Will I ever buy a laptop again? This is a significant question, PC's themselves are going the way of becoming locked down, indeed UEFI was the first step on that road, requiring secure keys and other literal dongles is becoming quite common for the home PC Builder; or even small assembly shops.
Laptops are an even more confused space, building your own is sadly incredibly rare, but even rarer is being able to buy a laptop and it being upgradable.
Now, I accept laptops have soldered on components, they are an all in one solution for most vendors. So it was four years ago when I specced up and bought my current laptop I had three requirements from it:
1. Upgradable Memory
2. Upgradable Drives/Storage
3. Changeable Battery
At that time I settled on the Lenovo E480, with an 8th Generation Intel Core i5 inside.
For point 1 I was able to buy it with 4GB of RAM (a single stick of DDR4) installed, saving me over £110 on buying an upgrade to 8GB direct. I simply received it, opened it and installed a 16GB kit (pair of 8GB sticks) for £83; so I saved and had more memory.
For point 2, I was again able to get deliver with a single 500gb mechanical hard drive, and for merely £65 I was able to get a really nice M.2 nVME SSD and install that the moment it arrived. I am still able to replace the standard 2.5" SSD SATA drive if I want. And I was also able to install a 1TB MicroSD card for more cold storage of large files when on the move and disconnected from my file server.
For point 3, being a Lenovo is a huge boon, there are a lot of resellers of their components and the battery is no exception, plus it's a battery just installed with a sticky pad and a single 4 pin connector, very simple to open the chassis and swap it out. After four years mine is due a change, it has gone from around 9 hours on a full charge to only 4.
The machine is simple to work on, it's got lots of external ports, it can drive all the devices I want, the wfi, bluetooth and just quality of the Lenovo build is very nice.
So, what could possibly replace it?
I am coming up blank, I've been looking and looking, I do not want to support Apple, as much as I like the look of their hardware the total lack of any repair or upgrade paths in the M1/M2 space annoys me, their GPU is custom too, and I want to be working in open source wherever possible (read Linux).
Asus are similarly offering lots of options but so very many of them are locked down, there are RAM upgrades for some, but that's about all. And crucially battery replacement is sketchy, it's hard to even find out what battery a unit offering has.
Very similar results in my search with Toshiba, Acer, Dell (including Alienware) and a custom builder here in the UK.
I did look briefly at modular options, such as the ones touted recently by Linus Sebastian, but getting them here in the UK is a massive pain in the rear.
So simply put will I ever buy a laptop again? I don't know.
If I can find something meeting my three previous requirements and include adding an external GPU via USB-C to it, that maybe a selling point, but I'm really not willing to give up on the first three requirements I had. They are the very definition of a laptop to me, you live with a locked down CPU and GPU, but at least you can expand the utility of the unit in other ways. Except, vendors want to ship thinner, sealed, easy [for them] to support units with a limited [est 2 year] shelf life; after which you are cast to the winds.
As I understand it my Lenovo now being 4 years old, an 8th Gen Intel, makes it positively geriatric.
