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Comment by Const-me | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn’t want a computer like that.

I owned 4 laptops, got my first one in 2008. For all of them I have upgraded RAM and disks immediately after the purchase. For some of them upgraded SSDs after couple years of use: both speed and cost per GB are quickly improving over time for them.

A soldered SSD is especially bad because broken laptop = lost data. I never broke a laptop but I think that was just my luck. When it will happen, I want to be able to recover data from the computer.

About the 3.5mm audio jack, bluetooth audio is not good enough for music, it simply doesn’t have the bandwidth. Uncompressed 16 bit / 48 kHz stereo exceeds 1.5 mbit/second, while Bluetooth audio has throughput of 300-400 kbit/second and uses some lossy codecs on the air.

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> A soldered SSD is especially bad because broken laptop = lost data. I never broke a laptop but I think that was just my luck. When it will happen, I want to be able to recover data from the computer.

Please reconsider your backup strategy if this is the case. If your data is valuable at all you should be able to drop your laptop in a shredder at any moment and not lose anything. 3.2.1. 3 copies, 2 types of media, 1 offsite.

The valuable data is backed up properly. And a laptop is usually a secondary computer i.e. there’s not much there to begin with.

But I don’t like to lose any data at all if avoidable, no matter how unimportant that data is. I still keep VHD disk images from these 3 old laptops, thanks to nearly exponential decline of disk costs per TB.

> And a laptop is usually a secondary computer

Definitely not true. For most college students, a laptop is their only computer.

My comment was about my own use cases. As for students, I think repairability is even more important for them.

Sometimes laptops are stolen or destroyed completely like dropped into the sea, for that they need to backup data.

But I think these cases are rare. Displays, hinges, and motherboards fail way more often, IMO. It’s nice to be able to recover data by moving SSD from the broken laptop into a USB3 enclosure, these enclosures are sold for $20-40. Another good option is getting another laptop based on the same chipset, and simply replacing the disk. None of these options are available for laptops with soldered SSDs.

I produce music. Bluetooth is an instant no-go. Yes, at home I use a DAC with two headphone jacks. But on the go, I don’t want to have to carry a USB to headphone converter.

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