Wouldn’t it be great if there were compartmentalized laptop designs, with standard-sized places to snap in whatever accompanying hardware that you want?
You can essentially plug a desktop computer into whatever keyboard, mouse/trackpad and display that you want; or at the very least, you have a lot of options. Why, in modern laptops with some of the most advanced industrial designs ever, is the entire experience now a pain in the neck?
A significant number of annoyances with modern laptops are not in the computing itself but in the surrounding components that are just too damned unreliable. What’s worse, these surrounding components have an entirely different useful lifetime than the interior.
I want a Mac laptop but I want to be able to “slide in” $MODERN_MAC_MOTHERBOARD under an existing robust frame that has whatever keyboard/trackpad I want. This could well include a frame that isn’t broken yet from a previous generation, and would definitely exclude unwanted “innovations” like Touch Bars. I want to slide in new batteries. I want to unhook the entire top display and replace it with a new generation of display. And if repair is required, I want to be able to go into a store and borrow a temporary display module (say) that I can slide in to my own laptop, while mailing in the broken display only.
I have a really hard time believing that there are any technical reasons not to design laptops with this kind of flexibility.
You can essentially plug a desktop computer into whatever keyboard, mouse/trackpad and display that you want; or at the very least, you have a lot of options. Why, in modern laptops with some of the most advanced industrial designs ever, is the entire experience now a pain in the neck?
A significant number of annoyances with modern laptops are not in the computing itself but in the surrounding components that are just too damned unreliable. What’s worse, these surrounding components have an entirely different useful lifetime than the interior.
I want a Mac laptop but I want to be able to “slide in” $MODERN_MAC_MOTHERBOARD under an existing robust frame that has whatever keyboard/trackpad I want. This could well include a frame that isn’t broken yet from a previous generation, and would definitely exclude unwanted “innovations” like Touch Bars. I want to slide in new batteries. I want to unhook the entire top display and replace it with a new generation of display. And if repair is required, I want to be able to go into a store and borrow a temporary display module (say) that I can slide in to my own laptop, while mailing in the broken display only.
I have a really hard time believing that there are any technical reasons not to design laptops with this kind of flexibility.