And how much did it weigh? Laptops have come a long way since even just 10 years ago. My rMBP is almost a pound lighter than my original Macbook, despite having a 15.4" versus 13.3" screen, a quad core versus dual-core processor, and a 96 watt-hour battery versus a 55 watt-hour battery.
And even if I was willing to cart around that extra 0.8 pounds, I wouldn't want to spend that extra weight budget on increased modularity. I'd much rather they, say, push the battery life to 14-15 hours instead.
The battery is swappable, and the whole thing opens with a set of phillips (you know, the '+' shape) screws.
Although you can't choose the GPU when ordering, newer ones tend to have newer models, implying that's also modular (just fixed to a selection of one at a given time).
So, yeah --- you can get a modular laptop, but you have to know where to look.
PCMCIA was so great. In my entire experience of computing and consumer electronics, I think PCMCIA is still my favorite technology. I miss it a lot.
There's no point adding any extra module, people do not upgrade anything besides RAM, and everything that wears off is included.
The PC was the outlier that allowed for easy expansion.
Now we have USB instead of Amiga expansion bays, that required a table with big enough width. Instead we scatter cables and hubs.
People forget Apple was sued, and lost, in the 1990s for telling people to buy new iPods instead of selling replacement batteries. They started moving to user serviceable stuff briefly, but then went back to their own ways and people haven't challenged them since.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc._litigation#iPod_bat...
It was the 2000s, 2005 was the settlement date, iPods didn't exist in the 1990s. They didn't lose, strictly speaking, they settled (which is not the same as admitting fault). Settling lets them save face, even if they may not have had a liability, by not dragging their name through the muck with regards to the poor performance of the batteries and iPods.
We didn't have to go down the road to soldering all the bits to a tiny motherboard, but Apple's vision of "small and light at all costs", including performance and battery life, killed all the other paths for the foreseeable future.
I might investigate EOMA68 stuff, though it is likely years before it'll be viable, if ever (especially given their anti-intel sentiment): http://elinux.org/Embedded_Open_Modular_Architecture/EOMA-68
Apple is the only vendor that has a 15" laptop with high-res screen and quad-core processor that gets 8+ hours of battery life. The only laptops with greater battery capacity than the Macbook Pros are the Thinkpads with extended batteries that stick out of the machine.
Now we have come somewhat full circle with Apple's Macbook which has meagre hardware functionality and relies on USB-C to provide the missing functionality in a modular fashion. However it means a nest of cables so it's probably not what anyone wants when they want a modular laptop.