[dividedbyzero]

> But the upside is that those companies want to make repairs/upgrades easy for themselves, which in turn makes them easy for the saavy consumer to do.

Do they? At least for the slimmer models, I was under the impression most have copied Apple and transitioned to soldering and gluing everything into an unserviceable mess.

[johnnyanmac]

>I was under the impression most have copied Apple and transitioned to soldering and gluing everything into an unserviceable mess

ultrabooks, yes. everything is so crammed and specs are relatively low, so you're mostly stuck with what comes in the machine.

Most other laptops (the "pro" competitors) tend to not do that. There's no good reason for an OEM to do that if they aren't optimizing for some sub 4lb laptop.

[bombcar]

It's part of the reason Apple has so few SKUs compared to others, because everything is conjoined; Dell will have five SKUs that are identical except two removable pieces (RAM and SSD) are varying sizes.