Common? Yes. Normal? No. RAM is sold by the stick in any configuration you can imagine, yet these products are designed to prevent the simplest of upgrades. It's like being told that you need a new car because you want snow tires.
Of course, but most consumers outside of tech enthusiasts have no idea which stuff in their laptop is upgradable, even when it is, so they just buy a new device whenever they want to upgrade, because that's how they've been conditioned by the industry.
>It's like being told that you need a new car because you want snow tires.
Let's not give Tesla any ideas now. Joking aside, your comparison is not apples to apples. You can't easily upgrade the engine of your car from a four cylinder to a V8 if you need more power down the line, can you? Come to think of it, even upgrading the multimedia unit is a hassle in modern cars as each unit is locked to its production vehicle. On this note, when do we go after car manufacturers for this anti-consumer practice?
If you make it simpler, you’ll get all 100% of users, but now 99% of them are evidently less capable of using the system.
One-off custom cars are a different thing same how there are YouTubers putting headphone jacks in their iPhones or upgrading the soldered VRAM of their Nvidia graphics cards.
Likewise, I'd also like to see less e-waste due to software deprecation (looking at you, Pixel 3).
And where did I say that reparability must be forbidden?
I was saying hat operations like transplanting a more powerful engine into your car is rare and difficult nowadays since grandparent made a reference to cars being easier to upgrade than laptops when that's not always true.
Anyway, swapping an LS into a modern miata is pretty simple and it integrates well due to everything being CANBUS compatible, after a sufficient amount of adapters is applied.
Is this a regional thing? In Germany changing a tire is part of the "theory" classes. It's also fairly straightforward.
Changing oil on the other hand is illegal except in places with special drainage systems (like gas stations) because of the risk of environmental damage from spills, so it's not generally something you can do yourself. This restriction also goes for washing your car I think but some gas stations have places where you can wash your car if you don't want to use a car wash.
That goes for everything though, most people don't know how a car works, yet you can replace every single component. The same goes for desktop computers and household appliances.
This has been the norm across many technical devices that have become part of everyday life. How many regular users know how a radio works? The point is that regardless of how technical they are, these devices have remained repairable by anyone who is so inclined.
The movement to proprietize basic maintenance on the part of manufacturers is purely profit driven, and is carried out at the expense of consumers, the environment, and overall innovation.
> Of course, but most consumers outside of tech enthusiasts have no idea which stuff in their laptop is upgradable, even when it is, so they just buy a new device whenever they want to upgrade, because that's how they've been conditioned by the industry.
While that's true, that doesn't mean it should be that way. Having everyone buy a new device whenever they need to upgrade makes business sense for device vendors but IMO we definitely shouldn't encourage regularly tossing out good hardware. Not with the ecological costs of new electronics.
We don't need to turn everyone into a tech enthusiast or a computer service person. But if part replacements and upgrades were possible and people knew about it, a local shop or someone else could do the job for them.
> Come to think of it, even upgrading the multimedia unit is a hassle in modern cars as each unit is locked to its production vehicle.
The original comparison to cars might have been unfortunate (as usual), and you may be right that things aren't that different with cars. But again, things being in a certain way with cars doesn't mean that's how they should be with other devices. Or with cars, necessarily, but I don't know much about those so I'm not going to argue about that.
I'd argue existence of interchangeable commodity components in computing has been very abnormal and because of the direction the "computer market" is going, I'm not sure how much longer it'll persist.
For now, it's still most profitable for the manufacturers and OEMs to source cheap interchangeable parts from many sources. If the industry consolidates even more, though, it may be more profitable to vertically integrate. That was the way before the PC clone market. Hopefully not, but we'll see.