The moment that all the brands started focusing only on who is the thinnest instead of who has more features that's the point that they just ran out of innovative ideas.
Batteries are like car tires, they are expected to need replacing. Why can't I replace them myself and instead have to send the laptop to the lab? Why can't I decide which brand of batteries I want just like in my car? Maybe I want more powerful batteries or maybe I want lighter batteries.
Another issue is that the unrepairabilty of these laptops harms the environment a lot. Lenovo sells now laptops with 8GB and maybe it's acceptable for some uses. But in a year or two, these laptops will have to be thrown to trash cause you can't upgrade the memory in any way. As many mentioned here they have fully working laptops for 5 or even 10 years and that's laptops that saved from the need to buy new ones.
So what? The market can bear having more than one kind of laptop and so exists many different kinds of laptops that come in all sorts of different shapes and sizes.
> The moment that all the brands started focusing only on who is the thinnest instead of who has more features that's the point that they just ran out of innovative ideas.
Except even if one brand focused only on that, there'd still be many others that did not.
> Batteries are like car tires, they are expected to need replacing. Why can't I replace them myself and instead have to send the laptop to the lab?
No laptop requires you sending it to a lab to replace your battery.
> Why can't I decide which brand of batteries I want just like in my car?
You mostly can. There's a whole lot of cheap replacement batteries you can buy for most laptop models.
> Maybe I want more powerful batteries or maybe I want lighter batteries.
In most cases this isn't really possible because of either 1) low market demand or 2) it's literally impossible to do so without modifying the chassis. A few thinkpads used to have this feature with a hot-swappable external battery that you could choose the capacity, though. You can still buy a T480 on ebay and go this route if you want.
> Another issue is that the unrepairabilty of these laptops harms the environment a lot.
I see this argument made a lot but I find it to be mostly made in bad faith. Most people use their laptop until it's not useful to them anymore and then get rid of it in some manner — selling it to someone else, handing it down to relatives, recycling it, and sometimes throwing it away.
> Lenovo sells now laptops with 8GB and maybe it's acceptable for some uses. But in a year or two, these laptops will have to be thrown to trash cause you can't upgrade the memory in any way.
People have been making that argument for at least 8 years now that 8gb wasn't going to be enough in a year or two, and yet it's still serviceable to plenty of people today. It's about as likely as the CPU that is soldered onto every laptop now (even the framework laptop) will stop being useful. Raspberry pis are at max sold with 8gb of RAM, are you really going to try and suggest that they won't be useful two year from now?
> As many mentioned here they have fully working laptops for 5 or even 10 years and that's laptops that saved from the need to buy new ones.
My 2013 Macbook Pro was working when I traded it into Apple to get a new laptop. I got a new laptop because I wanted something with more power, not because it strictly needed to be replaced. People that are able to will replace their laptop when they feel they need to and that threshold is different depending on the person. Throwing an ssd into an old laptop will only go so far.
So no, striving for thinness is not idiotic. It follows the same principles of miniaturization of all components in PCs. It also changes the skillset required to work on the devices, but that's not really all that problematic.
> the most idiotic trend today: make devices thin as credit cards no matter how this would impact their usability, battery life, robustness, repairability etc.
They're not, though. Laptops are by definition a compromise product. You compromise on various things to afford yourself more portability. If you want a laptop that's easier to repair, they have those. You want something with more power? They have those too, but it's going to be less portable and have less battery life.
Your real complaint is that they don't make a Thinkpad that matches your own set of acceptable compromises and tradeoffs in a portable device. That's totally valid but has nothing to do with your asinine complaints about thinness.