> designed obsolescence I am old enough to remember “reseating” memory to fix faults. Connectors fail, often disgustingly intermittently. Solder is used for re

> designed obsolescence I am old enough to remember “reseating” memory to fix faults. Connectors fail, often disgustingly intermittently. Solder is used for reliability, performance and price reduction: I think most people prefer those attributes versus upgradability (although nice to get choice with Framework!). Connectors now limit performance: there’s a reason why the highest performance memory does not use pluggable formats. HBM2. Remember when cache was a seperate stick of SRAM memory? The majority of PCs were never upgraded, even if they could be. I know, because I would do it for non-technical friends back-in-the-day and eek a couple of years of extra life out of a PC: however without my free labour (and usually trickle-down free parts) those friends would just buy a new PC and be happy. Upgrades are mostly for geeks. Meanwhile good hardware (phones, laptops) is often becoming obsolete due to lack of software upgrades, not lack of grunt. I just bought a new iPad because of this. A friend’s MacBook Air: working fine but needed new battery and no more MacOS upgrades. But also they wanted a new device with a better screen since they spend many hours a day on it, so less value in upgradeability? Yeah, batteries. I haven’t seen a good cost-benefit analysis of sealed devices. Modern batteries now seem to outlive the device, which wasn’t the case 10 years ago with iPhone6. Certainly I appreciate sealed mobile phones that don’t die from water damage.