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I'd bet 99.9% of people buying PC Laptops never upgrade a single chip... Apple's non-pro lines are likely not much different. Apple largely sacrificed that ability (in a few product lines) in favour of creating some of the thinnest laptops available. I don't remember them ever doing that before Macbook Air, for now reason.

That said, in this case, I don't see what is being gained by not making the GPU swappable or at least accessible (although it might very well still be). I'm assuming they could simply only offer official support for the one it contains but let people do whatever they want with it (which again might be the case in practice, they just aren't announcing it officially).



> I'd bet 99.9% of people buying PC Laptops never upgrade a single chip...

Some huge percentage of that is because many if not most laptops shipping today have wired everything down. You can't even update the Wifi chip in most laptops today, even though the whole reason we put Wifi on a daughtercard in the first place is because we knew the standards were going to have to move...

Meanwhile, I'm typing this from a five year old laptop that I would have happily upgraded by adding more RAM if possible, and I know a lot of people that would be more than happy to do the same, since CPU technology hasn't really been improving in leaps and bounds and neither has laptop design in the past five years.

Let's not be afraid to call it what it is: It's planned obsolescence. They want you to have to buy a new one in 18 months when they ship version 2.


You are the first person I've ever heard complain about not being able to upgrade the wifi in their laptop.


Make it 2 then. I want a good chipset with good drivers, that does not crash or has bad performance for weird reasons.

Until last year, I physically removed the default cards in any of my laptops to put a "known good"" Dell ath9k in place. I bought them in bulk, and I may still have some spares

i am now investigsting "modern" alternatives


Make it three, mostly because the wifi card in my laptop was a nightmare to get working in linux


I have an 8-year-old laptop. I'd love to upgrade the wifi to something that can connect to 5GHz APs.


They do make usb wifi dongles.


Ooh I actually did this a long time ago! Upgraded the Airport card in my PowerBook.

But, you know, once in 30 years of owning laptops.


Wifi and Bluetooth would both be great to be upgradable.


> They want you to have to buy a new one in 18 months when they ship version 2.

My laptop is 4.5 years old now and I'm starting to think about replacing it. It was upgraded the week it was purchased, with a bigger hard disk and 16 gigs of memory (and a US keyboard, but that doesn't count) and that was the last upgrade it had. The next one will probably be never upgraded, as the manufacturer offers the configuration I want (at the time, Dell didn't). I expect it to last about 5 years just like this one.

Would I love to have a faster laptop? Of course I would. Can I justify the cost in terms of productivity gained? No way.


HP laptops are a huge exception to this rule. We commonly upgrade RAM and drives on our laptops.

One of the elitebooks I saw recently doesn't even need a screwdriver to open the laptop.


Same with the Lenovo T-series. You can upgrade both batteries, both RAM chips, the LTE (or additionally a second SSD here), hard disk, wifi, until a cople a years ago the CPU, the monitor, keyboard, touchpad etc. All parts are available from Lenovo.

I guess the business Dells are the same?


Lenovo x230 checking in here. I've upgraded/replaced: battery, RAM, display panel, wifi, ssd (both in mSATA and SATA slots), keyboard (x220 keyboards FTW), BIOS (coreboot). The only thing I haven't replaced is the motherboard/CPU, because it doesn't seem worth the effort, even though it's technically possible.


There's a tradeoff of laptop size/weight and expandability. The market builds what most consumers want, which is aesthetics.


Why is this comment being down voted?


Because it’s intentionally obtuse to assume the only reason you would ever sacrifice upgradeability is for planned obsolescence.


But is it really far fetched? I am certain some people somewhere have considered this a big plus and weighted in their decision more than perhaps many of the other reasons for making HW impossible to upgrade.


> But is it really far fetched?

Yes, making things upgradeable generally adds weight and size to components. Sockets aren't "free", calling it planned obsolescence is absurd. They've been designed to have wired in components for a reason. You may not agree with that reason, say size constraints, but that is the constraints it was designed under. Weighting any decision is: how much will this cost our design? (note, cost here is not just money, its time, size, weight, manufacturing cost, complexity, etc...)

Upgradeability is a feature, if nobody is willing to pay for it, guess what will happen to the feature? Same thing as happened to our own species tails, they became obsolete.


> Same thing as happened to our own species tails, they became obsolete.

And no ape had its tail cut in the name of evolution. It happened slowly, as older apes were replaced by newer models.


To hit their noise target they'll have substantially modified the gpu package to have much more passive cooling than normal for this gpu. Making that work in a way that allowed end-users to slot in another gpu from an off-the-shelf package would be really hard.

Maybe their next iteration might have replacable gpu cartridges or something? But I can totally see why they wouldn't prioritise this. Not everything companies do is done out of malice.


Curious: how exactly do you see that the comment is being downvoted?


You must be an app user, like myself. It lacks functionality. You can tell if you log into the website.


TIL that there is an app!! I always log in from the website.


I work in a PC environment with 2k+ clients and even more side customers. 90% of PC customers upgrade their old laptops with more ram and SSD. Also some upgrade their network card, replace the dvd with a HDD/SSD, etc.

Because the CPU is not a problem and no noticeable difference in performance from generation to generation, makes no damn sense to replace their laptops.


That's just some silly underspeced nonsense then. I have a PC environment of 5000, and it's definitely in the single digits. PC's are speced appropriately prior to purchase, with a lifetime of 5 years. Sure occasionally users will request, and IT will approve an upgrade based on individual demands. But who the hell has time to upgrade 90% of the machines, after you've already spent the time migrating / deploying them? At 5 years, you're already turning over 20% of the environment yearly.


> I have a PC environment of 5000, and it's definitely in the single digits. PC's are speced appropriately prior to purchase, with a lifetime of 5 years

You get easily get more than 5yr at less cost if you spec for upgrade ability up front (good CPU + motherboard specs) and then do a mid lifecycle ram, storage, etc upgrade. Rolling upgrades can save even more money if done properly because the hardware coming out of use becomes your service parts for the stuff that's getting up there in age.

Regardless, the best solution is whatever fits your specific needs best.


Of course you can, but that's not how depreciated assets work in the corporate world. Especially when warranty/support ends after 5 years with companies like Dell.


I agree... Its a laptop. 5 year refresh cycle is plenty time for the device. Your looking at a few hundred dollars to get small gains to keep a device running an extra year or two. When by that time the market will have things 90% better ha.


I miss so much my 2009 MacBook Pro, where you could take out the DVD drive and replace it with an additional SSD for a performance boost.


Ha, I just did that this week. I have a late 2011 MBP and I noticed it was dragging a bit so I upgraded it from 8gb ram to 16gb and bought a 500gb SSD to replace the factory HDD. The next day I decided I wanted more space for my pictures so I bought the little enclosure and swapped out my CDROM and just reused the factory 1TB HDD. Like $220 later and it feels like a brand new machine.


you were using a 7 year old Laptop with a HDD in 2018 ? Some people don't seem to have any hardware requirements at all.. While i could tolerate a CPU from 2011, using it without an SSD feels so slow today, it's barely usable tbh. I switched to SSDs in 2009 in all my machines and never looked back, despite the price at the time.


Yeah I don't have a good excuse for waiting except it was my wife's primary computer for the last few years while she completed grad school and I didn't use it much to notice how much slower it seemed as compared to a modern SSD-based machine. Definitely wish I had done it earlier now.

It was an old work machine that I got to take with me when I left that job so it was far overspecced for casual use.. though it feels so much better now.


Not everyone can afford a new MacBook when their old one works fine, no matter how much HN shames them for it.


I did pretty much the same thing on my late 2011 MBP. And then the graphics went tits up. Argh!


Did the same thing for my 2012 MBP.


Any chance you've got a link to reliable instructions?



Yep, I used their instructions for the hard drive replacement and then again for the CDROM swap out. I used to build my own machines so I was pretty confident going in, on my scale the HDD was about a 3 difficulty but the CDROM was maybe a 6.. you need to disconnect several tiny connectors to clear enough space which always makes me nervous about breaking one but it went fine in the end.


I'm still using mine, with a patched version of OSX High Sierra installed. No problems.


How has your experience with that been? My MBP (early 2011) won't be supported by MacOS Mojave, so I'm anticipating a similar patch.

I may end up staying with High Sierra, but I'd really like to try out the dark mode


Only problems have been after the occasional update, when the patches haven't been updated. A few times it's taken 5-6 reboots to start OSX properly. The best way is to delay updates as long as possible!

Apart from that, no problems at all.

http://dosdude1.com/highsierra/ and the related forum posts were excellent.


You mean the old PowerBook Series where you could easily swap the batteries on the go and swap the DVD drive for an additional battery.


Still have my G3 500MHz somewhere - used that for my entire first year at university in 2008. Battery life was amazing.


Oh yeah, let's make the MBP double thick so there is space just in case you need an upgrade...


I recently bought an Aero 15. It's less than half a cm thicker than the new MBP and only 300g heavier. It's got a free SODIMM and NVME slot once you get the right screwdriver. There's plenty of reasons not to buy this specific laptop, but it's one of many that are in the same weight/size category that are both cheaper than the top end MacBook Pro and outperform it.


What % can be upgraded? This seems like a self fulfilling prophecy, just like mobile phones have moved towards non-user serviceable batteries. Great way to bootstrap an accessory ecosystem into existence.


> I'd bet 99.9% of people buying PC Laptops never upgrade a single chip...

I've added RAM and replaced the HD with a SSD on a laptop I've owned since 2005,and would upgraded more chips if it was possible.


You are the 0.01%


No, I'm really not. In fact, the only reason this isn't done more often is because some OEMs defraud their customers by forcing obsolescense into their products, such as intentionally designing them to be very impractical if not impossible to do basic stuff such as cleaning air ducts or replacing a HD.

If you asked any macbook pro owner if they were willing to spend money to double its RAM or HDD capacity I'm sure you wouldn't get many negative answers.


But for what cost???

The price of upgradabilty is a heavier, thicker machine with probably less battery life (because they now squeeze the cells into every nook and cranny).

The ability to upgrade a machine is not a no-cost argument.

If given a blanket question of - ‘would you like to be able to upgrade your laptop?’ I’m sure the answer would be 100% Yes!

But, if you said ‘would you like to be able to upgrade your laptop but it will be half an inch thicker and a pound heavier?’ You’d get quite a different answer.


It's not. People buy Thinkpads all the time, with their actual screws, separate drive bay, and swappable RAM. Half an inch and a pound is right - such a low price to pay.


They're not forcing anything. You want an upgradeable laptop? Buy one. I'm sorry the fact that a lot of people like thin and light designs is to painful to you, but those people do have a choice.


That is still an extremely small minority who would upgrade.

Based on what I've seen from non-technical friends and family, the standard approach to laptops is to buy a $300 netbook, fill it with crappy browser extensions and malware over a few years, complain that the computer is "too old and slow", throw it out and buy a new one.


> That is still an extremely small minority who would upgrade.

It's really not, and it's quite obvious that the baseless assertion that no one wants to upgrade hardware is rather mind-numbingly absurd.

There are businesses dedicated to repair, upgrade and refurbish computers, including laptops. There are businesses dedicated to sell used hardware which offer clients a choice of processors and other components, including different makes and models. It's utterly absurd that we're supposed that this basic need simply vanishes in a specific form factor.


Coming from a 2012 rMBP (from which this post is being typed out), the ability to double RAM/HDD by myself would be probably the end-all be-all


0.1%

but even that is obviously wrong because the 99.9% he claimed out of thin air.


You can still buy other thunderbolt 3 enclosures. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208544


Indeed - exactly.

And it's wasteful - once the GPU is out of date you have to dispose of a perfectly good TB3 enclosure.

Another anti-consumer decision made under the auspices of design and practicality that consumers want.

I cant imagine a single customer has ever asked for a non-upgradable eGPU.


That thing is upgradeable. Just replace the boy wih a new one. Just plug the cables. No screwdriver required!

Who cares that 50% of the components in both boxes are functionally identical? Certainly not all the not overly technical folks out there.


No, they asked for a quiet one.


Wire up a fan speed control.


I upgraded the ram and disk on my 2012 13in MacBook Pro.

The lack of upgradability on the newer machines is a real turn off.


The option is to buy it fully specced. A new 6-core i9 with 32 gigs of DDR4 amd 4TB of flash storage will probably keep you happy for the next 5 years. That means your budget is slightly above US$ 1200/year of happy computing with a Mac.

If you don't need macOS or an ultra-elegant thin computer with an incredible screen, you'll probably be happier with a PC from Dell or Lenovo with similar specs and an updated machine every 2 years. But they are neither elegant, nor thin. At least they run Linux very well.

My current personal laptop is 4.5 years old and I am now considering replacing it with a machine with specs similar to the PC I described - non-thin, non-elegant, decent-but-not-incredible screen, a non-bleeding-edge CPU, as much memory as possible, some flash storage and a hard disk and I don't expect to upgrade it in less than 5 years.


If happy computing includes trips to the Apple Store every few months because the keyboard got stuck... Again... Maybe. If happy computing means no physical escape or function keys... Maybe. If happy computing means no warranty after 3 years... Maybe. If happy computing means no accidental damage warranty whatsoever... Maybe. If happy computing means an oleophobic coating that will almost definitely fail at least once over the lifetime of the device... Maybe. If happy computing involves not being able to access the data on that 4TB SSD when the laptop bricks itself, necessitating constant backups... Maybe. If happy computing involves knowingly spending double the price of the storage and the RAM otherwise because Apple knows that you won't be able to replace them... Maybe.

But hey, it's thin and light and aluminum, so all is forgiven, right? Don't get me wrong, the MBP is a pretty gorgeous device, but it's pretty hilarious to say that all is good and well just because it's thin and light and aluminum.


> The option is to buy it fully specced. A new 6-core i9 with 32 gigs of DDR4 amd 4TB of flash storage will probably keep you happy for the next 5 years. That means your budget is slightly above US$ 1200/year of happy computing with a Mac.

The problem is that not everyone has the budget to buy a fully-speced machine at the time of initial purchase. Also, many laptop vendors charge a significant premium to buy such configurations.

Apple partly solves this by simply not even selling the low-speced "base model" that other vendors would advertise. But still, buying low/mid-range now and upgrading later can be significantly more tolerable on the wallet than going-for-broke every major upgrade cycle.


> The problem is that not everyone has the budget to buy a fully-speced machine at the time of initial purchase

Yes. In some markets Apple offers financing options right on their website. In case of businesses, they can deal directly with their banks.


My HP laptop died, the integrated GPU died. And HP support said they do not manufacture that motherboard anymore. So what's the point of having it upgradable? Sometimes it works, other times not.


It's always been the case with laptops that if the mainboard or some part ON the main board died, well, that's that. But being able to upgrade RAM, HDD or wifi was always great so you could eek a couple more years from it.

People who want upgrade-ability aren't wrong for wanting to buck the throw away society we've become.


I choose upgrade-ability too, it's just that I was shorted by HP choosing bad quality and lack of spares. I flipped the coin and I lost it seems.


"HP support said they do not manufacture that motherboard anymore"

You can probably still buy one of those mobos and swap it out. Just look on ebay.


I think the gain is in footprint size and noise levels. I have a Sonnet eGPU box, and it is pretty massive, nearly the size of a microATX case. It also has a fan on the box and the fan of the GPU cooler itself.

This design looks a lot smaller, and I'm sure it is a lot quieter as well. If you don't want those things and do want upgradability there are plenty of other options available already.


> I'd bet 99.9% of people buying PC Laptops never upgrade a single chip...

You're right, they don't. They ask someone else to do it. So, I'd bet your number is way off.


Even with the chunky laptops, I only ever really upgraded the wifi card, ram, and storage...




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