> If being able to replace a part requires me to have a screwdriver (literally a Philips one should do), the component, and no additional PhD or bravery coming from youth, inexperience or both, I will welcome it with open arms.

You have to understand though that people like us are a tiny minority.

Increasingly I hate creating waste, especially e-waste, and so I'll tinker with things to get them working or upgrade them, but most people don't want the hassle.

It's not just price. The market for this expertise is also not very deep and liquid. If I have to get a laptop repaired, what are my choices? Send it off to the manufacturer/importer if it's still under warranty, and get it back in maybe two months. Drop it off at a shop that does also phone repairs and hope they don't wreck it?

Realistically I don't know anyone with my specific kind of problem who's used their services before, so I don't really know their reputation. It's not like walking into a supermarket, or even getting a car repaired where you have some sense of the likelihood it will take as long as they say, cost as much as they say and actually succeed. There's much greater information asymmetry.

Of course, given how unattractive it is to get something repaired, more people will be inclined to just buy something new, resulting in less demand for repairs, resulting in less supply, less attractive repair market, etc.

Repairability (at home, by relative morons) also means more repair shops, because less repairability means death of a repairs market.

>Even if a professional can fix it, that expertise to be able to use those tools worth "a few thousand dollars" costs a lot too, likely pushing the price high enough that its worth thinking about buying a new device instead.

This is generally a problem in taxation than the devices. Consider I want to have an electrician fix my broken wallsocket:

>Billed for 100€/hour

>Out of which expenses for moving using a workcar, calculating by officially recognized tax administration car wear value 0,59€/km for 5km both ways, so ~6€, 94€ remains

>VAT is 25,5%, leaving you with ~70€

>Paying for mandatory employer's portion of pension 17,5%, leaving us with ~57,75€

Now the employee gets 57,75€, out of which following are deducted:

>Income tax for average electrician: 26%, ~15€

>Employee's part of mandatory pension: 7,15%, ~ 4,1€

>Municipal taxes: ~8% depending on municipality ~ 4,6€

So 57,75€ - 23,7€ = ~34€

There are also various single or partial percent taxes that slightly affect the outcome, and companies often want some sort of profit instead of directly giving 100% to the single employee.

I'm a huge Thinkpad fan. I'm an even bigger MacBook fan.

None of my MacBook Pros ever had any issues, and I used my last MacBook for 9 years. I could keep using it with Linux instead of MacOS, but I think almost a decade of use is plenty of value for me.

There were recalls and scandals with the MacBook Pro over the years, but nothing that other vendors also didn't see, and that wouldn't have required the same exact parts being replaced. I'm thinking of the GPU issues with certain MacBooks. The difference is Apple is usually able to be held to task to fix issues, while almost any other vendor did not care to stand behind their product, including Lenovo.

I had a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon with the HiDPI screen that was absolutely awful, requiring replacement multiple times. Each time, the moron from Unisys that Lenovo sent to do the on-site repair would return me with a laptop that was poorly reassembled, and with new problems due to the tech's ineptitude. The same dude did service for Lenovo servers, and he once dropped a server that needed a fan replaced on the floor. Talk about fragile.

Thinkpads are great, and the oldest ones are still solid to use, but to say that MacBooks are fragile ignores that Thinkpads too are fragile.

> Apple's era of easily (or even hot) swappable parts.

This. It existed. The laptops still commanded enthusiasm, felt great, capable, and solid without being too heavy, and had swappable RAM and disk. Keyboard and battery swap were screwdriver set DIYs. Heck, the old Pismos had hot swappable battery and drive bays.

I'm still frequently using a MacBook Pro 11,3. Only lets you swap the drive but that by itself is a great point of flexibility.

The M series does amazing things which have their own merits, but the particular set of tradeoffs aren't inevitable.

The "sacrifices must be made" idea apparently sacrifices recall of other possibilities first.

> failing 3rd party RAM

Unless you're Samsung, almost all RAM is 3rd party. It's either Sammsung, SK Hynix, or Micron.

Easily swappable components also increase resources consumption. We don't necessary want or need to be able to fix all the parts of our laptops or cars (or shoes!) at home, but we definitely want and need a local professional to be able to do so for a reasonable cost.

Chips have a limited lifespan too. It doesn't matter if you can swap a module in your laptop, at some point all those chips will need to be recycled.

It's faster, but a big reason apple silicon is ahead is because the memory is co-packaged on an MCM. This is the direction things are going.

People as in the general population were not doing it, just us weirdos.

I funded my early career years by doing IT for home users of all sorts of expertise and budget and I feel like I got a decent gauge at what the average user did during the replaceable hardware era.

The people in the middle class and below would end up with such a shit device out of the gate (those 400-600usd laptops at the time, lower outside of the us), that by the time they started complaining about slowness, the upgradeable things did not make a difference. 1 to 2gb ram with a shit Celeron? Hardly worth the money. Bottom shelf Core2duos, overheating, cracking hinges, etc.

Not to mention that even then not all laptops were very standard in the way they were built. Taking one apart could be very time consuming and they would pay by the hour for me to do it, so after labor it was above what the device was worth and it would only buy them a few months of time at most. You do that once and you realize next time you’ll get a desktop.

The richer people would just get MacBooks and only call me for software stuff.

Companies had thinkpads and once purchased would never go out the standarized build. Just swap them when out of warranty, or at the time most would actually work at a desk with a desktop and leave work at work.

CAMM was not good enough to saturate the memory bandwidth of AMD Strix Halo. Imagine telling people to use a standard that is already dead on arrival for top end machines

Nah, personally? I know it’s possible, I’ve done it, and I just do not care anymore.

not worth it

>Cars [...] No modifications are done

In a lot of places that is highly illegal