Nice to see this pop up as Apple announce their 5yr plan to flood the world’s landfills & scrap yards with 8gb fused ram Neo’s.
Hasn’t Apple been soldering everything to the motherboard for ages now?
Oh yeah…for well over a decade. If you’re REALLY lucky the proprietary form factor m.2 is user replaceable and not just sad bits soldered direct to the PCB. (Edit: I really really hate Autoassume, that’s supposed to be “SSD bits”… I’ll leave it as is because it’s funny)
My wife has a 2017 MacBook Air, at some point in the last few years it stopped getting system and security updates. She didn’t notice until she got a pop-up from Chrome saying that her OS is no longer supported. Completely ignored it until around October last year when some websites stopped working and gave an error indicating out of date certificates.
(There’s a lot in those last 3 sentences that is wildly troubling to me…)
Took me from October until mid-January to convince her to TRY Linux. So I went to buy her a new m.2…and paid an extra £20 on top of standard because of the proprietary form factor. Luckily I bought before the major price hikes…got a 256gb m(ac).2 for ~£90. Would have just backed up her files and wiped the original drive but she wanted to be able to switch back to her exact installation if she didn’t like Linux…and the new drive is double the capacity 👍
There’s a difference between ‘repairable’ and ‘upgradable.’ Most of the comments seem to conflate the two. Lenovo isn’t doing a Framework.
It’s a smart move. Differentiates them from other laptop-makers for corporate IT, who can do the parts swaps themselves. Also smart is associating the brand with iFixit and working to get a 10/10. That’ll be what sets them apart from all the others, at least for the next year or two.
The “upgradability” part in a small laptop is questionable to me, anyway.
The GPU is really compromised in that chassis, as having it in a slot compromises cooling big time, and limits how much power it can use. And while I love upgradable RAM for the CPU… it’d be better if they used faster CAMM modules. Many other brands have upgradable SSDs/WiFi.
Swappable ports are awesome, no question.
…But honestly, I’d rather have a smaller chassis, bigger GPU and better cooling right off the bat, like a Zephyrus chassis. And have it reparable, and make the whole motherboard standardized/swappable, but not compromise the chassis so severely by making it modular.
A think pad t series is not really much harder to take apart than a framework. Just more screws and fewer magnets. The screen is probably an exception however.
That’s his point. It’s similar to framework, but not the same.
Easy repairability is great, truly.
But framework offers more than that, easy repairability AND upgradability, because they offer new upgraded parts with the same compatibility as the old ones, so you can just drop them in.
Lenovo is not yet doing that. Which is fine. Just a noteworthy difference.
I would be curious to see how often people actually upgrade their frameworks.
I agree with their repair stance. It just feels like one of those things people will tell you they want and then never do.
Still maybe the explosion in memory prices will change the incentives and people will start holding things longer. It will be interesting to see.
That’s nice you can replace the charging port without reflowing the motherboard now.
