[geezerjay]

> I'm not convinced that consumers care if their laptop has easily replaceable parts.

That's like saying that you're not sure consumers dislike the idea of falling victims to price gauging schemes or even being forced to scrap perfectly good hardware due to a minor issue with an otherwise perfectly modular component or the inability to upgrade low-performing hardware.

[wilsonnb2]

"like" and "dislike" aren't the same as caring. In this case, caring means they feel strongly enough about it to purchase or not purchase a specific laptop. I'm sure plenty of consumers dislike their laptops lack of repairability - I also think that they don't care.

[oldcynic]

Careful here.

Anecdotally I'm aware of more than a few folks who replaced their bottom end PC/Windows laptop with a brand new machine because it was supplied with far too little memory, but hit a £399 or £499 price point, and they installed one too many bits of crap. So they spend another £499 on another too lightly specced laptop when £40 doubling memory would have fixed all their issues. PC makers have always been happy to sell machines with barely enough RAM to reach the desktop let alone run or install anything.

A lot of consumers don't know what they're buying, how much memory Windows needs, how to upgrade even when possible, or how to uninstall things they no longer need (eg iTunes after they switched to Android, Massive HP drivers remaining when now running an Epson printer and vice versa). Helpful in-store sales people don't help with this.

Most of us on HN however would prefer to buy the least standard memory/SSD possible and immediately bump it at Crucial or some such for a quarter of Dell, Lenovo or Apple's price.