally would want to do this Being able to swap out RAM and storage and battery from factory-provided can extend the

> I literally can think of no reason I personally would want to do this Being able to swap out RAM and storage and battery from factory-provided can extend the lifetime (and even increase the performance capacity) of a given machine at nothing more than the cost of the new parts. And Apple used to make it pretty easy to do this, and enough people did that there was a subeconomy of vendors selling for this purpose, although of course there were full-service options for people who literally couldn't imagine doing it themselves. This also meant that downtime wasn't controlled by Apple Store service availability (literally had a drive fail on me once, had my bootable backup, swapped it into the machine, good to go). And on a number of occasions I've done more complex replacements, a DVD drive here, a keyboard there. I can see why most people wouldn't want to do those, they're a giant pain, but having the option can be empowering. What's actually hard to think of, if one is thinking, is what Apple has gained in return for this. I can kinda squint and see that irregular (and therefore, perhaps, less efficiently swappable) battery shapes have some credible advantages, but the rest of the marginal ounce-gains and dimensional-golf scores belong to a category of diminishing returns.

thatwasunusual 6y ago
> Being able to swap out RAM and storage and battery from factory-provided can extend the lifetime (and even increase the performance capacity) of a given machine at nothing more than the cost of the new parts. While that is true, how many users of any kind of device actually considers that an option these days?
chongli 6y ago
Being able to swap out RAM and storage and battery from factory-provided can extend the lifetime (and even increase the performance capacity) of a given machine at nothing more than the cost of the new parts. It isn't just the cost of new parts. It's also the cost of those parts being larger in order to accommodate user-accessibility and replacement. When everything is surface-mounted on the PCB it can be made a lot smaller. This allows Apple to shrink the laptop as well as allocate more space for the battery. No one is asking for phones where we can swap out the RAM and storage. Why do we want this from laptops? I'm typing this on a 2020 Air which I configured with 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. I really don't anticipate a need to upgrade either of these things before the machine reaches end of life anyway.
- kelnos 6y ago
  > Why do we want this from laptops? Why shouldn't we? I would gladly sacrifice a few mm of thickness for a machine where I could upgrade the RAM and storage (and replace the battery) every few years. Not only would that save me money, but it's much more sustainable from a manufacturing and waste perspective. I just finally threw out my old (sadly broken) 12" G4 PowerBook, and marveled that it had a removable battery (you don't have to disassemble it; you just flip a latch on the external bit, and the battery slides out). And I remembered that at some point I'd done a trivially-easy disassembly at one point to upgrade the HDD. I got that laptop secondhand, when it was already a couple years old, and it lasted me a good five years, and probably would have lasted longer had my then-girlfriend not dropped it on concrete, which somehow fried the drive controller.
  - billyhoffman 6y ago
    The 12” powermac g4 was 4.6 lb. Yes, modern Apple laptops gave up the “brick battery that slips out with a latch.” But in place of that we have Terraced internal batteries that can fill any volume
  - chongli 6y ago
    My Air is 2.8lbs, far thinner and lighter than a 12” PowerBook G4 (which I used to own as well) with way better battery life. I don’t want to go back to an old brick of a laptop like that. I think most people don’t. You’re part of a very small niche. The tinkerer who doesn’t want to jump to Linux. This is a tiny number of people, sadly, just as the number of people who want to tinker with their cars is very small. Most people just want something that works and is very convenient. They prefer to leave the service to service people.
    - kelnos 6y ago
      > My Air is 2.8lbs, far thinner and lighter than a 12” PowerBook G4 (which I used to own as well) with way better battery life. I don’t want to go back to an old brick of a laptop like that. I think most people don’t. Not saying you'd have to. Battery technology has improved since then; we can make lighter batteries that last longer. Hard drives have been replaced by small PCBs with a few chips on them; again, much lighter. Further miniaturization of the internals means a smaller chassis which means less material; again, much lighter. It's be perfectly possible to build a laptop with similar dimensions and weight as the current crop of laptops, but allow for easier battery replacement, and even RAM/storage replacement. I'm not saying it'd be as simple to swap as it was in 2005, but it'd at least be easier/possible and not involve special tools. Apple seems to implicitly claim that their anti-repair/anti-upgrade stance is due "delighting customers" with smaller, lighter hardware, but I suspect it's mostly driven by their desire to lock down their hardware against tampering, and keep people on the upgrade/purchase treadmill every few years. > You’re part of a very small niche. The tinkerer who doesn’t want to jump to Linux. I actually do run Linux (previously on Mac hardware, but I finally gave up on it last year), so that's not the niche I'm a part of. But that's not really the point; I'm not speaking for myself, I'm speaking for average users. I see a lot of posts here claiming that average users "don't think about" this or "don't care about" that, and I posit that the average user doesn't care about an extra few millimeters of thickness or an extra few tenths of a pound of weight. Especially if it doubles or triples the useful life of the device through a RAM/storage upgrade and easy/cheap battery replacement every few years. > They prefer to leave the service to service people. That's fine too, but Apple is actively against allowing a robust, price-competitive field of independent repair shops. And even if they weren't, soldering in the RAM chips and NVMe drives means the only thing those repair shops could do would be to swap out batteries and main boards, rather than do cheap, targeted upgrades.
devonkim 6y ago
It used to be the case I would swap MacBook parts out more when laptops were simply clunkier maybe 10 years ago (added a SATA SSD back in 2010). But lately with 16 GB RAM being fine for most developers even, NVMe SSDs being standard, Macs still being lame for GPGPU tasks besides mining cryptocurrency, and a lot of compute intensive tasks simply put into the cloud ... I can’t really say I need to do many hardware updates on a Mac besides perhaps the battery anymore. What really helps me most now is battery life and better screens to reduce eye fatigue, and that’s basically what Apple has done fairly well compared to the PC laptop market. I’m kind of curious to see how usage goes for AWS Graviton 2 instances in the future as Apple laptops transition and there’s less friction to deploy along ARM based tool chains and artifacts.
ucosty 6y ago
Last time I had a laptop with replaceable ram modules, there weren't any bigger modules on the market and the cpu memory interface had a maximum capacity equal to the installed amount. I'm not sure expandable ram in laptop is all that useful, unless you intend on getting the lowest spec version and upgrading it later.

thatwasunusual 6y ago

> Being able to swap out RAM and storage and battery from factory-provided can extend the lifetime (and even increase the performance capacity) of a given machine at nothing more than the cost of the new parts. While that is true, how many users of any kind of device actually considers that an option these days?

chongli 6y ago

Being able to swap out RAM and storage and battery from factory-provided can extend the lifetime (and even increase the performance capacity) of a given machine at nothing more than the cost of the new parts. It isn't just the cost of new parts. It's also the cost of those parts being larger in order to accommodate user-accessibility and replacement. When everything is surface-mounted on the PCB it can be made a lot smaller. This allows Apple to shrink the laptop as well as allocate more space for the battery. No one is asking for phones where we can swap out the RAM and storage. Why do we want this from laptops? I'm typing this on a 2020 Air which I configured with 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. I really don't anticipate a need to upgrade either of these things before the machine reaches end of life anyway.

kelnos 6y ago
> Why do we want this from laptops? Why shouldn't we? I would gladly sacrifice a few mm of thickness for a machine where I could upgrade the RAM and storage (and replace the battery) every few years. Not only would that save me money, but it's much more sustainable from a manufacturing and waste perspective. I just finally threw out my old (sadly broken) 12" G4 PowerBook, and marveled that it had a removable battery (you don't have to disassemble it; you just flip a latch on the external bit, and the battery slides out). And I remembered that at some point I'd done a trivially-easy disassembly at one point to upgrade the HDD. I got that laptop secondhand, when it was already a couple years old, and it lasted me a good five years, and probably would have lasted longer had my then-girlfriend not dropped it on concrete, which somehow fried the drive controller.
- billyhoffman 6y ago
  The 12” powermac g4 was 4.6 lb. Yes, modern Apple laptops gave up the “brick battery that slips out with a latch.” But in place of that we have Terraced internal batteries that can fill any volume
- chongli 6y ago
  My Air is 2.8lbs, far thinner and lighter than a 12” PowerBook G4 (which I used to own as well) with way better battery life. I don’t want to go back to an old brick of a laptop like that. I think most people don’t. You’re part of a very small niche. The tinkerer who doesn’t want to jump to Linux. This is a tiny number of people, sadly, just as the number of people who want to tinker with their cars is very small. Most people just want something that works and is very convenient. They prefer to leave the service to service people.
  - kelnos 6y ago
    > My Air is 2.8lbs, far thinner and lighter than a 12” PowerBook G4 (which I used to own as well) with way better battery life. I don’t want to go back to an old brick of a laptop like that. I think most people don’t. Not saying you'd have to. Battery technology has improved since then; we can make lighter batteries that last longer. Hard drives have been replaced by small PCBs with a few chips on them; again, much lighter. Further miniaturization of the internals means a smaller chassis which means less material; again, much lighter. It's be perfectly possible to build a laptop with similar dimensions and weight as the current crop of laptops, but allow for easier battery replacement, and even RAM/storage replacement. I'm not saying it'd be as simple to swap as it was in 2005, but it'd at least be easier/possible and not involve special tools. Apple seems to implicitly claim that their anti-repair/anti-upgrade stance is due "delighting customers" with smaller, lighter hardware, but I suspect it's mostly driven by their desire to lock down their hardware against tampering, and keep people on the upgrade/purchase treadmill every few years. > You’re part of a very small niche. The tinkerer who doesn’t want to jump to Linux. I actually do run Linux (previously on Mac hardware, but I finally gave up on it last year), so that's not the niche I'm a part of. But that's not really the point; I'm not speaking for myself, I'm speaking for average users. I see a lot of posts here claiming that average users "don't think about" this or "don't care about" that, and I posit that the average user doesn't care about an extra few millimeters of thickness or an extra few tenths of a pound of weight. Especially if it doubles or triples the useful life of the device through a RAM/storage upgrade and easy/cheap battery replacement every few years. > They prefer to leave the service to service people. That's fine too, but Apple is actively against allowing a robust, price-competitive field of independent repair shops. And even if they weren't, soldering in the RAM chips and NVMe drives means the only thing those repair shops could do would be to swap out batteries and main boards, rather than do cheap, targeted upgrades.

devonkim 6y ago

It used to be the case I would swap MacBook parts out more when laptops were simply clunkier maybe 10 years ago (added a SATA SSD back in 2010). But lately with 16 GB RAM being fine for most developers even, NVMe SSDs being standard, Macs still being lame for GPGPU tasks besides mining cryptocurrency, and a lot of compute intensive tasks simply put into the cloud ... I can’t really say I need to do many hardware updates on a Mac besides perhaps the battery anymore. What really helps me most now is battery life and better screens to reduce eye fatigue, and that’s basically what Apple has done fairly well compared to the PC laptop market. I’m kind of curious to see how usage goes for AWS Graviton 2 instances in the future as Apple laptops transition and there’s less friction to deploy along ARM based tool chains and artifacts.

ucosty 6y ago

Last time I had a laptop with replaceable ram modules, there weren't any bigger modules on the market and the cpu memory interface had a maximum capacity equal to the installed amount. I'm not sure expandable ram in laptop is all that useful, unless you intend on getting the lowest spec version and upgrading it later.