That's not really true on Laptops. Apple, Lenovo, and Dell all make sturdy high-end upgradable repairable laptops. Not the kinds of products you'll see at your local West Fry though.
I'm a huge fan of Apple products in general - and firmly believe their laptops are the best on the market.
But there's incredibly little ground to call any of their current laptop lineup upgradable or repairable. I'm not sure there's a single upgradeable component left on any laptop they currently offer. The Macbook and the Macbook Pro have both moved to soldered CPU, RAM, and flash memory. The Macbook Air I believe still has a replaceable SSD but it has the proprietary connectory. To further complicate things - the batteries in the Macbook and Macbook Pro are both heavily glued in, so even that's difficult to replace.
Re:Android Oreo
by LeifCarrotson on Tuesday August 22, 2017 @10:54PM
(#15078197)
I've worked with a Lenovo T60, a W520, a T430, and checked out the T560. They are steadily getting less repairable.
I cannot change that. The ~5,000 I have spent on smartphones and laptops in the past 10 years is hardly enough. My buying choice, yours, and the GP's are just not strong and valuable enough to cause a manufacturer to pander to our desires.
The economies of scale and the greater money available from the opposite are so bad that no one even makes an expensive phone to capture our tiny segment of the market. They all chase the thinner, glued-up, bloatware-filled, non-repairable, closed-source, 2-year-or-less buyers. Same story on laptops.
In fact, my purchases seem to have the opposite effect: the Nexus is now as expensive as any other flagship. Motorola's cheap stock Android phone line shut down. LG stopped installing removable batteries. MacBook Pros still have nice hardware, but they are completely glued up. Thinkpads still have crappy stock screens.