[FootballMuse]

It would be amazing to replace the battery and get an upgraded Cumpute Element every few years while reusing the same basic hardware.

CPUs tend to get tied +/- 1 or 2 chipset generations, but given that this uses a PCIe interface, it may actually be plausible.

[sneak]

Then we can be stuck with the same low-res <200ppi screen for many years to come!

(My personal pet peeve is the stagnation of pixel density in displays outside of Apple hardware and phones.)

What's wrong with replacing the display and keyboard? They're the cheapest parts of the computer.

(I think the compute module includes the chipset, too, given that it includes the ram and wifi. It probably exposes pci to the laptop which is at that point just a bunch of peripherals.)

[ltbarcly3]

My Thinkpad T490 has 210ppi and it's nothing special. Runs Debian like a champ (I am addicted to TrackPoint so I'm stuck with Lenovo these days). The picture quality on this laptop is far superior (contrast, color saturation, black levels) to my 16" MBP (the LCD panel on the 16" MBP is shameful, it is the worst Apple display I've had in 15 years. If you calibrate it so that colors aren't washed out it is so dark it's impossible to use. If it wasn't a work laptop I would sell it, but luckily I have a good external 4k monitor).

So I call shinanigans on what you are saying here.

That said, I'm staying with the T490 because the best generation AMD thinkpads aren't available with high resolution panels yet, so I will grant you that you have to be patient to get a good laptop display. OTOH, you are wrong about retina displays, they aren't uniformly good so you have to be selective there as well.