[38911BBF]

I sometimes answer questions in the tech-help reddits to get a feel for the kind of IT-problems everyday users are battling with.

The amount of people asking if they can upgrade the CPU, GPU, SSD/HDD or memory in their new-ish laptops is disheartening. Most of the questions concerns the CPU og GPU where the answer is no 99.99% of the time these days. 90% of consumer grade laptops have the RAM soldered to the mainboard too now. Luckily the HDD/SSD is usually replaceable or upgradeable in case of failure, performance problems or lack of free disk space... but for how long?

From a purely ecological standpoint, the laptop producers should be forced to buy back and recycle all their shitty unupgradeable, unrepairable, made-to-fail consumer electronics. It's a shameful situation we are in.

If societies can get 99% of glas and plastic bottles recycled using bottle deposit money, we should be able to reach the same figures for consumer electronics like laptops.

[II2II]

The lack of an upgrade path wouldn't be as much of a concern if laptops actually shipped with decent specifications to begin with.

One thing that caught me off guard was the number of low end models with 4 GB of RAM and pricier models limited to 8 GB RAM. With Windows using nearly 2 GB on boot and a chunk being used for the GPU, that doesn't leave much for applications. Having a non-upgradable CPU is not a huge issue in my opinion, except the performance of low end models is astoundingly abysmal. I doubt that many of them could keep up with my 8 year old desktop, which was not a high end build at the time. Not only is the hardware disposable, in many cases it is intended to have a very short life.

[xiphias2]

I feel the same with SSD, although it's replacable. Often it's cheaper to buy the smallest SSD option, throw it out and buy a new 2TB SSD instead of asking for it integrated.

[II2II]

Agreed. While I was responding from the perspective of disposable would be more acceptable if they were actually usable for a significant period of time, I do look for a replaceable SDD. Granted, that is mostly because I expect a data recovery path should the machine break.

Overall though, I would be happier if manufacturers were clear on what you are getting. While I do some real work on my laptop, I tend to offload most of my work onto a desktop. This means that I look for a handful of key features and don't care about the rest. Unfortunately, my last laptop purchasing experience was a nightmare. Researching a couple of laptops took more time than deciding upon parts for a desktop build and, of course, you have to look at more than a couple of laptops to find something that is acceptable in terms of features, performance, and price.

[read_if_gay_]

This is a good point. Tangentially related, it’s especially ironic how much Apple talked about the environment in their recent iPhone 12 announcement when they pretty much started the trend of unupgradeable electronics, and aren’t about to stop.