5 ms·

You can't make that form factor and a repairable laptop, no?

sam0x17 4y ago
Well, the framework laptop is really going places for one. They just need to hit that slightly higher high end with an i9 and an OLED imo
jeroenhd 4y ago
I don't see why not. With M.2 SSDs and DIMM sticks you've got quite a thin minimum footprint. Apple has decided that soldering everything onto the PCB is worth the cost of making the device unrepairable, and that's their business decision (and yours if you decide to buy such devices). There are downsides to normal solutions (i.e. higher latency, needing to design places for screws to go) but it's not nearly as impossible as modern tech companies would like you to believe. Framework has designed a laptop with some excellent repairability and they're just a small team with extremely limited funds. Tech giants like Apple should have no trouble coming up with similar devices if they actually cared to do so.
- nojito 4y ago
  Idk where this idea of repairability = good for the environment came from. You’ll be hard pressed to find a laptop that is built with more recycled material than a MacBook.
  - kappuchino 4y ago
    Are you open to ideas? Repairability = good for the environment comes from replacing a small piece of a larger hardware item so the whole hardware does not have to be recycled in the first place. Now what happens when the MacBook has a defect processor or ram or ssd or screen? The whole thing is trash. And thats much more footprint than any smolten copper/gold/... that was put into it. The only reusability is shredding - most of the time! - and smelting/separating the metals, which causes a lot of enviromental issues.
  - spiffytech 4y ago
    The old slogan "reduce, reuse, recycle" is written in priority order: buying recycled products is good, but extending life and avoiding consumption are better.
    - nojito 4y ago
      Apple forces people to buy base configs, they support their devices longer than others, and their laptops are built from more recyclable parts than the competitors.
      - kappuchino 4y ago
        "they support their devices longer than others" - true. its just after that time apple keeps the key to the device so they become insecure electronic ... paperweights? I mean, whats the use of an old phone / ipad / ... that you can infect with a single message, yet you can't run an alternate os on it. This is the point of the critcism: Unrepairable Hardware + Lockdown = Paperweights over time = less ecological than a modular, repairable and unlocked laptop, computer or phone.
      - JohnTHaller 4y ago
        > they support their devices longer than others They support the laptop/desktop hardware longer than others. Software-wise, Windows supports a given hardware set longer than macOS does. Note that you can mod macOS to support older hardware than it official does (dosdude1, ben216k, opencore).
      - jeroenhd 4y ago
        They've ended support for 2015 Macbooks after seven years. Even Microsoft, heavily critisised for its arbitrary cutting off point in Windows 11, still supports Windows 10 for years to come, supporting devices for well over 10 to 13 years. Personally, I think it's unacceptable that a $2k device from 2016 gets less support than a $700 laptop from 2012, especially in cases where the hardware manufacturer is also the software manufacturer. If you want to run a fully patched operating system on the top-of-the-line Macbook you bought in 2016 you'll have to run Windows or Linux. Apple's software patches for older versions are spotty and often incomplete, after all, because so many devices upgrade to the latest OS immediately unless they have no choice. iOS definitely receives excellent support, but Apple's reputation for long term support only seems to apply to mobile phones. The computer market has higher standards for software support in which Apple doesn't perform well.
  - jlg23 4y ago
    > Idk where this idea of repairability = good for the environment came from. > You’ll be hard pressed to find a laptop that is built with more recycled material than a MacBook. How is swapping one part built with "recycled material" not better than swapping that one part plus the whole rest of the device with equally "recycled material"?
  - TheMode 4y ago
    Reusing instead of recycling will always be more environment friendly. No exception.
  - TomSwirly 4y ago
    The idea came from logic, and from people who study the environment, and from endless peer reviewed studies. Had you spent a few moments looking into the issue, you too would have come to the same conclusion. > You’ll be hard pressed to find a laptop that is built with more recycled material than a MacBook. From reading their materials, all the aluminum and most of the tin in the laptop are recycled, and most of the packaging they send you the computer in, and that seems to be it. Chips can't be recycled. Macs seem to contain very little recycled plastic. The circuit boards are definitely not recyclable. Reduce; reuse; recycle in that order.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  > I don't see why not. With M.2 SSDs and DIMM sticks you've got quite a thin minimum footprint. The memory used in Apple laptops is not the same type of memory that you find on a DIMM. The architecture is more like a GPU, with high-speed memory placed as close as possible to the CPU. Nobody complains that they can't upgrade the RAM on their GPU because we all understand the benefits of putting it on the same PCB. Apple did the same with CPUs. > Framework has designed a laptop with some excellent repairability and they're just a small team with extremely limited funds. Tech giants like Apple should have no trouble coming up with similar devices if they actually cared to do so. 99.9% of consumers do not care about upgrading. They wouldn't be opening their laptops and trying to swap out components even if they could. It's not reasonable to expect Apple to compromise the design of their system to cater to the vanishingly small minority of customers who demand such features. For that minority of users, companies like Framework exist to fill the void. However, let's not pretend like the Framework laptop is on par with an M1/M2 Apple laptop in terms of speed, size, power, battery life, or really any other metric beyond ability to swap out parts. They're cool laptops, but Apple's highly integrated products are on a different level entirely.
  - thefz 4y ago
    > The memory used in Apple laptops is not the same type of memory that you find on a DIMM. The architecture is more like a GPU, with high-speed memory placed as close as possible to the CPU. That was a design decision too. It's not that they bought a chip, they made it themselves. > It's not reasonable to expect Apple to compromise the design of their system to cater to the vanishingly small minority of customers who demand such features. I repaired an upgraded dozens of laptops for friends and family, extending their service life for years. Less rare earth in a landfill and more money in the pockets of my acquaintances. The "small minority" is "vanishing" because people are being trated more and more like consumers that throw away the current toy to buy a new one. Companies like Apple are the root cause to this. They want this.
    - throw457 4y ago
      They build upon an architecture they knew from their phone socs and arm mobile socs never had dimmable ram. I get your viewpoint but your arguments are null if you look back on how their silicone came to be.
kappuchino 4y ago
You are right. But instead of making things smaller all the time, a company could chose to make things better repairable - like the framework laptop. Would Apple do that? No, why should they, since most if its hardware buyers are oblivious to the implications of bad repairability. It least thats what I think, but what do I know ...
thefz 4y ago
Check out the service manual for a Lenovo X1 Yoga. You can replace/repair almost everything and it's one of the thinnest devices. Apple goes for the soldered internals to spill you even more money since thy are the only ones able to repair it. https://download.lenovo.com/pccbbs/mobiles_pdf/tp_x1_carbon_gen9_x1_yoga_gen6_hmm_en.pdf https://download.lenovo.com/pccbbs/mobiles_pdf/tp_x1_carbon_...
AshamedCaptain 4y ago
I have smaller x86 tablets that are more repairable.

Well, the framework laptop is really going places for one. They just need to hit that slightly higher high end with an i9 and an OLED imo

jeroenhd 4y ago

I don't see why not. With M.2 SSDs and DIMM sticks you've got quite a thin minimum footprint. Apple has decided that soldering everything onto the PCB is worth the cost of making the device unrepairable, and that's their business decision (and yours if you decide to buy such devices). There are downsides to normal solutions (i.e. higher latency, needing to design places for screws to go) but it's not nearly as impossible as modern tech companies would like you to believe. Framework has designed a laptop with some excellent repairability and they're just a small team with extremely limited funds. Tech giants like Apple should have no trouble coming up with similar devices if they actually cared to do so.

nojito 4y ago
Idk where this idea of repairability = good for the environment came from. You’ll be hard pressed to find a laptop that is built with more recycled material than a MacBook.
- kappuchino 4y ago
  Are you open to ideas? Repairability = good for the environment comes from replacing a small piece of a larger hardware item so the whole hardware does not have to be recycled in the first place. Now what happens when the MacBook has a defect processor or ram or ssd or screen? The whole thing is trash. And thats much more footprint than any smolten copper/gold/... that was put into it. The only reusability is shredding - most of the time! - and smelting/separating the metals, which causes a lot of enviromental issues.
- spiffytech 4y ago
  The old slogan "reduce, reuse, recycle" is written in priority order: buying recycled products is good, but extending life and avoiding consumption are better.
  - nojito 4y ago
    Apple forces people to buy base configs, they support their devices longer than others, and their laptops are built from more recyclable parts than the competitors.
    - kappuchino 4y ago
      "they support their devices longer than others" - true. its just after that time apple keeps the key to the device so they become insecure electronic ... paperweights? I mean, whats the use of an old phone / ipad / ... that you can infect with a single message, yet you can't run an alternate os on it. This is the point of the critcism: Unrepairable Hardware + Lockdown = Paperweights over time = less ecological than a modular, repairable and unlocked laptop, computer or phone.
    - JohnTHaller 4y ago
      > they support their devices longer than others They support the laptop/desktop hardware longer than others. Software-wise, Windows supports a given hardware set longer than macOS does. Note that you can mod macOS to support older hardware than it official does (dosdude1, ben216k, opencore).
    - jeroenhd 4y ago
      They've ended support for 2015 Macbooks after seven years. Even Microsoft, heavily critisised for its arbitrary cutting off point in Windows 11, still supports Windows 10 for years to come, supporting devices for well over 10 to 13 years. Personally, I think it's unacceptable that a $2k device from 2016 gets less support than a $700 laptop from 2012, especially in cases where the hardware manufacturer is also the software manufacturer. If you want to run a fully patched operating system on the top-of-the-line Macbook you bought in 2016 you'll have to run Windows or Linux. Apple's software patches for older versions are spotty and often incomplete, after all, because so many devices upgrade to the latest OS immediately unless they have no choice. iOS definitely receives excellent support, but Apple's reputation for long term support only seems to apply to mobile phones. The computer market has higher standards for software support in which Apple doesn't perform well.
- jlg23 4y ago
  > Idk where this idea of repairability = good for the environment came from. > You’ll be hard pressed to find a laptop that is built with more recycled material than a MacBook. How is swapping one part built with "recycled material" not better than swapping that one part plus the whole rest of the device with equally "recycled material"?
- TheMode 4y ago
  Reusing instead of recycling will always be more environment friendly. No exception.
- TomSwirly 4y ago
  The idea came from logic, and from people who study the environment, and from endless peer reviewed studies. Had you spent a few moments looking into the issue, you too would have come to the same conclusion. > You’ll be hard pressed to find a laptop that is built with more recycled material than a MacBook. From reading their materials, all the aluminum and most of the tin in the laptop are recycled, and most of the packaging they send you the computer in, and that seems to be it. Chips can't be recycled. Macs seem to contain very little recycled plastic. The circuit boards are definitely not recyclable. Reduce; reuse; recycle in that order.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> I don't see why not. With M.2 SSDs and DIMM sticks you've got quite a thin minimum footprint. The memory used in Apple laptops is not the same type of memory that you find on a DIMM. The architecture is more like a GPU, with high-speed memory placed as close as possible to the CPU. Nobody complains that they can't upgrade the RAM on their GPU because we all understand the benefits of putting it on the same PCB. Apple did the same with CPUs. > Framework has designed a laptop with some excellent repairability and they're just a small team with extremely limited funds. Tech giants like Apple should have no trouble coming up with similar devices if they actually cared to do so. 99.9% of consumers do not care about upgrading. They wouldn't be opening their laptops and trying to swap out components even if they could. It's not reasonable to expect Apple to compromise the design of their system to cater to the vanishingly small minority of customers who demand such features. For that minority of users, companies like Framework exist to fill the void. However, let's not pretend like the Framework laptop is on par with an M1/M2 Apple laptop in terms of speed, size, power, battery life, or really any other metric beyond ability to swap out parts. They're cool laptops, but Apple's highly integrated products are on a different level entirely.
- thefz 4y ago
  > The memory used in Apple laptops is not the same type of memory that you find on a DIMM. The architecture is more like a GPU, with high-speed memory placed as close as possible to the CPU. That was a design decision too. It's not that they bought a chip, they made it themselves. > It's not reasonable to expect Apple to compromise the design of their system to cater to the vanishingly small minority of customers who demand such features. I repaired an upgraded dozens of laptops for friends and family, extending their service life for years. Less rare earth in a landfill and more money in the pockets of my acquaintances. The "small minority" is "vanishing" because people are being trated more and more like consumers that throw away the current toy to buy a new one. Companies like Apple are the root cause to this. They want this.
  - throw457 4y ago
    They build upon an architecture they knew from their phone socs and arm mobile socs never had dimmable ram. I get your viewpoint but your arguments are null if you look back on how their silicone came to be.

kappuchino 4y ago

You are right. But instead of making things smaller all the time, a company could chose to make things better repairable - like the framework laptop. Would Apple do that? No, why should they, since most if its hardware buyers are oblivious to the implications of bad repairability. It least thats what I think, but what do I know ...

thefz 4y ago

Check out the service manual for a Lenovo X1 Yoga. You can replace/repair almost everything and it's one of the thinnest devices. Apple goes for the soldered internals to spill you even more money since thy are the only ones able to repair it. https://download.lenovo.com/pccbbs/mobiles_pdf/tp_x1_carbon_gen9_x1_yoga_gen6_hmm_en.pdf https://download.lenovo.com/pccbbs/mobiles_pdf/tp_x1_carbon_...

AshamedCaptain 4y ago

I have smaller x86 tablets that are more repairable.