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Comment by unknown2374 | Hacker News Reader

That is very untrue. In most places in the world (and with most classes of people), the standard is to repair your laptop if it breaks, not buying a new one. Among certain people, and probably within the bias group you and I are coming from, the norm is to replace laptops every 3-4 years, but that is so not the case for a lot of the other groups of people and geography.

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At least in the UK, I've never been unable to sell or give away an old laptop, even if it's "broken". There's always someone willing to repair it, whether a student with plenty of time, or someone who runs a small repair shop and buys broken electronics from eBay to repair and sell.

I've taken apart MacBooks (it was cheaper to put in a custom SSD than buy Apple's overpriced one .. and at the time they didn't offer 16GB of ram so I manually changed out the 8GB chips) and I'm often on the road a lot in a nomadic fashion, so ship-in based warranties are often a not-an-option.

I've found Dells, Lenovos and even MSIs aren't too bad to take apart; even their incredibly thin version too. Most have replaceable parts (Carbon X1 has soldered on ram .. grr, but you could get an adapter to M.2 for the first gen weird/custom SSD).

You can make super thin laptops that are serviceable, and with high end developer laptops running upwards of a grand, yes, people do service them. At most shops I worked at, if your Dell went bad, the desktop support team would take it apart get a replacement screen, bezel, battery, whatever, and send the original back as part of their service contract.

Whoa, did you document the RAM upgrade process somewhere? That sounds fascinating/terrifying.

Nah I didn't, but it was a 2012 era MacBook. There was nothing special; just standard laptop memory sockets. You unscrewed the back and they were right there.

Oh okay, I misunderstood. Yeah, I upgraded one of them too— I was thinking you were saying you re-soldered the 2013+ BGAs.

That's a very fair point. Maybe what those people need is a laptop that looks more like the ones we had 15 years ago that are larger, and easier to manipulate. However, the universe of people who will get rid of a laptop once it stops working is large enough, that a company can be very successful addressing just those people. Maybe the answer to your statement is someone needs to make low cost laptops that are thick, heavy, cheap, and maintainable? The problem is whatever company that is will not be marketing themselves as "cutting edge".

Why do they need to be thick and heavy? Mine has a 15.6" screen, Weighs around 5lbs (slightly under), and is under 3/4" thick. It could be lighter if the case were made out of plastic instead of aluminum. It's about half the thickness and 60% the weight of my previous laptop, but still has user-replaceable components (I upgraded the RAM and added an HDD after purchasing it).

Also thick doesn't really need to be heavy. My Thinkpad x230 weights less than a pound more than a current macbook pro. Everything is easily accessible and replaceable, and it has a bevy of ports. It cost me about $250 bucks to upgrade it to contain 2 256gb ssds and 16gb of ram. -- edit -- just checked, current x260 actually is lighter than the current macbook pro.

Surface and MacBook are not marketed to those people. They haven't been marketed to those people since the removable battery was killed off.

How many of your MacBook Pros shipped with removable batteries?

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