alt Hacker NewsYou can go and buy a framework laptop.
In fact, now is the best time in the last 20 years for either: fully integrated SoC’s inside laptops (with all the pros and cons of better battery life, lower heat, smaller size - but irrepairability) and almost entirely modular laptops.
I understand that most people want socketed CPU’s in machines, but speaking genuinely storage used to be upgraded more than ram, and ram more than a CPU; CPU’s limit how much ram we can have so having soldered RAM isn’t that big of a deal in reality to most people.
I feel like a heathen saying it, because emotionally I don’t want it to be true, but it’s definitely the truth.
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You can - and you’ll readily find (as is expected and forgivable from a low run, low R&D budget machine) the build quality is abysmal next to the Mac. The case is flexy, the battery lasts a fraction of the time, the trackpad is nowhere near as good, the processors are anemic or badly thermally managed by comparison.
> You can go and buy a framework laptop.
> In fact, now is the best time in the last 20 years for either
> having soldered RAM isn’t that big of a deal in reality to most people.
Precisely. This whole sub-thread is a response to sacralising Apple for their M chips, pretending there is no compelling alternative, and subsequently giving Apple a free pass for consumer-hostile/commercially-dubious practices.
At any point in time, Apple has the lead, there's no argument there, but if you can afford to wait 12/18 months, you get about the same performance in a repairable/extensible package. That makes Apple's performance less stellar, especially when the same people laud those devices' life expectancy (my daily-driver ThinkPad is specced from early 2017, in 2025 it wouldn't care having bought it "old" in 2018).
I get it, this is an affluent forum, people like the latest and greatest, and a lot of Apple's marketing strategy is about validation and status, that's not terribly rational and healthy, though.