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There’s nothing baffling to it. Windows PCs are upgradable. Apple won’t even give you a PCie slot on its $10k mac studio ultra to install a better network card
by elorant 4mo ago
There’s nothing baffling to it. Windows PCs are upgradable. Apple won’t even give you a PCie slot on its $10k mac studio ultra to install a better network card or whatever.
- robertlagrant 4mo agoMost people have laptops now, in my experience of large corporations.
- recursive 4mo agoI got the RAM upgraded in my work laptop.
- airstrike 4mo agoLast time I requested that, they just swapped my laptop for a newer one with more RAM
- Hugsbox 4mo agoOn very rare occasions I may do that for a user, if I happen to have extra RAM on hand from - for example - a broken machine. But by and large it's just going to be a whole machine upgrade.
- cortesoft 4mo agoI haven't worked with TOO many different companies, but I have worked at a few of various sizes (from small startup to huge Fortune 100), and none of them ever provided upgrades for machines. It was always full replacements. Sometimes you would get a used machine, but they were from someone else who left, not an upgraded machine. Are other IT shops really doing a lot of piece by piece upgrades for employee machines?
- thewebguyd 4mo ago> Are other IT shops really doing a lot of piece by piece upgrades for employee machines? I doubt it. I'm certainly not, and none of my peers at other companies locally are either. Even less so now that plenty of business class laptops are coming with soldered ram anyway. The MO is to just replace the machine once its out of warranty.
- fragmede 4mo agoIt's for specialist users. Eg video editors or CAD systems. They need a 10-Gig connectivity to the SAN and want a Mac and not a Dell.
- spankibalt 4mo ago> "Are other IT shops really doing a lot of piece by piece upgrades for employee machines?" My experiences cover only Europe, mostly in sasec (safety and security, not infosec) shops, including sasec-related engineering and product development. The only Macs I see in any pro capacity are those of clients and rent-a-lecturer/instructor-types, the latter seldomly part of the industry. In my neck of the woods we run mostly on machines from Panasonic and Lenovo; in-house repair labs are a thing (some of them with expertise and equipment that makes the Rechenzentren at the local universities bow their heads in shame). What a lot Apple people don't seem to get into their heads is that there's user segments to whom the virtues of Apple's "silicon" is utterly irrelevant; the small benefits you'd get out of it are completely negated by a litany of cons that makes their products completely undesirable.
- michaelt 4mo agoIt's not common, but it's not unusual either. If your standard developer laptop has a 256 GB SSD, but a certain team needs more disk space due to the work they're doing, you can just add a second nvme for a fraction of the cost and inconvenience of replacing the whole laptop.
- Kirby64 4mo agoWhat company upgrades their windows PCs? They give them exactly as shipped. IT department is not wasting time swapping out RAM or SSDs. And they certainly are not upgrading them over time. You just replace the entire PC if you go to 'swap' it.
- kyawzazaw 4mo agomy school IT department does this but it's a small university
- 0x1d7 4mo agoIME edu operates much differently than [US] corporations which use a 3 - 5 year deprecation schedule. Edu is more 'run it until it doesn't'.
- msisk6 4mo agoI work for a little company called Boeing and all our PCs (desktops and laptops) are Dell and our IT center will upgrade SSD, memory, and even do repairs like swapping out motherboards. Probably helps the IT center folks are actually employees of Dell and this service is part of the deal Boeing has with Dell. Lots of big companies have similar deals with their hardware vendors.
- Kirby64 4mo agoInteresting. I’ve worked for company’s that were all Dell shops as well and were similarly large and they had no such deal. You got whatever PC was available (like two options, one large and one small) and no choice beyond that. If you were special and could adequately plead your case, you maybe got a desktop for the extra RAM which was special order. Why would you even want a SSD or memory upgrade? By the time you’re out of memory, the cpu upgrade is typically worth it.
- prmoustache 4mo ago> Why would you even want a SSD or memory upgrade? By the time you’re out of memory, the cpu upgrade is typically worth it. Not necessarily. Sometimes the default laptop sizing comes with a standard usage in mind but more space and ram is justified for other roles. Sure you could have different laptop models but if you are fine with just more ram and disk space why not?
- kasey_junk 4mo agoI have never, in 30 years, working across big companies and small, had a computer hardware upgrade. It’s _always_ just a new box.
- Modified3019 4mo agoI work I Ag retail (agronomic services, chemical sales) and while we have an IT department, a decade ago I’d occasionally act as “local” tech support and double a coworker’s RAM when their combination of browser/office/database front ends stopped gracefully fitting in 4GB (and later 8GB). I would also migrate them from HDD’s to SSD’s, and set them up with backups. But even I haven’t done that in several years now, once IT moved to providing 16GB memory and SSD’s as a baseline, there’s really nothing left in a box to upgrade. I’m quite happy enough to not have to care.
- zdragnar 4mo agoSomething as simple as adding a stick of RAM might be worthwhile, but some upgrades will take more money in salary (you and the person whose computer you're working on) than the upgrade is actually worth. This is especially true if you replace several components one at a time in a what would otherwise be a single replace cycle. This is especially true if the business is writing down the replaced hardware as depreciated capital, compared to say simply adding a stick of RAM.
- havaloc 4mo agoAgreed, the only time I did upgrades on boxes is swapping out spinning disks for SSD, that saved me a whole upgrade cycle it was such an improvement.
- j2j8 4mo agoThey are often leased and have to be returned in the same condition at the end of the term.
- tom_ 4mo agoI've generally been given additional decent-performance storage every year or two when working in video games, fairly reliably the case since 2000, seemingly regardless of company size. Somehow each new project would always require yet more working space (again), and projects would often overlap to some extent. Aside from that, almost always a new PC - almost! When times haven't been so good, I've had spot upgrades. All of the above is just a question of running the numbers and minimising for cost, I'm sure.
- reaperducer 4mo agoThere’s nothing baffling to it. Windows PCs are upgradable. We're talking about enterprises here, not home tinkerers. Enterprises buy whole computers and replace them every x years. They don't waste expensive IT employee time running around upgrading machines all the time. The last time I worked for a company that did any repair of its computers was around 2005, when all ~500 Dells in the office had to have their defective motherboards replaced.
- ioblomov 4mo agoThere’s an accounting factor too. Businesses depreciate equipment as SOP. The laptops have already been written off by the time they need upgrading.
- GeekyBear 4mo agoI actually have seen a business upgrade PCs that were fairly recently purchased once, back during the transition from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95.