You can't make that form factor and a repairable laptop, no?
There are downsides to normal solutions (i.e. higher latency, needing to design places for screws to go) but it's not nearly as impossible as modern tech companies would like you to believe.
Framework has designed a laptop with some excellent repairability and they're just a small team with extremely limited funds. Tech giants like Apple should have no trouble coming up with similar devices if they actually cared to do so.
You’ll be hard pressed to find a laptop that is built with more recycled material than a MacBook.
Now what happens when the MacBook has a defect processor or ram or ssd or screen? The whole thing is trash. And thats much more footprint than any smolten copper/gold/... that was put into it.
The only reusability is shredding - most of the time! - and smelting/separating the metals, which causes a lot of enviromental issues.
They support the laptop/desktop hardware longer than others. Software-wise, Windows supports a given hardware set longer than macOS does. Note that you can mod macOS to support older hardware than it official does (dosdude1, ben216k, opencore).
If you want to run a fully patched operating system on the top-of-the-line Macbook you bought in 2016 you'll have to run Windows or Linux. Apple's software patches for older versions are spotty and often incomplete, after all, because so many devices upgrade to the latest OS immediately unless they have no choice.
iOS definitely receives excellent support, but Apple's reputation for long term support only seems to apply to mobile phones. The computer market has higher standards for software support in which Apple doesn't perform well.
> You’ll be hard pressed to find a laptop that is built with more recycled material than a MacBook.
How is swapping one part built with "recycled material" not better than swapping that one part plus the whole rest of the device with equally "recycled material"?
Had you spent a few moments looking into the issue, you too would have come to the same conclusion.
> You’ll be hard pressed to find a laptop that is built with more recycled material than a MacBook.
From reading their materials, all the aluminum and most of the tin in the laptop are recycled, and most of the packaging they send you the computer in, and that seems to be it.
Chips can't be recycled. Macs seem to contain very little recycled plastic. The circuit boards are definitely not recyclable.
Reduce; reuse; recycle in that order.
The memory used in Apple laptops is not the same type of memory that you find on a DIMM. The architecture is more like a GPU, with high-speed memory placed as close as possible to the CPU.
Nobody complains that they can't upgrade the RAM on their GPU because we all understand the benefits of putting it on the same PCB. Apple did the same with CPUs.
> Framework has designed a laptop with some excellent repairability and they're just a small team with extremely limited funds. Tech giants like Apple should have no trouble coming up with similar devices if they actually cared to do so.
99.9% of consumers do not care about upgrading. They wouldn't be opening their laptops and trying to swap out components even if they could. It's not reasonable to expect Apple to compromise the design of their system to cater to the vanishingly small minority of customers who demand such features.
For that minority of users, companies like Framework exist to fill the void. However, let's not pretend like the Framework laptop is on par with an M1/M2 Apple laptop in terms of speed, size, power, battery life, or really any other metric beyond ability to swap out parts. They're cool laptops, but Apple's highly integrated products are on a different level entirely.
That was a design decision too. It's not that they bought a chip, they made it themselves.
> It's not reasonable to expect Apple to compromise the design of their system to cater to the vanishingly small minority of customers who demand such features.
I repaired an upgraded dozens of laptops for friends and family, extending their service life for years. Less rare earth in a landfill and more money in the pockets of my acquaintances. The "small minority" is "vanishing" because people are being trated more and more like consumers that throw away the current toy to buy a new one. Companies like Apple are the root cause to this. They want this.
I'd love to see apple do an A/B test with a model of, say, their current 15" MBP vs. a modular 15" MBP that made those compromises to get repairability/expandability, and see how the models sold and actually measure the demand.
"Nobody is buying them because we don't give anyone the choice, so nobody cares about it" isn't terribly scientific or even market-driven.
I don't concur on your 99.9%. Consumers don't necessarily think in upgrading, but in my circles people will generally go to some third party computer dealer and ask them "to make it fast again". This usually includes stuffing more RAM or an SSD (if they didn't have one yet) into an older PC, cleaning up some crapware cruft, and unless the CPU was cheap and shitty (i.e. Celeron, Pentium, the castrated i3 in some products like the old macbook Airs) the system will feel fast and responsive again without spending $2k on a new device. With unmaintainable stuff like Apple's these computer stores will have to tell people to buy a new device. This is not a "small minority", it's more like 30-40% of people in my experience.
Perhaps maintainability of Apple hardware isn't important because if you've got enough money to buy into the Apple ecosystem you've probably got enough money to buy a new one after three or four years.
https://download.lenovo.com/pccbbs/mobiles_pdf/tp_x1_carbon_...