There’s nothing baffling to it. Windows PCs are upgradable. Apple won’t even give you a PCie slot on its $10k mac studio ultra to install a better network card or whatever.

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cortesoft 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I haven't worked with TOO many different companies, but I have worked at a few of various sizes (from small startup to huge Fortune 100), and none of them ever provided upgrades for machines. It was always full replacements. Sometimes you would get a used machine, but they were from someone else who left, not an upgraded machine.

Are other IT shops really doing a lot of piece by piece upgrades for employee machines?

	▲	thewebguyd 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Are other IT shops really doing a lot of piece by piece upgrades for employee machines? I doubt it. I'm certainly not, and none of my peers at other companies locally are either. Even less so now that plenty of business class laptops are coming with soldered ram anyway. The MO is to just replace the machine once its out of warranty.
	▲	fragmede 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It's for specialist users. Eg video editors or CAD systems. They need a 10-Gig connectivity to the SAN and want a Mac and not a Dell.

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Kirby64 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What company upgrades their windows PCs? They give them exactly as shipped. IT department is not wasting time swapping out RAM or SSDs. And they certainly are not upgrading them over time. You just replace the entire PC if you go to 'swap' it.

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kyawzazaw 3 hours ago | parent [-]

my school IT department does this but it's a small university

	▲	0x1d7 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		IME edu operates much differently than [US] corporations which use a 3 - 5 year deprecation schedule. Edu is more 'run it until it doesn't'.

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kasey_junk 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I have never, in 30 years, working across big companies and small, had a computer hardware upgrade. It’s _always_ just a new box.

	▲	Modified3019 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I work I Ag retail (agronomic services, chemical sales) and while we have an IT department, a decade ago I’d occasionally act as “local” tech support and double a coworker’s RAM when their combination of browser/office/database front ends stopped gracefully fitting in 4GB (and later 8GB). I would also migrate them from HDD’s to SSD’s, and set them up with backups. But even I haven’t done that in several years now, once IT moved to providing 16GB memory and SSD’s as a baseline, there’s really nothing left in a box to upgrade. I’m quite happy enough to not have to care.
	▲	havaloc an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Agreed, the only time I did upgrades on boxes is swapping out spinning disks for SSD, that saved me a whole upgrade cycle it was such an improvement.
	▲	j2j8 an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		They are often leased and have to be returned in the same condition at the end of the term.

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robertlagrant 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Most people have laptops now, in my experience of large corporations.

	▲	recursive 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I got the RAM upgraded in my work laptop.

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GeekyBear 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I actually have seen a business upgrade PCs that were fairly recently purchased once, back during the transition from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95.

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reaperducer 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There’s nothing baffling to it. Windows PCs are upgradable.

We're talking about enterprises here, not home tinkerers.

Enterprises buy whole computers and replace them every x years. They don't waste expensive IT employee time running around upgrading machines all the time.

The last time I worked for a company that did any repair of its computers was around 2005, when all ~500 Dells in the office had to have their defective motherboards replaced.

	▲	ioblomov 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There’s an accounting factor too. Businesses depreciate equipment as SOP. The laptops have already been written off by the time they need upgrading.