I agree with him. My personal laptop is an m1 MacBook Pro, and 5 years on it’s still a better experience than my work laptop which is a high spec dell with an i9 and 32GB ram. I’m more likely to chuck the dell than upgrade it because whatever combination of stuff it’s doing just doesn’t work.

Give me something solid that will last 5 -6 years with a serviceable (I don’t care if it’s glued or torx’ed or whatever in, just as long as it’s replaceable) battery, and I don’t care if the RAM and SSD is soldered to the chipset.

In the past I’ve replaced spinning rust with SSDs and that’s given that machine a lease of life but those kinds of upgrades don’t really exist anymore - adding an extra 8GB ram isn’t going to turn my stupid dell machine into something that works.

The half-life of Apple kit is so high, they are arguably a lot more sustainable than their repairable PC counterparts.

Apple laptops I have that boot include a 2007 iBook (my folks used it until this Summer and then bank websites would stop working with the Chrome browser they could get working on it), which I'll be putting a BSD or Linux distro on over Christmas, a 2012 Intel MBP that has Linux on it and a couple of 2015-2017 era MBPs that I inherited via one means or another.

I'm typing this on an M4 MacBook Air I picked up cheap during Black Friday sales. I fully expect it to still be functional in 10 years.

I don't think I've ever had a PC laptop last close to that.

Electronic devices usually get thrown away because nobody wants them anymore because they are obsolete. Having removable RAM will do you little good if you can only fit ddr3.

It doesn't have to be thrown out. It can be re-used by someone else. Just build durable electronics. It will last a decade easily. Upgradeable laptops are actually less sustainable: people buy not 1 or 2 laptops, but 1.6 laptops: effectively throwing away 0.6 laptop.

Also I see no reason why a non-upgradeable laptop would also be non-repairable.

There's no reason such a laptop can't be repairable. Sure, it may be harder to do, but that's the tradeoff you choose when buying such a device.

The main obstacles to repairability in such devices are intentional: part serialization, lack of documentation, and so on. Those don't help making the device any more compact or easier to manufacture, it's pure greed.

Address those problems and you can happily have your ultra-slim, tightly integrated laptop. It may be slightly less repairable, but as long as repair isn't intentionally being prevented, life will find a way.

Heck most people won’t be upgrading every few years, the m1 Macs are still plenty good today, it sounds like this guy just wants a MacBook Pro that runs highly tuned Unix based OS that is not macOS

I also want it. I dislike this idea "make it illegal I don't want other people to have the freedom to do something I dislike". Of you don't like unupgradable products, then don't buy them. I like upgradability - apple makes some things like the SSD non-uogradeable without much benefit. But many other parts gain different benefits when you don't try to make everything infinitely upgradable. I really want this non-enshittified macbook alternative!!!! Shut up and take my money.

> I don’t care one bit about upgradability or customizability. After a year or two, I’m happy to throw it out and buy a new one. It’s not like upgradability is a bad thing, but it usually comes with tradeoffs to weight and power draw, and I’d rather it all be in one solid package glued together. And I don’t like customizability because I like when all the testing and polish work is put into one configuration.

Jesus christ. What a wasteful and selfish way to look at things.

Seeing the latest Valve Steam Machine made me disappointed. No replaceable GPU, soldered memory, no socketed CPU. I really hope Valve isn't going to lead the way for unrepairable gaming PCs.