111–120 of 282 posts
I wonder why ThinkPads are not mentioned. It's not like I recommend them (I mean, I use one, but it's not like I've tried most laptops out there, so who I am to judge), but I was under the impression it's still a de-facto Linux laptop standard.
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There's no reason such a laptop can't be repairable. Sure, it may be harder to do, but that's the tradeoff you choose when buying such a device. The main obstacles to repairability in such devices are intentional : part serialization, lack of documentation, and so on. Those don't help making the device any more compact or easier to manufacture, it's pure greed. Address those problems and you can happily have your ult…
There is such a reason: it isn't modular enough for the economics to favor repair over replacement, what with the economies of scale and that.
Whether repair of such devices is economically viable is one thing and that's up to the market to decide, but making repair intentionally harder is a choice of the manufacturer and has nothing to do with how slim the laptop is.
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> I've never been happy with a trackpad: they feel too imprecise Everything non-Apple is. Apple's trackpad are great and have been for decades. I’ve done professional image editing on the go even with the tiny by today’s standards PowerBook G4s trackpads. The real tragedy of our industry is that Apple got the basics right a few decades ago but seems determined to make their OS worse for pro user with every release. Y…
I see this comment about how awesome Apple Trackpads are all the time here, and just assumed I was missing out because I'd never used a MacBook. But I got given a MacBook Pro recently for work, and I'm super underwhelmed. The trackpad on it is no better or worse than any other trackpad I've used.
What I'd want in a hack laptop is a full size TKL keyboard (and full height, or close), with a trackpoint (or 2 -- add one near the arrow keys).
I think the kind of laptop this person wishes should simply be made illegal to make. We cannot sustain having all electric devices being thrown after a year or two, these things need to last, to be repairable and make it easy to grab pieces and materials when they die anyway
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There is such a reason: it isn't modular enough for the economics to favor repair over replacement, what with the economies of scale and that.
Restricting access to documentation, part serialization, or restricting OEMs from selling components directly has nothing to do with laptop form factor though. Whether repair of such devices is economically viable is one thing and that's up to the market to decide, but making repair intentionally harder is a choice of the manufacturer and has nothing to do with how slim the laptop is.
If only you could take a big old stick and beat the "control freak" tendencies out of all the major corporations out there.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Restricting access to documentation, part serialization, or restricting OEMs from selling components directly has nothing to do with laptop form factor though. Whether repair of such devices is economically viable is one thing and that's up to the market to decide, but making repair intentionally harder is a choice of the manufacturer and has nothing to do with how slim the laptop is.
The reason is simple: corporate control. It's not a good reason. If only you could take a big old stick and beat the "control freak" tendencies out of all the major corporations out there.
You can have a somewhat repairable laptop even if it's slim and tightly integrated, and you can also have a completely unrepairable one even if all components are modular and accessible but then use strong cryptography to authenticate to each other.
Form factor is not the primary reason current tech is hard/impossible to repair, though the industry loves that people believe so, since it diverts attention from their intentional efforts to hinder repair.
I mostly think of when geohot wanted to make his own RISC-V core and cranked out some basic verilog. It was incomplete and barely commented, and never touched again. I suspect we are going to get a few blog posts of analysis and then he moves on to something else
The naming fails at big cos is simply caused by having internal branding teams that need to justify their existence.