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Comment by donmcronald | Hacker News Reader

People have no idea how nasty serialization of parts is going to get if it isn't stopped by new legislation. You'll be lucky if you don't have to buy your socks and shoes from the same vendor in 2030 :-(

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The issue isn't merely the same vendor, but having to buy parts bundled together. Good luck replacing your hard drive/RAM/whatever separately from the rest of your machine without blessing from the manufacturer.

Isn’t this already the case with Macs and their SSDs tied to the disk controller? Add in stacked memory being unreplaceable and impossible to upgrade.

The upgrade path is to throw away the entire machine and buy a new one.

Apple has been a particularly notable offender of R2R. Others have been (and will continue to be) following suit.

But this is the inevitable, and desired, future of integrated circuits, with more and more being bundled into the SoC. Integration has always had, and will continue to have, very real and desirable benefits to the consumer.

Ehhh...I mean with the way things are evolving - it is very likely your long term storage, short term storage, and CPU will all be on the same chip/package. Expecting to be able to replace the components individually will largely be a relic of the past. I see it more as the evolution of overall computing. I mean in the early ages of computers you could replace individual transistors...then you could replace individual logic blocks...a new adder! Etc...as the technology shrunk and become more integrated, our concept of a "computer" evolves. Legislating things like "a hard drive and ram must be separately replaceable" will sound as implausible in a few years as "each transistor needs to be individually serviceable" does today.

Sure, that's why nobody suggested legislation be written about hard drive and RAM replacement in particular.

A curious counterexample of this that's existed for decades is the motherboard. Once one part breaks on that you're throwing out a lot of functioning parts.

I've often wondered why the boundaries were defined where they are for its responsibilities. What was it like building PCs before the concept of a the current motherboard architecture existed?

I'd be surprised if you couldn't get the parts to repair a normal desktop motherboard. But as far as I know there aren't really any repair shops that work on stuff like that. Likely because the motherboards in most desktops are fairly cheap and easy to replace. On laptops, the main board is the most expensive part. More so ever since everything started being soldered on instead of socketed.

Maybe the solution is to getting people to repair desktop motherboards instead of tossing them is to turn the cost to the environment of generating e-waste into an actual monetary cost. (Though I can't say I know how you'd do that since making e-waste disposal cost money will mean that people will just dump that stuff in the normal trash)

I've replaced many VRMs, capacitors, etc, over the years--even a PCIe socket I melted once. It's been a few years since my overclocking days where I'd burn this stuff out, but it was pretty easy to replace most things on those boards, assuming you were semi-capable with a soldering iron.

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