No, it isn't.

The entire point of the "my grandfather's axe" or "my grandmother's broom" story -- of which Theseus' ship is the original -- is that there's nothing of the original left, but replacement was gradual so there's a feeling of continuity.

Whereas this is the original laptop with some upgrades. Same chassis, same motherboard, same screen, same (IMHO, bad) keyboard, but more RAM, more & faster disks, and a new CPU.

This is not Theseus' ship, where nothing was left.

The point of this story is that an end-user with normal tools can, at home, repair and upgrade a decade-old Thinkpad, but you can't do that with the new ones.

The subtext is that in fact CPU performance isn't increasing much any more, and hasn't in a decade and a half. GPU performance is a bit but most of us don't need it, same as most of us don't need lots of CPU cores in a laptop. SSD performance is improving, somewhat, yes. Size, a lot.

New laptops aren't that much faster than old laptops. Unless you're very demanding, old ones are good enough.

So laptop makers, who need people to keep buying new laptops or they'll go out of business, are making laptops that you can't fix or upgrade any more.

I did not know there was a name for this[1].

I am regularly using a T400 which started life as a Lenovo 3000 N100.[2]

Upgrades since then include a 2 TB SSD, 3.06 Ghz CPU, and WiFi.

I do enjoy tinkering, but I also like the keyboard :-)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

[2]: https://www.nu42.com/2016/12/another-one-bites-the-dust.html

Car industry is going in the direction of manufacturer rebuild (remanufacture), so laptop industry should do the same. Instead of making unupgradeable garbage, manufacturers should offer upgrades.

I am not sure of what you're saying, perhaps partly because I don't own a car, and never have since I got my driver's licence at age 38 or so.

I do recall a neighbour of mine saying "back when cars went rusty" to me a decade back, which surprised me. A lot. Apparently they don't now?

But modern cars, and many modern motorbikes, are sealed units which are not maintainable by the end-user. I dislike electronics like that.

For this reason, for years now, I have favoured very cheap smartphones. If I must have a sealed brick that I can't fix or upgrade, then I will have the cheapest one I can get that does what I need.

Luckily, there are very decent £/€ 125 smartphones now, from companies such as PPTV, iRulu and Umidigi, which are entirely usable and which I can replace every couple of years without pain.

For laptops, I just use decade+ old Thinkpads for now. They're fast enough for me and the keyboards are better than any modern thing.

Toyota announced last week it's going to offer a full overhaul of its BEVs in the UK every few years. So you can drive it back to the manufacturer and they will make it new, much like a major revision of an aeroplane. This is what should be happening with laptops as well. Sealed devices are a thing of the moment and will not last imho.

Galvanized steel and clear-coat paint finish are a huge part of why cars don’t rust as much as they used to. (But salt will eventually take a toll if you are coastal or live where roads are regularly salted.) Alternative materials like stainless-steel coated aluminum, or plastic coatings also contribute.

Here’s an article contemporaneous to the rise of clearcoats and galvanization: https://www.csmonitor.com/1985/1025/hrust.html

How often do you upgrade your phone or laptop?

I ask because I sort of went the opposite road, making sure I bought something that would last a long time.

Aside from screen resolution and the modern “anything” thinking we all have high resolution monitors my old 2015 MBP is still performing just fine despite its heavy usage.

In the same period I’ve gone through 5 or 6 work laptops that were certainly not top end.

I’m of course scared that the glory days of Apple died and my next mbp won’t live 10 years, but I hope so.

I follow more of this track as well...buy the highest end model and use it 2-3 times as long as you would a lower end model (but you're not paying 2-3 times the price).

My 2015 MBP made it to the end of 2021 for me - when the fans started to have to run constantly and even still caused thermal throttling - when I had 2 Thunderbolt external displays attached (thus running the discrete GPU). I think it was an OS bug introduced in Catalina or Big Sur.

I even tore down my hardware and re-applied thermal compound and clean dup the heatsinks...no joy.

Running "pmset -g thermlog" while using it sealed the deal for me. I was only getting a fraction of the CPU power when running on two displays (and this is when the ambient room temp was 68-70F). I had a day when my AC conked out for a day and the room temp jumped to 76-78F and it was unusable.

I am really enjoying my 16" 2021. Didn't realize how much of a slouch my 2015 had been by comparison.

That being said, I still rock a mid-2012 MBP for light tasks when I just need a laptop and not a desktop replacement laptop.

Laptop: rarely. My main travel one is a Thinkpad X220 I bought used for £150 in 2017. It replaced a Thinkpad X200 I bought used in 2013 for about the same price.

I recently (end of last year) bought i7 versions of the T420 and T520, because for me they are the last generation of Thinkpads with good keyboards, and I hope they will last me for a while.

My phone? It varies but typically every 18 months - 2 years. Phones lead hard lives and don't last very long.

Current: Umidigi F2. Before that: 2nd hand iPhone 6S+. Before that: PPTV King 7. Before that: Blackberry Passport (used). Before that: iRulu Victory V3. All those in the same time period that 2 old Thinkpads have covered, and all were relatively cheap.