Compression Attached Memory Modules may make upgradable laptops a thing again
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Nah, most PC makers have fallen hook, line and sinker for Steve Jobs' trick of pulling the Macbook Air out of an envelope and destroyed the PC laptop industry as was his plan. Making lighter laptops do not require thinner laptops -- well before Jobs' trick I had a Panasonic CF-Y5 which was a 14" 1.5kg laptop and yet it included a DVD burner. It was not thin for sure. This thin craze is only making worse laptops because you have no space for cooling, ports and keyboard travel.
I have a Sony Vaio VGN-Z17 laptop that I purchased in 2008 in a mint condition that now runs Linux. It has 4Gb of RAM, which – I think – is the maximum, and it can't be upgraded any further due to the chipset not allowing such a thing. Everything else (apart from the 32-bit CPU)… is still a marvel: a 1.4 kg masterpiece with a carbon fibre body, 2x GPU's (discrete Intel and NVIDIA chips), a fingerprint scanner, a 1300x900 TNT screen (okay, low res by modern standards), up to 11 hours of the uptime with a swappable large battery, plus other peripherals expected and usual of the era. Everything still works like a charm.
Memory can't be upgraded tho. Intel has held laptops vendors hostage for far too long by not supporting more in the chipset. It should not come as a surprise that the laptop vendors have started soldering memory chips on.
Lastly, running 3Gb processes (which Linux supported and Windows did not) on a ultra-portable laptop was not really a thing in 2008, and who was going to win the 64-bit x86 flavour battle (AMD or Intel) had not become clear yet.
I also think it's ridiculous to consider this in a vacuum. The few AMD laptops I could find from the same time frame have the same memory limits.
We are not talking about making laptops not fit into bags. We are talking about not making laptops 9mm thin when they would work better if they were 18mm thin.
I’ll tell you what is noticeable. Typing on an iPhone either worsened or I’m just getting old!
Do you want a laptop that's super thin (implicitly not upgradable, expensive to repair)?
Do you want a laptop for which you can replace anything fast and cheap for upgrades or repairs (implicitly thicker)?
1. Do you want a laptop you need to use dongles with? 2. Do you want your laptop where it's more comfortable to type? 3. Do you want your laptop to run cooler and more quiet?
If you can have thin and cool why not? But make sure you don't only consider the former and forget about the latter until you burn your lap.
My assumption is that it comes down to two end goals.
Replaceable parts to me seem primarily just a one way to reduce long-term cost of the device, with the main alternatives being quality manufacturing so that stuff breaks less and lasts longer, or ability to easily and cheaply replace it if it breaks; and improvements in those areas can remove the need for parts to be replaceable.
And upgradeable parts rely on the notion that it might be efficient to not buy a part now, but buy it later when either it is cheaper or a substantially better version is available. IMHO this capacity was very useful some decades earlier, but not it's substantially less relevant because the technological change is different - we're not seeing RAM prices halve every few years, as it used to be in my youth, and if you get a substantially better technology, that often isn't going to be compatible even if you could physically replace the part, because the better component also requires a newer interconnect standard and a better other component, so moving on to next generation requires replacing most of the system anyway, and the practical benefit from a laptop being made of things you can upgrade is reduced to fixing mistakes in initial specification for storage - and that can also be fully met buy just buying the larger option now - like, being "upgradeable" adds significant complexity and cost overhead (just take a look at the modular, open smartphone projects) and instead of a modular device with 1 foobar of storage with a hope you might upgrade to 2 units later, IMHO it's strictly superior to have a comparable cost non-upgradeable device with 2 units storage right away.
And after all, any device can be upgraded by replacing it - all we're talking about is about cost efficiency, how much people are willing to pay up front to purchase an option that a future upgrade might be cheaper because you could keep some parts of the device.
I have no desire or need to ever upgrade after that.
> all we're talking about is about cost efficiency I am not buying that argument much here. These are 1500+ dollar devices. On the sub 200 dollar range I get it. But on the higher end we are getting integrated stuff where if the track pad eats itself I have to figure out how to glue it back in if I can get the right part.
The angle I would take on this is general repairability: expand the “right to repair” laws, mandate part availability on a long-term, and require everyone to pay for old batteries and parts for recycling so they don’t end up in the general trash stream, even if that means something like baking in a $50 deposit to the price of a new laptop.
Although for me there are still bigger priorities than size such as I/O, battery, durability and upgradability. But I'll take extra weight over size any day.
I love that series, especially those from your laptop's era.
https://panasonic.jp/pc/p-db/CF-Y5KW8AXR.html
Edit: Let's Note are much more durable than "standard" notebooks.
At CES this year even the gaming laptops have moved away from thicker, boxier designs capable of housing elaborate cooling systems and a full array of ports. And instead resemble traditional thin laptops.
The reason is that the majority of people want sleek, thin, usable form factors that isn't out of place in a cafe or library. And it is the priority over all else.
The compromise with bulky gaming laptops is simply not worth IMO - it's not as good of a desktop computer as an actual desktop, and not as good of a laptop as some notebook. It's nice to be ocassionally able to do something more serious while on the go, but that is optimizing for the 10% use-case instead of the 90% use-case.
I could buy a desktop and remote desktop to it from a lighter laptop (maybe with a monitor, mouse and keyboard? too much stuff to move) but sometimes I don't work from home. Not every year now. Thankfully covid took care of nearly all of those days spent at a customer's premises.
That's what they are told and that's what they are sold.
You can't compete with a billion dollar marketing machinery by saying "hey my machine is not 9mm but 25mm but in turn it runs cooler and doesn't require dongles".
The value of a thin laptop honestly depends on what you sacrifice to get to that point. Jony Ive's entire career should stand testament to the fact that people honestly don't care after a certain point.
You do know that's because they moved away from Intel to their own M CPUs.
It has nothing to do with the case.
Plus... Intel chips are wattage-configurable. If Apple chose to run their CPUs at a TDP beyond what the Macbook could dissipate, isn't that a software issue? There are a lot of ultrabook CPUs that have ACPI tables tuned to lower temperatures, even the insufferable 14nm Intel ones.
This is also missing the larger point: Apple does not run the PC industry. They’re popular but if they were pushing something unpopular, one of their competitors would have seen better sales for thicker models. Since even the gamers aren’t willing to buy larger laptops, I think they’re pretty clued in for what the buying public values.
That's a bit like saying if Airpods were objectively bad, then people would buy other headphones. You're right; but there are ulterior considerations that people make when they buy these products. When Macbooks were at their worst, the waste-of-money i9 aluminum pancake ovens, most Apple users probably were not considering alternative manufacturers. They want Apple's experience, and will suffer through the 12" Macbook or the 16" monster machine to get it. Same as the first-generation Airpods that were measurably worse than the 7x cheaper Earpods.
My point is that Apple can make objectively bad decisions (eg. butterfly keyboard, inadequate thermal solutions) and their customers will still buy their products. The same is not really true for most other laptop OEMs since they're functionally interchangeable if you're a Windows user.
The fact that laptops got thinner over time is not evidence that the industry deliberately follows Apple. It's evidence that technology gets smaller, a fundamental observation made 10 years before Apple Inc. was incorporated.
Agreed. I'd be fine if there were other laptops in the market but there really are not. If you want a laptop that makes good use of its internal space, and has any internal space to make use of in the first place, you're going to be paying thousands.
For most people, making good use of available space means leaving as little room as possible inside. At best, you can replace your SSD or RAM with higher capacity ones.
They'll complain that they're slow, hot, the battery doesn't last, etc. but when I suggest a thicker laptop instead, they'll turn it down.
A lot of people giving up upgradability to join Apple (this isn’t hyperbole: their marketshare notably increased after the M1 debut) getting double the battery life of their last Intel system are making a very logical and reasonable trade-off. When it comes to traveling and getting work done, whether or not I can upgrade the system might take a back seat to whether or not the system hurts my back. The whole point of a laptop is to make a reasonable trade-off for mobility.
Of course, that said, it’s true that Apple could provide us with at least a storage upgrade path without any compromise. Memory is debatable since LPDDR has real efficiency benefits. But someone who wants what you can get out of an M3 Max laptop can’t buy that package anywhere else at any price.
What x86 system comes in a 14” portable notebook package with ~20 hours of productivity battery life and on-board graphics only 7% slower than a laptop RTX 4080 that can be configured to address over 100GB of VRAM?
Thankfully for consumer choice, Intel’s Core Ultra products finally caught up to the type of performance per watt standard that Apple set.
Mine, with 32 GB RAM, idles around 4 watts in Linux with Firefox open on WiFi and screen at about 1/3 brightness, which translates to around 13 hrs of battery life.
no they are giving in to hype and it's insanity to pay real world money for a laptop where you can't remove storage. Whether it's for repairs or for upgrade this is a fundamental feature that really can't be negotiated with. There are no ifs, buts, nothing. Reason doesn't enter the picture of buying a computer without removable storage. A lot other things do but reason does not.
And, to add, unlike with LPDDR memory, there's no engineering reason to do this. There's a lot other reasons -- most of them are not pretty -- but engineering wise your wins are practically none.
This topic reminds me of a story from some relatives. Both relatives are relatively affluent and live in a state with recycling deposits. You save your cans and bottles and return them to the grocery store to get your deposit back, a handful of cents per can.
Relative #1 has done this out of habit and thrift for decades, despite being affluent as I discussed.
When they were over relative #2’s house for a party, they asked where they keep their cans. #2 said “just throw them in the recycle bin.” #1 said, “but what about the deposit?” And the response was basically just laughter.
In the perspective of relative #2, who in their in their right mind cares enough about a bottle deposit to bother wasting their time on it when they can just throw them in the regular recycle bin? It’ll still get recycled, and you save a significant amount of time putting the cans in the deposit machine at the cost of literal pennies per soda can.
This is where reason enters the picture. #2 is correct so long as their high income and busy schedule supports the idea that returning can deposits is a complete waste of time. Imagine a doctor canceling an appointment to take their cans over to the grocery store.
Now imagine you’re a typical Apple user. You make well above median household income. Apple has 23% marketshare, and coincidentally if you’re top 23% of income in the US you make just about exactly $100,000 a year.
Your choice is to buy an Apple system where 1TB of storage costs you an extra $400, but if you bought a PC you could upgrade that storage yourself and only spend around $100, maybe even less.
What life sacrifice did you make to spend this extra money if you’re in this income bracket? The truth is you probably wouldn’t notice that missing $400 you spent upgrading the storage to 1TB.
Heck, if you’re a business rather than an individual, you now have to pay salaries and factor in lost productivity any time you’re taking a computer away from your employee and spending time repairing it. That situation is double jeopardy: pay IT to do the repair, pay your employee to sit there and do nothing in the meantime.
Let’s say you buy a computer every 3 years, which itself is pretty luxurious. In this scenario, that non-upgradable storage basically costs you $100 every year without even considering the sale of your used laptop 3 years later. Basically, getting a laptop with non-removable storage every 3 years like clockwork costs less than a typical streaming service or Amazon Prime.
I see no financial reason why any of Apple’s affluent customers should give a flying fuck about upgradable storage. I think it’s actually closer to the bottom of the list than you realize.
On top of this, if you’re comparing a Mac to a Windows PC, that means you’re comparing things like integration to your phone and other accessories, battery life, fit and finish, software, performance, and customer support/warranty, not just the single feature of storage upgradability.
Of course, cloud providers have so successfully trained US customers some 23% of them think nothing of not owning their data any more. That's the lunacy I am talking of.
Nothing about an Apple system stops you from backing up to an external drive (or even booting from one) and the external I/O is fast enough for high-performance SSDs.
Let's go down the data ownership road, though: The consumer didn’t need to be brainwashed into cloud storage. Dropbox didn’t need a Super Bowl ad to become a household name. The services solve a real problem, one that existed before drives were soldered. In mayn cases you can't solve the problem for the same amount of money on your own (just put a cheap Synology system and two hard drives in your Amazon cart along with replacement disks every 3-6 years and tell me how much that costs compared to the $8.25/month you pay for Google One. I'm not even sure you can make it breakeven, ever).
Hell, I’ve never given Dropbox a dime and they have stored and synced all my important documents for almost a decade now. Not a single item has ever been lost. I’m a terrible storage provider in comparison.
An analogy to what you're saying is that someone who leases a car doesn't really get the benefits of that car. But that's not really true, is it? If you lease the car you're the only one who gets to drive it. Tangible data ownership is more of a philosophical preference than a matter of "does this solve my problem or provide me with benefits?"
If they want to upgrade their laptop, they just sell it and buy a new one. They certainly aren't going to crack out the screwdriver set and replace the "SSD" whatever that is.
Engineering is about trade-offs between competing end-user requirements. Apple's particular set of trade-offs has clearly resonated with the market.
If you’ve ever worked in purchasing or IT, you see how much people who travel or move around value thin, small, and light notebooks.
If you’ve used modern thin, light notebooks, you’ve seen how little it matters for performance and battery life. A modern Apple laptop is tiny and performs extremely well.
Upgradeable RAM is a very niche demand. If your goals are simultaneously to keep a machine forever while minimizing upfront cost, then compromising form to make RAM upgradeable is a reasonable decision. However, most people just want an all-new laptop come upgrade time because CPUs and GPUs are advancing rapidly. People who know they’re going to keep the laptop forever will spend an extra couple hundred on RAM up front.
I think HN has also lost sight of how the average laptop user operates. Even I had an 8GB RAM secondary Apple laptop for testing and it worked completely fine for a mix of day to day tasks and coding. I wasn’t going to be doing Chromium compiles in the background while cycling through 100 background tabs in Chrome, but for even moderate usage with Chrome and Electron apps and an IDE it was fine.
> I had a Panasonic CF-Y5 which was a 14" 1.5kg laptop and yet it included a DVD burner. It was not thin for sure. This thin craze is only making worse laptops because you have no space for cooling, ports and keyboard travel.
I suspect a lot of these perspectives are anchored to past realities: Laptops from 5-10 years ago where carrying a jumbo laptop did actually have significant advantages. Times have changed and all of the anecdotes from ancient laptops or even 2010-era laptops just don’t apply.
it's bewildering to call the engineering marvel those Panasonic and Sony laptops me and a few others talk about here "jumbo". It's been more than 17 years and the only physical advantage of the Macbook M3 Pro 14" over the CF-Y5 is the thickness change. That's it. Near two decades of advancement, the laptop is the same weight except it went from 1.3"-1.9" to 0.61" thickness. It's been 3.7 lbs then, 3.4 pounds now with the Max being 3.6 lbs and I bet merely dropping the DVD writer would've been enough bring these to par. Jumbo...? The Dell XPS M2010 was a jumbo, that's not in question but these?
> move around value thin, small, and light notebooks.
We are on the same page about light. Let me tell you, I was not happy how much heavier my next laptop, the ThinkPad T420 was at 4.9lbs. That's a full third heavier. No, it's the demand for insane thinness that I argue was manufactured artificially. If you want smaller laptops, there were, back then, both from Panasonic and Sony as they used to call them, subnotebooks, at 11" and 12" size with the exact same argument possible.
I work with IT support and I can tell you upgradeable RAM is NOT a very niche demand. Upgrade RAM is the 1st thing users ask when their computer are becoming slow and believe me, they always get very upset when they find out their laptops don't have an expansion slot.
And thinness is pretty useless. a 1" thick laptop takes roughly the same amount of space in your bag as a 0.6" thin macbook air, but weight you notice on your shoulder after lugging it through airports for a few hours.
It's a pick 2 of 3 situation: 2 of thin, light and expandable. Only 2 of those 3 are useful features.
It's the same issue with material: a high quality plastic can have exactly the right amount of plasticity so that it's neither too brittle nor too flexible so that it provides maximum protection when dropped, while still being light. But plastic isn't sexy.
Except when it is not. Laptops with a dvd drive or an ethernet port or more than 2 USB A ports have become very rare.
It is your primary and likely only tool in a profession where everyone makes 6 figures.
Spending an extra 3000$ every 3 years doesn't sound all that bad, as far as professional spending goes.
Consultants spend more on suits every year.
Same cam be said for 1 UsbA port and a micro SD card slot.
Playing devil's advocate it might be that the more compact you try to make a laptop the less servicable it gets. I don't buy it tho.
Of course it’s suspicious that computer manufacturers can make more money in the process. But that doesn’t invalidate the technical argument.
If this standard solves the technical problem, I’m all for it. We’ll have to wait and see which manufacturers adopt it.
The only "AI" feature I use on macOS with any kind of regularity is the built-in OCR to copy text from images. But then my weak-ass Pixel 4a can do the same thing in the app switcher, so I assume it needs neither a fast CPU nor high-bandwidth memory.
The one we're talking about these days which requires high memory bandwidth only existed since 2023. 2022 was GPT 3.5, but locally Llama was the threshold when local llm really took off and that's early 2023. That's in the ballpark of time you normally need to design a new laptop and get it into production.
When the manufacturers figure out how to introduce upgradable laptops in a way that brings them more money, they will allow and encourage that.
Imagine a laptop subscription, where you pay the full cost of a laptop each year and receive parts to upgrade.
The first point is that LPDDR5 chip's operating frequency today has reached an all-time high of 9600 MT/s, and the latest off-the-shelf laptops (Intel Meteor Lake) are running at 7467 MT/s. This kind of high bandwidth is especially preferred in laptops for improved graphics and gaming performance. The iGPU has to compete with CPU for system DRAM bandwidth (which is already only a fraction of what a dedicated GPU has), every GB/s helps. Meanwhile, SO-DIMM is hitting its physical speed limit due to signal integrity issues (I heard that the impedance mismatch at the connector is too great to go faster). So yes, if you want high operating frequency, soldered RAM is the only option.
The second point is that, it's not always needed for every laptop, of course it's just a matter of tradeoff, many users would prefer lower DRAM bandwidth in exchange for better upgradability. On the other hand, hardware vendors can use this technical limitation as a justification to design machines with non-upgradable memory. You hit two birds with one stone: you can achieve better performance and force customers to pay extra for RAM at the same time.
If CAMM sees mass adoption, it's still up to the vendor to decide if they're willing to actually provide upgradability - but at least it'll be made possible at the technical level.
Honestly I don't think that really factors into it, simply because the vast majority of buyers have no idea what they need to begin with and really don't care about upgradability as a consequence. Why are they supposed to care about whether the RAM can be upgraded when they don't know what the RAM does or how much is a reasonable amount? (and let's not even mention different speeds...)
RAM capacity on the other hand is something everyone needs to care about, because having insufficient RAM brings the entire computer to a screeching halt. Being blunt, I consider it a travesty that computer vendors are selling machines with 8GB of RAM today. 16GB is the new minimum for practical use, with how bloated Windows, Chrome, and honestly everything is getting.
Don't get me started any further on why we even need at least 16 gigabytes of RAM to do the same things we were doing with 16 megabytes back in the day. Bloody insane, this timeline is.
Here's a random modern mid-range Dell with swappable m.2 storage, 2.5" SATA storage, m.2 Wi-Fi slot, and battery https://www.newegg.com/black-dell-inspiron-3520-mainstream/p.... If you're more adventurous you can often upgrade the screen as well but only like part replacement is intended for that.
This isn't unique to the mid price range or Dell or particularly rare. The main exception is modern MacBooks as there is only one provider for portable Macs and they went all in on integration (to some pros as well as the obvious cons).
I can see that saving a mm or two with this form factor would be advantageous though. Slots change every few years anyway - DDR3, DDR4, DDR5 all have physically incompatible slots so moving to this new saystem isn't that big a logical change.
Ram chips (~2mm thick) are soldered onto a board 2 mm thick, which uses 1mm spring contacts onto the motherboard.
Total height: 5mm above the motherboard.
So this CAMM system doesn't seem to actually solve the height or board area problem that was causing manufacturers to solder RAM directly.
So I turned it upside down and opened it up and to my interest/curiosity I found this RAM (CAMM) in it.
its a very interesting design. What I do find interesting is that there is no extra slot for more ram. so if /when i decide i want more than the 16GB I need to remove the existing. which is only slightly better than soldered ram in my opinion.
End result: You have a laptop that crashes whenever you pick it up from the 'wrong' corner.
Changing only the memory vs changing the whole laptop with battery, motherboard (incl. CPU/GPU), display, chassis seems at least an order of magnitude better. It was maybe meant hyperbolic, but I want to make clear that having the option to replace memory is really a lot better than soldered memory.
Even if with 2 SODIMM sockets you could populate or upgrade only 1 socket, the performance could be much worse than when using and replacing a matched pair of modules.
I have never used mismatched memory modules and many others do likewise, so if you want the best performance it does not matter that there is a single CAMM socket, it just makes the replacement simpler.
I'm wondering whether amd or intel will match apple on a future platform, who have been using 4 or more channels in their newer macbooks.
Wow! Blast from the past!
With non-upgradeable/self-contained/all-in-one computers, when you buy a new one, the old one continues to be perfectly usable on its own, unlike a standalone RAM stick or SDD or video card or..