11 ms·
Silly idea in tech, the hardware will be long outdated before someone look for parts which are going to be overpriced, and the company might be gone forever. Yo
by GhettoComputers 5y ago
Silly idea in tech, the hardware will be long outdated before someone look for parts which are going to be overpriced, and the company might be gone forever. You can buy common business laptops such as thinkpad and swap the parts easily and cheaply. People aren’t swapping their 2011 i3 for a 2011 i7 if they care about performance; they’re getting an i5 from 2018.
None of these swappable parts are unique aside from the processor (mine is soldered), I can replace all my parts and my laptop cost under $200.
- fartcannon 5y agoThinkpads are owned by Lenovo, a known bad actor who installed, for example, rootkits on their own hardware.
- GhettoComputers 5y agoNever the thinkpad.
- smoldesu 5y agoIf something comes preinstalled with Windows on it, it's going to be rootkitted anyways. There's also an argument to be made where we assume all commercial OSes are backdoored, but I think at this point playing the "muh security" card is a bit of a ruse. If you care about the stuff, you've already installed LTSC/Linux/BSD/Some special Windows distro.
- throwaway2048 5y agoit wasn't about pre-installed windows software, it was about software embedded in UEFI that reinstalled itself on windows even with a clean fresh non-lenovo provided installation of windows.
- thrashh 5y agoI give them a pass because their actions seem come from stupidity rather than maliciousness. Also while this was going on, they never did any of this to Thinkpads.
- aaomidi 5y agoIt also means that you can keep the same shell while changing other components to upgrade it, yknow, like desktops.
- GhettoComputers 5y agoI have the same shell/case.
- cyberbanjo 5y agoAnd the used 2011 i3, that wouldn't become garbage if it were repairable would get sold to someone less performance / price consciousness? Now it gets trashed.
- GhettoComputers 5y agoNope, nobody wants it. You can try to sell it though. People don’t want even a free processor that needs an expensive mobo they’ll need to buy our own when they can get a much better ryzen board and a cheap processor that will trounce it. Nobody wants these old processors, many are so useless they’re being drilled for keychains.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- throwaway946513 5y agoWhile I certainly can't speak for everyone - I've had a 2011 Dell Inspiron that I upgraded from the i5-2450m to an i7-2670qm a couple years ago. Additionally the RAM and HDD were upgraded/swapped for SSDs. The computer now lives with my mom, who needs a simple but reliable device. The i5 was sold on ebay for a few bucks to some lad or lasse who may have needed it for a cheap laptop build. Decade old computers aren't vastly different from today in terms of day to day use. Capabilities and high performance is one thing, but using devices longer, and upgrading entire systems less frequently is both better for your wallet, and better for the environment.
- GhettoComputers 5y agoI agree, performance hasn’t changed much. But they’re relying on old motherboards which are way more fragile. How often does your mother use that computer? Did the performance matter to her at all? Even if you swapped it back to the old i5 with the SSD I doubt much of a difference would be noticed.
- BoorishBears 5y agoThe other comment points it out correctly, no one wants it price conscious or not. Between the fact that many of them work without issue for years, and the fact that an new equivalent to your 2011 i3 becomes exponentially cheaper over time, repairing it will never be worth it. A Raspberry PI 4 is a functional computer but costs less than just the CPU of that i3 based machine while trouncing it in performance and power efficiency. https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i3-2100 https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i3-2100 https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/16396722 https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/16396722
- varispeed 5y agoIf you can't buy parts from 3rd parties e.g. you can't source chips or connectors etc. on Mouser, then I can't see how this is much different from Apple. Just because manufacturer sells parts themselves (thus avoiding spending money on good repair service), probably won't save you much money considering you will have to spend your own time and make effort to fix it yourself. Nonetheless, any move into more repair friendly product is welcome.
- jaywalk 5y agoFramework's hardware is entirely open source (https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/ExpansionCards https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/ExpansionCards) so you can buy parts from any third-party that wants to produce them.
- GhettoComputers 5y agoThat just reminds me of Alienware’s open modular GPU cards or the open nanoSD cards from Huawei, both of which are open and nobody wants to make or use in their own products. It’s open but there isn’t any incentive for anyone else to make some niche parts for a single laptop brand.
- liminalsunset 5y agoThey have open sourced a development toolkit for making expansion card modules but the motherboard itself is not open source. You can, however get schematics if you are a "repair shop", under NDA, however they define that.
- userbinator 5y agoI hope the schematics leak, just like they do for many other laptops.
- varispeed 5y agoEntirely? That's just for expansions which are essentially USB-C dongles.
- 5y ago
- unethical_ban 5y ago"It's a silly idea in tech, my computer does the same thing". Framework may not be for the purpose of upgrading a laptop incrementally for ten years, but it has the core competency of intending to let you repair every component of your laptop as needed, while having the profile of a slim but powerful machine. They are the anti-apple from that perspective. Your $200 laptop is not as good as the Framework laptop. You either bought a Chromebook, or you bought used meaning someone else ate depreciation, or you're comparing apples to oranges.
- GhettoComputers 5y agoI use a used business laptop. My programs don’t care if their being run off depreciated hardware. Even if you bought a new one you’d still have access to all these cheap replacement parts and common skus. It’s still better for replacing parts cheaply and easily. If you want a repairable device for cheap, you aren’t going to buy new devices from new unknown companies that have a monopoly over the parts production. The aftermarket for iPhone batteries is so good it doesn’t matter if they’re proprietary batteries over open batteries nobody has. Even PinePhone piggybacks off Samsung batteries.
- funnyflamigo 5y agoI disagree. My thinkpad x230t is still going strong nearly 10 years later (extreme example). With 16GB of ram and an SSD it's still a decently capable machine. If you're the type of person that needs the _fastest_ computer then yeah obviously you're upgrading every year. Or if you work on large codebases, etc. But if you don't care about that, you can easily go 4+ years with your laptop. Yes computers have gotten faster, but the internet is still usable on a 10 year old machine. I've replaced my battery once already, but consider your keyboard/screen are likely things to break at any point in time with accidents. And we're comparing this to apple, a company that has been basically DRM'ing components - even if you can buy the replacement you can't use it without it being "programmed" by apple. EDIT: Also note that the bare minimum models from 10 years ago are likely too slow nowadays, I mean to compare this to the medium-upper range devices of the time, potentially with relatively low cost upgrades like an SSD.
- narraturgy 5y agoThis is a tangential question. I adore my Thinkpad x230t but it has a whopping ~1 hour battery life at this point. Do you leave yours permanently plugged in or do you have some sort of modern battery solution for our ancient beast with an amazing keyboard?
- rxhernandez 5y agoI ended up just buying a new battery for my t540p. I was reluctant to because I didn't think it could possibly last much longer with the abuse it's been subjected to, but, it's still going strong a year later.
- GhettoComputers 5y agoThey’re so much cheaper than the 2013 ones. I love the new battery platform.
- javchz 5y agoThat's the reason I jumped to the T430. Same CPU, but can get a 70++ battery for 6-9 hours worth of battery, but kinda the same concept. The only bad thing, you need to mod the keyboard for an t420 for the vintage thinkpad experience.
- pantalaimon 5y ago> People aren’t swapping their 2011 i3 for a 2011 i7 if they care about performance I beg to differ. I swapped my 2011 i5-2500k for a 2012 i7-3770 and it was a nice and cheap upgrade. Used hardware is cheap, there is no reason to not upgrade it all the way.
- GhettoComputers 5y agoYou’re really depending on your mobo to not blow a cap and using way more energy. A used older ryzen 5 is comparable and much better, and the mobos are current. Even a newer intel F processor isn’t much more the 3770K is way overpriced for its performance.
- pantalaimon 5y agothe 3770 was 30€ on ebay and given the rising TDP numbers on Intels latest desktop platforms, I really doubt it uses any more energy than a recent system.
- Vogtinator 5y agoIt's not just about upgrades, in fact it's not even mainly about upgrades. It's about being able to understand the machine, repairing it when necessary and ultimately being able to rely on it. Otherwise your device might be a candidate for the bin after the warranty expired, which can be surprisingly quick.
- mlindner 5y agoThis weird OCD obsession with wanting to be able to piece apart a device just like it's a car is just strange. The device is a complete package. You don't re-solder and reflash busted chips on a motherboard do you? So why do you want to be able to replace the higher level parts rather than the whole device? This isn't like a desktop where all the parts are bought from different manufacturers and assembled by an OEM or by you. The laptop is a complete kit made by a single manufacturer.
- UseStrict 5y agoBut why does it have to be that way? They ship off-the-shelf RAM and SSDs in the Framework fully or partially assembled kits. They released CAD files and drawings for their module system. They actually sell replacement parts for other components, much like an OEM automaker does. If my touchpad dies I'd rather be able to swap it out with a new $100 part than buy a whole new $1500 laptop. It's a new company and have not been tested yet in terms of backwards-compatibility and ongoing inventory. But just because you can't swap parts in most laptops doesn't really imply that you shouldn't be able to.
- GhettoComputers 5y agoThe thinkpad trackpads are $15 new. If you want to get repairable laptops just get business laptops. Don’t be fooled by the marketing, many Dell, HP and Lenovo laptops have those benefits on top of a huge aftermarket which framework doesn’t have and can’t leverage. You can way cheaper buy a broken laptop of the same model and fix yours with it whereas framework will only have their niche market which won’t be cheaper.
- snek_case 5y agoI'm using a MacBook Air 2015 and it's basically still a fast, perfectly usable machine. Quad core i7, 8GB RAM, SSD. However, I wish I could replace the battery, I wish the SSD was more easily upgradeable, and it would be nice to double the RAM.
- RistrettoMike 5y agoNot to be overly pedantic, but Apple didn't release any quad-core MacBook Airs in 2015.(see https://support.apple.com/kb/sp714?locale=en_US https://support.apple.com/kb/sp714?locale=en_US) Intel didn't even have quad-core ULV CPUs available until late 2017-2018. I only comment because the jump between dual & quad core is a pretty big one, as is the presumed jump to newer chips with 6, 8, and 16 core processors in modern machines. Dual core has remained surprisingly usable for light tasking though. Whether it is a well-loved MacBook or a battle-scarred ThinkPad from that era, Intel's dual core CPUs have held up well (even if it means they didn't feel the need to push their CPU design as much in the subsequent years.)
- snek_case 5y agoYou're right this is a dual core, with two way hyperthreading, so 4 logical cores.
- lotsofpulp 5y agoIt is very easy to replace a 2015 MacBook Air battery: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Air+13-Inch+Early+2015+Battery+Replacement/40697 https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Air+13-Inch+Early+2015+...
- anthk 5y agoMy AMD Turion 2 based laptop has a "new" SSD and it rocks.
- marmaduke 5y agoWe have a compute cluster made mainly of Westmere-generation Xeons from 2011, which has been the workhorse for research publications from our group for a decade. They are still running fine, the (non soldered, replaceable) ECC DRAM chips are failing before anything else.
- formerly_proven 5y agoBeing able to replace memory and storage is very critical for anything that will see a lot of use. Both of these are certainly not "lifetime" items.
- GhettoComputers 5y agoI never had to replace either, although I don't want them non replacable. External/cloud storage can take care of space, and memory corruption is a fear, but nothing I worry about, batteries are worst than both combined.
- formerly_proven 5y agoI don't think I ever had a single machine where I stayed with the storage it came with. As for memory, DRAM doesn't really have a particularly long lifetime (iirc design life is something like 75k hours), and that certainly shows in servers - memory modules start to fail a lot after the four year mark. And here I don't think I ever had a machine where I didn't upgrade memory at least once.
- GhettoComputers 5y agoMine came with a 500GB SSD, the older one I had I swapped it since it came with an HDD. I never had computer ram ever fail me, ever in my lifetime, have you? Unless you bought it with low specs, it isn't useful is it? I'd add ram to low spec computers, but my current one came with one slot and 8GB, no change to it for me.
- 5y ago
- novok 5y agoTBH until very recently with the apple M1 archtecture CPU perf peaked about 7 years ago and laptops never really had a good GPU story. Improvements have been fairly incremental since then. Yes lower nm processes reduce energy usage, but we are even starting to approach a wall with that too now. Personal laptops and desktops have become things you replace at car intervals now. And phones are starting to approach that too.
- GhettoComputers 5y agoM1 is just a continuation of the same, it’s just fanless, cooler, less energy usage and optimized for a few types of uses (very useful for web). CPUs really haven’t had a jump since sandy/ivy bridge, and GPUs got much better with the nvidia models in 2016, but it didn’t show up in the real world as much as it did in running machine learning algorithms. Gaming laptops existed with good if overly hot and expensive GPUs.
- qudat 5y agoWhen you upgrade the cpu on a framework laptop, you upgrade the board as well. So Framework owners can upgrade to a 2018 i5 or an AMD or even an ARM cpu if Framework offers it.
- GhettoComputers 5y agoAt that point I am sure it'll be much cheaper and faster to buy another laptop on sale instead of waiting for framework to make the motherboard with the CPU you want (if they do it at all), and pay extra for custom parts that only fit their latop, therefore locking you into their hardware ecosystem, no different from Apple except the parts are all generic x64 and you don't gain anything other than having in fit in the form factor of their device. The case is not so unique or special that someone would be unwilling to have another device, pay extra for some CPU/mobo laptop combo that only fits in one laptop, and never want another laptop casing again keeping as many of the old part as possible includuing to choose to keep the used chemical batteries in the framework laptop rather than have another cheaper computer with all new parts.
- Sunspark 5y agoPeople get attached to their machines. It's like a car.
- GhettoComputers 5y agoHaven't ever seen that myself ever, most people don't care, they just don't want to replace the machine if it still works if that counts, but nobody is using a classic all original parts device or seeks a classic HDD for their old computer. If you present them with a better one though, I bet most would be jumping for joy, but you have to make sure its "better" to them.
- Sunspark 5y agoSome older machines just have a "look" that is different than anything made today due to a different design language being used.
- trissylegs 5y agoI just had to check. But I have replaces the drive on every computer I've owned. Not because of failure, but because the size and speed vs cost steadily improves over time. But most of the other parts don't change as much. (eg I can put a 2TB ssd in my 2015 macbook pro for $400, which I doubt I could've done in 2015)