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Compression Attached Memory Modules may make upgradable laptops a thing again
- chx 3y ago> Most PC makers and laptop PC buyers made an unspoken bargain in the early- to mid-2010s, around when the MacBook Air and the Ultrabook stopped being special thin-and-light outliers and became the standard template for the mainstream laptop: We would jettison nearly any port or internal component in the interest of making a laptop that was thinner, sleeker, and lighter. Nah, most PC makers have fallen hook, line and sinker for Steve Jobs' trick of pulling the Macbook Air out of an envelope and destroyed the PC laptop industry as was his plan. Making lighter laptops do not require thinner laptops -- well before Jobs' trick I had a Panasonic CF-Y5 which was a 14" 1.5kg laptop and yet it included a DVD burner. It was not thin for sure. This thin craze is only making worse laptops because you have no space for cooling, ports and keyboard travel.
- eviks 3y agoIndeed, and you could even make it lighter by removing the DVD burner if you didn't need it (in some models)! Or make it heavier by replacing DVD with an extra hard drive if that was the worthy tradeoff for you
- fomine3 3y agoOr external battery bay, it was a thing.
- inkyoto 3y agoNah, the trend had started some time before, and Intel is complicit due to limiting the maximum amount of RAM at the chipset level. I am not sure whether it was a technological or a marketing constraint. I have a Sony Vaio VGN-Z17 laptop that I purchased in 2008 in a mint condition that now runs Linux. It has 4Gb of RAM, which – I think – is the maximum, and it can't be upgraded any further due to the chipset not allowing such a thing. Everything else (apart from the 32-bit CPU)… is still a marvel: a 1.4 kg masterpiece with a carbon fibre body, 2x GPU's (discrete Intel and NVIDIA chips), a fingerprint scanner, a 1300x900 TNT screen (okay, low res by modern standards), up to 11 hours of the uptime with a swappable large battery, plus other peripherals expected and usual of the era. Everything still works like a charm. Memory can't be upgraded tho. Intel has held laptops vendors hostage for far too long by not supporting more in the chipset. It should not come as a surprise that the laptop vendors have started soldering memory chips on.
- aurareturn 3y agoIf the CPU is 32 bit, then the max RAM can only be 4GB.
- inkyoto 3y agoThe laptop has an Intel Core CPU that supports 36 bit physical addresses (via larger memory pages), so – practically – it can address up to 64Gb of RAM. The constraint is the Intel chipset.
- zozbot234 3y agoPAE is a hack, you're still not able to use more than 2GB (or 3GB if you're lucky) of address space in a single process. Like it or not, we're at a point where that might not even be enough to browse a single webpage (if that webpage is a horribly bloated SPA). 64bit compute is inevitable.
- inkyoto 3y agoMy point did not pertain to aesthetic qualities of PAE but rather to a limitation of Intel CPU chipsets that imposed a maximum memory constraint (either out of marketing microsegmentation or engineering reasons), the practice that has persisted for years onwards and upwards, and was likely the catalyst for the PC laptop vendors to start soldering the memory chips on. Lastly, running 3Gb processes (which Linux supported and Windows did not) on a ultra-portable laptop was not really a thing in 2008, and who was going to win the 64-bit x86 flavour battle (AMD or Intel) had not become clear yet.
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- Sakos 3y agoCore 2 Duos might have been more limited than they maybe could have been, but the 2006-2008 era was still very much transitional. DDR2 was still extremely common and you weren't going to find any 4GB modules. The next architecture was Arrandale (the first Core i3/5/7 line) where the max was increased to 8GB and the Sandy Bridge (probably the minimum I'd consider for doing anything with modern applications or a modern OS) supported 16-32GB. If they held anything hostage, they certainly didn't do it for long. I also think it's ridiculous to consider this in a vacuum. The few AMD laptops I could find from the same time frame have the same memory limits.
- Milner08 3y agoI am really not sure how much of the general population would agree with you. Having a slim laptop that I can drop in my bag and not take up the world of space is great.
- atoav 3y agoI have a laptop that is 25mm in height. It fits my bag perfectly. It could be 30mm and would still fit fine. We are not talking about making laptops not fit into bags. We are talking about not making laptops 9mm thin when they would work better if they were 18mm thin.
- williamcotton 3y agoI can’t help but agree because my 17” MacBook Pro M3 is noticeably thicker than an Air but not an issue for transporting around. I’ll tell you what is noticeable. Typing on an iPhone either worsened or I’m just getting old!
- lobsterthief 3y agoIt’s definitely worsened. It’s a well-discussed phenomenon.
- wiz21c 3y agoI want my laptop made of things I can upgrade/replace. Which means stuff that is less optimized for space.
- tiagod 3y agoThat's perfectly reasonable, but it's also reasonable to value other things, and most poeple aren't in that camp
- close04 3y agoSome people are focused on a particular parameter out of explicit necessity or personal preference - has to be thin for [reason]. For the others it's a matter of how you frame the question. Do you want a laptop that's super thin (implicitly not upgradable, expensive to repair)? Do you want a laptop for which you can replace anything fast and cheap for upgrades or repairs (implicitly thicker)? I'll bet you the same people might answer "yes" to both because they don't frame the brackets or consequences in their mind, only the immediate benefit. The laptop is thin when they make the choice and only expensive later on if it breaks. But I'd go so far as to say that if all cards were on the table during the decision making process more people would choose to add a few mm if it makes the devices cheaper to buy, to repair, and to upgrade.
- saagarjha 3y agoMost laptops of the time were light because they were flimsy; MacBook Air was aluminum. How did yours fare?
- chx 3y agoIt was a magnesium alloy and practically indestructible. Alas, I did test it -- it got kicked off a table while open in a very cramped multi story flat during a hackathon -- but it survived with a minor scratch on the lid. Did I mention it was a Panasonic Toughbook?
- Rediscover 3y agoLet's Note series. I've only seen it branded Toughbook in North America. I love that series, especially those from your laptop's era. https://panasonic.jp/pc/p-db/CF-Y5KW8AXR.html https://panasonic.jp/pc/p-db/CF-Y5KW8AXR.html Edit: Let's Note are much more durable than "standard" notebooks.
- threeseed 3y agoIt's funny how out of touch you are. At CES this year even the gaming laptops have moved away from thicker, boxier designs capable of housing elaborate cooling systems and a full array of ports. And instead resemble traditional thin laptops. The reason is that the majority of people want sleek, thin, usable form factors that isn't out of place in a cafe or library. And it is the priority over all else.
- lpapez 3y agoI agree. If I wanted max power and cooling efficiency, I'd go for a PC anyway. When picking a laptop, my first question is whether I would be able to carelessly carry it around every day. The compromise with bulky gaming laptops is simply not worth IMO - it's not as good of a desktop computer as an actual desktop, and not as good of a laptop as some notebook. It's nice to be ocassionally able to do something more serious while on the go, but that is optimizing for the 10% use-case instead of the 90% use-case.
- jusssi 3y agoThere is the case of "home laptop". Something that you rarely or never carry around, but you still don't want a stationary desktop PC for whatever reason.
- Dalewyn 3y agoIf you aren't staying somewhere permanently but also aren't moving in the immediate future (eg: college dorm) or your living space is constrained (eg: a trucker or an RVer), it definitely makes sense to have something powerful in a form factor that is "temporary", low-maintenance, and mostly self-contained.
- andruby 3y agoI suppose the market for those is probably too small for the manufacturers to invest in.
- pmontra 3y agoMy home laptop is my work laptop, a 30 mm thick ZBook 15 from HP. I move it in several rooms according to the season. Some rooms get too hot in summer, others are OK. Same thing for winter. I could buy a desktop and remote desktop to it from a lighter laptop (maybe with a monitor, mouse and keyboard? too much stuff to move) but sometimes I don't work from home. Not every year now. Thankfully covid took care of nearly all of those days spent at a customer's premises.
- LoganDark 3y ago> This thin craze is only making worse laptops because you have no space for cooling, ports and keyboard travel. Agreed. I'd be fine if there were other laptops in the market but there really are not. If you want a laptop that makes good use of its internal space, and has any internal space to make use of in the first place, you're going to be paying thousands.
- Someone 3y agoI think that’s not an evil conspiracy, but because the demand just isn’t there in sufficient numbers at lower price points. For most people, making good use of available space means leaving as little room as possible inside. At best, you can replace your SSD or RAM with higher capacity ones.
- LoganDark 3y agoI don't think it's an evil conspiracy either, just everyone simultaneously assuming that "thin and light" is the most important trait of all, and must be achieved at all costs (i.e. at the cost of everything else).
- cameronh90 3y agoI buy laptops for end-users and the number one thing they all want, developers included, is for the laptop to be light and thin. To the detriment of everything else. They'll complain that they're slow, hot, the battery doesn't last, etc. but when I suggest a thicker laptop instead, they'll turn it down.
- dangus 3y agoOnce you know that it’s technically possible to have your cake and eat it too (the Apple M1/M2/M3 chip), this becomes a reasonable demand. The MacBook Air released in 2020 with no fan was managing to match and beat the 2019 Intel 16” MacBook Pro in some benchmarks, and that 16” model was itself thicker than the previous model. A lot of people giving up upgradability to join Apple (this isn’t hyperbole: their marketshare notably increased after the M1 debut) getting double the battery life of their last Intel system are making a very logical and reasonable trade-off. When it comes to traveling and getting work done, whether or not I can upgrade the system might take a back seat to whether or not the system hurts my back. The whole point of a laptop is to make a reasonable trade-off for mobility. Of course, that said, it’s true that Apple could provide us with at least a storage upgrade path without any compromise. Memory is debatable since LPDDR has real efficiency benefits. But someone who wants what you can get out of an M3 Max laptop can’t buy that package anywhere else at any price. What x86 system comes in a 14” portable notebook package with ~20 hours of productivity battery life and on-board graphics only 7% slower than a laptop RTX 4080 that can be configured to address over 100GB of VRAM? Thankfully for consumer choice, Intel’s Core Ultra products finally caught up to the type of performance per watt standard that Apple set.
- saltcured 3y agoJust to give you another data point, an AMD-based Thinkpad P14s Gen 4 gets about halfway to some of your targets. The AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U has a pretty nice iGPU. It can be ordered with 64 GB LPDDR5 RAM for ~$1400 USD. Mine, with 32 GB RAM, idles around 4 watts in Linux with Firefox open on WiFi and screen at about 1/3 brightness, which translates to around 13 hrs of battery life.
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- Aurornis 3y agoThis is a great example of how Hacker News comment section preferences do not represent the general population’s preferences. If you’ve ever worked in purchasing or IT, you see how much people who travel or move around value thin, small, and light notebooks. If you’ve used modern thin, light notebooks, you’ve seen how little it matters for performance and battery life. A modern Apple laptop is tiny and performs extremely well. Upgradeable RAM is a very niche demand. If your goals are simultaneously to keep a machine forever while minimizing upfront cost, then compromising form to make RAM upgradeable is a reasonable decision. However, most people just want an all-new laptop come upgrade time because CPUs and GPUs are advancing rapidly. People who know they’re going to keep the laptop forever will spend an extra couple hundred on RAM up front. I think HN has also lost sight of how the average laptop user operates. Even I had an 8GB RAM secondary Apple laptop for testing and it worked completely fine for a mix of day to day tasks and coding. I wasn’t going to be doing Chromium compiles in the background while cycling through 100 background tabs in Chrome, but for even moderate usage with Chrome and Electron apps and an IDE it was fine. > I had a Panasonic CF-Y5 which was a 14" 1.5kg laptop and yet it included a DVD burner. It was not thin for sure. This thin craze is only making worse laptops because you have no space for cooling, ports and keyboard travel. I suspect a lot of these perspectives are anchored to past realities: Laptops from 5-10 years ago where carrying a jumbo laptop did actually have significant advantages. Times have changed and all of the anecdotes from ancient laptops or even 2010-era laptops just don’t apply.
- chx 3y ago> where carrying a jumbo laptop did actually have significant advantages. it's bewildering to call the engineering marvel those Panasonic and Sony laptops me and a few others talk about here "jumbo". It's been more than 17 years and the only physical advantage of the Macbook M3 Pro 14" over the CF-Y5 is the thickness change. That's it. Near two decades of advancement, the laptop is the same weight except it went from 1.3"-1.9" to 0.61" thickness. It's been 3.7 lbs then, 3.4 pounds now with the Max being 3.6 lbs and I bet merely dropping the DVD writer would've been enough bring these to par. Jumbo...? The Dell XPS M2010 was a jumbo, that's not in question but these? > move around value thin, small, and light notebooks. We are on the same page about light. Let me tell you, I was not happy how much heavier my next laptop, the ThinkPad T420 was at 4.9lbs. That's a full third heavier. No, it's the demand for insane thinness that I argue was manufactured artificially. If you want smaller laptops, there were, back then, both from Panasonic and Sony as they used to call them, subnotebooks, at 11" and 12" size with the exact same argument possible.
- killingtime74 3y agoDoes the writer really think laptops are not upgradeable because of technical issues? Laptop makers convice people to buy more computer than they need as they can't be upgraded, making more money and waste in the process.
- fsflover 3y agoThis. I've just upgraded RAM to 64 GB on my Librem 14 laptop.
- AnonCoward42 3y agoI also made the observation that more expensive laptops tend to have fewer replaceable parts vs the cheaper models. There is clearly also a manufacturer difference. Out of all the OEMs it's HP that often offers laptop with replaceable memory (especially on the low end). Playing devil's advocate it might be that the more compact you try to make a laptop the less servicable it gets. I don't buy it tho.
- josephg 3y agoI hear what you’re saying, but AI makes memory bandwidth much more important in computers. As I understand it, it’s much easier to increase memory bandwidth by soldering ram adjacent to the CPU - like GPUs have been doing for decades. Of course it’s suspicious that computer manufacturers can make more money in the process. But that doesn’t invalidate the technical argument. If this standard solves the technical problem, I’m all for it. We’ll have to wait and see which manufacturers adopt it.
- grishka 3y agoAI has been around for how many years, and it's still as niche and gimmicky as it's ever been. Especially the heavyweight kind that does need that bandwidth. The only "AI" feature I use on macOS with any kind of regularity is the built-in OCR to copy text from images. But then my weak-ass Pixel 4a can do the same thing in the app switcher, so I assume it needs neither a fast CPU nor high-bandwidth memory.
- senectus1 3y agoMy current laptop (Dell Precision 7670) had flashing light error on the other day, that the Dell support paper suggested was potentially "loose ram". So I turned it upside down and opened it up and to my interest/curiosity I found this RAM (CAMM) in it. its a very interesting design. What I do find interesting is that there is no extra slot for more ram. so if /when i decide i want more than the 16GB I need to remove the existing. which is only slightly better than soldered ram in my opinion.
- krzat 3y agoIf RAM comes loose often enough that support paper mentions it, it's not a good sign.
- actionfromafar 3y agoToo bad they didn't solder it in place.
- thih9 3y agoPerhaps they should do the same with ssd memory too, just in case.
- ekianjo 3y agoThats already the case with tablets
- robin_reala 3y agoAnd MacBooks.
- goosedragons 3y agoSurface line has replaceable SSDs. On the newer Pros it's super easy to access too, just a sim eject tool. My Surface Pro X is basically the same thickness as my 2017 iPad Pro as well so it's not even something that requires really thick devices. I think it's fantastic and wish more had it.
- twic 3y agoWhat does the "Compression" in the name mean? Is it compressing data, RAM Doubler style? Or does it mean the physical form factor is smaller? Or what?
- wheybags 3y agoI would guess "compressing" the pins against pads, like tightening down a traditional lga desktop cpu
- isilofi 3y agoThere are flat-ish contact surfaces on the bottom of the module that are compressed by a bracket onto the corresponding contact surfaces of the motherboard.
- nuriaion 3y agoIt's physically pressed down to the pads on the motherboard with screws.
- dtgriscom 3y ago> RAM Doubler Wow! Blast from the past!
- londons_explore 3y agoSo, laptop motherboards are say 2mm thick, with components about 2mm on either side, all except 'tall' components like power electronics and things with heatsinks. Ram chips (~2mm thick) are soldered onto a board 2 mm thick, which uses 1mm spring contacts onto the motherboard. Total height: 5mm above the motherboard. So this CAMM system doesn't seem to actually solve the height or board area problem that was causing manufacturers to solder RAM directly.
- farmdve 3y agoI still dread the fact that 15 inch laptops are the norm and not the exception for a 17 inch one.
- _ZeD_ 3y agothat's the main reason I'm sticking to an lg gram
- Neil44 3y agoNo it's absolutely not close to correct that most mainstream computer systems don't have upgradeable RAM as stated in this article. Source: I have an IT company. I can see that saving a mm or two with this form factor would be advantageous though. Slots change every few years anyway - DDR3, DDR4, DDR5 all have physically incompatible slots so moving to this new saystem isn't that big a logical change.
- williamcotton 3y agoTangential, but the soldered on flash hard drives are a terrible choice on Apple’s part. Yes, sure, backup frequently, but not being able to retrieve your data because of locking a consumer into overpriced commodity storage is a real jerk move.
- kevincox 3y agoTo be fair these drives are encrypted with HSM (Secure Enclave) keys anyways. So even if you could extract them they would be useless. One could argue that for most users making 6 digit pins secure is more valuable than being able to recover their data from a broken device.
- acdha 3y agoYou be wouldn’t be able to anyway because they use encryption to prevent your data being compromised by the guy who stole your laptop. This is a tricky balance but it’s also never been easier to have backup so I think this is the right balance for most people.
- williamcotton 3y agoWouldn't it be just as safe if it was possible to print out a backup key?
- acdha 3y agoThat’s part of the system setup process for that reason. The point was just that data recovery isn’t as strong an argument against integrated components as was around the turn of the century: online backup services are ubiquitous, components are far more reliable, and relatively few people are going to be in the situation where they have a system fail to the point where they can’t even use target disk mode but the drive is still intact and they have the FDE key but not backups.
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- Jemm 3y agoI look forward to hardware capacity as a subscription. Won't be long before someone does it, cough cough Akkle
- Razengan 3y agoPeople talk about "e-waste" regarding non-upgradeable computers; do you think upgrading a computer generates no waste? What happens to the old part? Does it always find a new home? Eventually there's always going to be a part that gets thrown away. With non-upgradeable/self-contained/all-in-one computers, when you buy a new one, the old one continues to be perfectly usable on its own, unlike a standalone RAM stick or SDD or video card or..
- Razengan 3y agoNot to mention the individual packaging, printed material and cooling sinks/fans for each of those separate parts.
- DonnyV 3y agoI miss the days where you could upgrade your laptop. I had a dell back in 2010, that I updated its ram and wifi card. Which gave me a budget to update my home wifi also with an extended drive. So the money I would of spent on a new laptop I ended upgrading my home network and speeding up my laptop. True freedom to do what you want with your tech.
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- zamadatix 3y agoThey, particularly Dell, have never stopped making laptops with upgradeable storage, RAM, and Wi-Fi - hence Dell being the first ones mentioned using this new module in the article. If you self select to a model with a few mm less thickness instead that's your choice of trade off and it's really more freedom to do what you want instead of less. Here's a random modern mid-range Dell with swappable m.2 storage, 2.5" SATA storage, m.2 Wi-Fi slot, and battery https://www.newegg.com/black-dell-inspiron-3520-mainstream/p/1TS-000A-0W9J3?Item=9SIAE4NJSE9047 https://www.newegg.com/black-dell-inspiron-3520-mainstream/p.... If you're more adventurous you can often upgrade the screen as well but only like part replacement is intended for that. This isn't unique to the mid price range or Dell or particularly rare. The main exception is modern MacBooks as there is only one provider for portable Macs and they went all in on integration (to some pros as well as the obvious cons).
- DonnyV 3y agoI stopped buying Dells years ago. The problem I was having with them was quality control. I got burned on a couple Dell purchases and just stopped buying them. I bought a MSI Stealth in 2014 and still have it. I've never had a problem with it. Great aluminum body build and top notch components.