I would point out though that while he might have been wrong on the X1 Carbon, you still have not really dismantled the key argument - that you don't need to embrace soldered RAM to get laptops that are thin enough. At a certain point, you're just going to end up with an experience that is objectively worse since keyboards start having more and more give the thinner you make them (not to mention far worse feel).

I'd make the trade off for more mm of thickness anyway.

> I'd make the trade off for more mm of thickness anyway.

That's great, then you can buy this modular laptop or one of many laptops that still has user upgradeable ram. Turns out you don't have to make this compromise if you don't want to and people that do can also make their own choice!

Ah yes, the "free market" argument. Remind me of how that one went with the headphone jack. Seems I have less and less choices in that department these days, especially at the flagship tier - despite it objectively being a worse device for it with almost no positives except saving a little bit of cost for the manufacturer. I do not accept the arguments on it being necessary for water resistance or providing much saving of internal storage either - since we have devices that demonstrate how these claims are bunk.

My point is that maybe there needs to be an organised pushback against this instead of pretending like customers have perfect knowledge of the drawbacks and benefits associated with a particular design decision and are not at all affected by marketing.

The free market is allowing a company like this one to exist because they're banking on there being enough people that care about this sort of thing to buy into their device rather than buying from a well established brand. That assumption will be put to the test very soon and advocates for this sort of device have a great opportunity to do so. The bitter reality though is that there might be a market large enough to sustain a company like this, but it won't make any big waves in the industry as a whole. Because people generally don't care.

> Seems I have less and less choices in that department these days, especially at the flagship tier

You're making a conscious decision about what sort of compromises you're willing to make with regards to your devices, just as everyone else is that buys electronic devices. There are plenty of phones with headphone jacks that have premium hardware specs. Sure, Apple doesn't have it. Samsung doesn't. But plenty of other manufacturers do, and people aren't buying them. Sony's top of the line smart phones have a headphone jack. LG's Vx0 line had headphone jacks and a fancy DAC built into them. ASUS's RoG phones have a headphone jack too. There's plenty of choice if it's actually that important to you. Buy those devices and hope that you can convince enough other people that the feature is as important to them as it is to you.

You don't need to shit on other people's choices nor assume that they aren't informed about the choices they make to want for the things that you do.

> The free market is allowing a company like this one to exist

The "free market" is controlled by a very small set of conglomerates.

They get caught red handed deploying anticompetitive strategies every other week.

Yet this product is still coming to market despite that.

Which doesn't really disprove anything. Nobody is arguing that there are armed gunman that target any company that dares deviate from the chosen path of planned obsalescence. The argument though is that the market is overwhelmingly controlled by those that do practice it and furthermore, this practice has nothing to do with serving the interests of the consumer but that of the shareholder.

The fact that there are some that have been persuaded through years of concentrated marketing that bad engineering decisions are desirable is more of an example of manufacturing consent than the "free market of ideas".

It's incredibly arrogant to assume that the only reason why people might come to a different conclusion from you is that they've been manipulated into thinking that way through marketing. It's simply impossible that the indoctrination only occurred to other people and not yourself, right?

Your entire argument seems to be that "not every manufacturer's top of the line devices matches my vision for what is an ideal device, so I want to force them all to change to match that." Not everyone wants the same device as you and no, it's not just because they're all ignorant morons that've been manipulated into thinking differently from you.

Why are you so vehemently against allowing other people to make their own decisions?

I never recall being "so vehemently against allowing other people to make their own decisions". I also am not under any delusions that I have some unique ability of being immune to marketing. Nobody is a moron here and in reality the only way to truly be immune to such things is being literally brain dead. Most people are too busy to absorb tonnes of domain specific knowledge of often questionable relevance to their own lives.

However, it's honestly pretty ridiculous to pretend like marketing does not have an immense influence on the trajectory towards consumer desires or that it cannot lead to worse choices by many objective measures. See cigarettes, fast food, hell, even the stupid obsession with buying bank bustingly expensive diamonds for marriage proposals. There would definitely still be a market for all of the above (and personally I am against any regulations limiting the freedom of purchasing even cigarettes for legal adults) but it was marketing that turned it into a cultural norm, not organic consumer demand.

It also does not need to be something that starts off as a bad thing. Thinner devices are better up to a certain point, no argument there. However, it does start leading to usability and maintainability problems past a certain threshold. We have definitely reached and passed that threshold for many devices.

Customers don't exist in isolation, if you are locked in to the Apple ecosystem, you're stuck with their decision to ditch the headphone jack unless if you want to stick to phones before iPhone 7. If your family have been purchasing Samsung devices predominately, chances are you will just assume that it's best to just get one of the latest one because it's reassuring to get a familiar brand and surely the latest automatically means better, right? Feel free to strawman this as me claiming people are morons but for most normal people not preoccupied with tech, these assumptions are reasonable.

Also, pretending like blatantly unpopular decisions like removing the headphone jack and expandable storage are somehow in demand based purely on continued sales figures is stupidly reductive. Humans don't have perfect knowledge of the market and the leaders of that market will not only dominate airtime, they can afford to absorb bad PR if they deem that an unpopular decision will lead to better profits long term.

> Thinner devices are better up to a certain point, no argument there. However, it does start leading to usability and maintainability problems past a certain threshold. We have definitely reached and passed that threshold for many devices.

This is entirely subjective and I disagree. As do many other people. Some people want chonky 17 inch gaming laptops and other people want 12 inch macbooks and some people want something inbetween. Some people want products in form factors that don't even exist. I personally want a macbook with an ergonomic keyboard built in! But that's just me talking about what I want. The market for laptops is large enough to sustain a huge degree of choice, but you are insisting that there is an absolute limit on form factors as decided by... you? If not by you, then by what? The government? A standards committee?

> Customers don't exist in isolation, if you are locked in to the Apple ecosystem, you're stuck with their decision to ditch the headphone jack unless if you want to stick to phones before iPhone 7.

No one is "locked" into the Apple ecosystem. Not even remotely. You're right, if you want a headphone jack on an iPhone you'll have to live with using an iPhone 6s or earlier. It's fine to want a headphone jack on your modern iPhone, but that is entirely different from you not having a choice. There are markets where people don't realistically have a choice, but smartphones and laptops definitely aren't those markets.

> Feel free to strawman this as me claiming people are morons but for most normal people not preoccupied with tech, these assumptions are reasonable.

The entire premise of your argument is that consumers need to be protected from manufacturers. Sometimes, I would absolutely agree with that. But with laptop form factors? Or not having a headphone jack on every single smart phone that's out there? That's absurd. If someone buys a Samsung phone and finds out only after buying it that it doesn't have a headphone jack, there's plenty of actions they can take post-purchase if they find that aspect of their new device untenable.

> Also, pretending like blatantly unpopular decisions like removing the headphone jack and expandable storage are somehow in demand based purely on continued sales figures is stupidly reductive.

Is it actually blatantly unpopular? Are you sure this isn't just the false consensus effect coming into play for you? As I previously mentioned, for things like the headphone jack there are a ton of options with top of the line specs out there. Purchasing decisions are always about compromise and not every niche is always going to be accommodated by the market. My ergonomic keyboard laptop still doesn't exist, despite me very much wanting it to. I have plenty of fancy headphones I can't use with my phone without an additional external DAC. I guess that sucks, but given how I use my phone, it has had almost zero impact on my life. For people that find that feature indispensable though, then they will probably also have to think about their purchase and will rightly be upset that one of the features they valued in the lineup of phones they've been buying isn't there anymore. I encourage those people to be loud about it, just as you are. That's part of this whole market thing, and there's plenty of cases where people's voices have absolutely made a big impact on the decisions made by shortsighted companies. Just don't expect everyone to fall in line with you.

I wasn't trying to dismantle an argument, just pointing out that the parent had no clue what they were talking about, and a little research would make for a stronger position to argue from (and save some embarrassment).

I actually prefer laptops with upgradeable components and I'm definitely weighing replacing my two aging Thinkpad laptops (running OpenBSD and Void Linux respectively) with the Framework Laptop. I had briefly considered a M1 MacBook Air but I already have a M1 Mac mini and I try to stay diverse between form factors. The specs on the Framework are fantastic; even the i5 is a powerhouse, comparable to i7 desktops from just two years ago[1]. With the modular bays I could easily have Void on the main storage and OpenBSD on a module and choose between the two. I already have compatible RAM and M.2 storage laying about so the DIY SKU is a no-brainer.

As for keyboards I'm right there with you; the higher travel on the Framework's keyboard is another selling point in my opinion.

[1] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i7-8700-vs-Intel-...

Sorry, I got the X1 carbon wrong from a list of 3 laptops off the top of my head. I must have been thinking of another Lenovo and mixed them up.

What I don't understand is why you felt the need to get aggressive and diss me in 2 different posts saying I have no clue what I'm talking about or that I'm making stuff up and calling for my embarrassment, only for a small mistake, when you could have made the same arguments without the personal dissing.

I feel like being kind to others, even if they're wrong, goes a longer way in productive discussions. I definitely will not be replying to you again. Have a good day sir.

I don’t feel that I was aggressive at all in my direct reply to you, maybe a little in my reply to the other commenter, but obviously you took it that way and I’m genuinely sorry. It’s not an excuse, but I just get so tired of people making arguments based on false statements of fact (whether from malice or ignorance) and it moved me to speak out when it seemed like that’s what you were doing. I see now that wasn’t your intention. You’re right, we all make mistakes and I made one too.

Now that's what I call a courteous roundhouse kick to the social nads courtesy of the great Chuck Norris.

A better example would probably be the Lenovo T-series. Recent models eg. T490s have soldered RAM, but if you go back to eg. T460s there were DIMM sockets for upgrading, and the laptop was quite thin. But, that was 5 years ago already.

I too am dismayed by how older models of thin laptops lost DIMM sockets for increasingly diminishing amounts of thickness removed.

I ended up going with the below because I wanted a 360 degree touchscreen Ryzen laptop that I could upgrade the HD and RAM...and I felt like I was searching for a needle in a haystack. Shame on you Dell for never offering Ryzen in your convertibles. Shame on you HP for soldering RAM in your new Elitebook line.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/HP-ProBook-x360-435-G7-laptop-...