There are obviously people who are stuck on the upgrade treadmill, where they want to upgrade a laptop, but beyond saving a few dollars buying something from Dell/etc with less than the full memory capacity then upgrading that, I don’t.
I don’t want a boat anchor that is as serviceable as possible, but then I would never buy an *expensive* gaming laptop. It seems counter-productive to me, why game on a laptop unless you’re hard up for a few cubic feet of space to store a desktop?
The more the laptop costs, the more important that it be repairable, and I as much as anyone am into repairing things, but I don’t consider the industry using things prone to failure, then having an easier time repairing that at great additional purchase price, size, and weight, to be a good option. On the contrary, I don’t want to replace something that failed, with the same thing again. I don’t want modular repairable for most of it, just to be built better in the first place so it never needs repair for those subcircuits.
I agree that USB-C is not fit for anything worth more than $20 except phones (not joking!), and if it’s used on anything larger than a phone, that at least the USB port should be on a more easily replaced daughter board, but that’s about where my agreement ends. The factors of durability and self-repair are opposite sides of the same coin, where if the design was more rugged, repair wouldn’t factor in as much.
The last thing I want is a more expensive laptop besides the minimal cost to make it more durable in the areas that matter. There are people who need high performance laptops but this is a separate issue from building for durability for the average mass users which is what the market should be targeting.
It’s always funny when people suggest that in order to have robust hardware that consumers should be willing to pay a premium for something exotic when it’s more of back to basics situation where consumers should just shun bad design WITHOUT paying much more… maybe 5% to knock out the weak points. All external ports on daughter boards, and a keyboard with a waterproof tray under it, a layer to drain off any accidental spills and keep stray dust/etc from getting further in.
A modular laptop where you connect an external battery pack then use a voltage converter module to tether that to the laptop? Makes zero sense, goes against the purpose of a laptop and is more like a boat anchor. I don’t see the benefit unless you live in a van down by the river and that laptop is all you could have.
Screw gaming on a laptop. We’ve reached the era where laptops should be cheap due to the high level of integration possible, where mostly what you’re paying for is the high res, high quality screen, but the industry has an agenda to not let that happen. Power savings, and associated smaller battery size/cost is a good thing, but it all gets lost in the noise and we’re still paying too much for what the average person wants to use a laptop for. Windows bloat is a factor but not a large one – take that ~2GB memory hit (vs another OS you still need) then appreciate that you have windows if you really want it.
I’m not disagreeing that any consumer demand should be met including a rebuildable/upgradable laptop, but it’s a very small market and it’s not a solution to the faults found on most laptops. You should not ever need to repair a laptop unless there was some severe stress event or it was just so old that it needed a wear item – the fan or battery, replaced.