A modular & open design 13" Notebook that can be customized and upgraded to fit user's needs
When you upgrade a Desktop, even if you completely replace CPU, Mainboard, RAM, Storage, GPU and Coolers, you don't have to throw away your perfectly-fine case and power supply and espechally not Screen, Mouse, Keyboard and Speakers.
Systems can and should be repairable as well as upgradeable.
- Shure you may have some constraints in terms of volume and component dependencies as well as requirements, but aside from that, there isn't any reason you can't use your decades old and beloved case anymore.
Some Single-Vendor & single-Provider Solutions like the Framework Laptop can work, but they make consumers depend on said company keeping their promises.
- Apple for example has broken commitment promises for Upgrades several times on their Mac Pro line of machines.
The Success of the PC as a Platform is solely based upon it's openness, with at least two manufacturers for every component to choose from.
Only Open Standards that are royality-free or at least very affordable to license gained traction and got adopted, whereas Single-Vendor & single-Provider options were quickly obsoleted, replaced by better & opener alternatives or never caught on.
- This includes "Microchannel" as a Bus among many others which got quickly obsoleted by PCI and that got suceeded by PCI Express...
The reason why people don't just buy the cheapest machine they can get is because reputable brands offer Support and Repair options.
And while it's good to find a 1st party option, no manufacturer of laptops will be able to provide spare parts till the end of time.
- Whereas on a Desktop PC, it's design using off-the-shelf parts allows for - if necessary - replace defective parts with more or less drop-in replacements.
- While it would be best if one could source every single IC and offer them as well, that's not feasible if people don't have the skillset to do the repairs or if it's financially not feasible to pay someone to do the fix.
- Documentation should however be accessible and allow those patient enought to do so anyway!
- While it would be best if one could source every single IC and offer them as well, that's not feasible if people don't have the skillset to do the repairs or if it's financially not feasible to pay someone to do the fix.
Technology Progresses, and so it stands to reason that people may need to upgrade parts of a system to keep up with their demand for more RAM, Storage or Computational Power.
- This may necessitate swapping the Mainboard since a lot of mobile & embedded chips ain't available in a socketed form factor anymore.
While it may be tempting to go Ultra high-End, only a systems that are affordable to everyone and every business will see the necessary amount of adoption required to get Longterm Multi-Vendor & Multi-Provider support.
- Just like the Desktop PC offers everything from sub-€100 boxes with new-old-stock tablet SoC's and cheap [refurb] Office machines to eyewateringly expensive Workstations and Servers that can cost 6+ digits before taxes.
Simple things that seem to be forgotten and extraordinary but shouldn't be.
- Toolfree swappable batteries
- Fully upgradeable RAM
- Fully removeable Storage
- AFAIK the most repairable Ultrabook currently in production and for sale.
- If you're looking for a commercial product that you can just buy, check out Framework.
- At it's core it's just a 8,9" Netbook but VIA Technologies did opensource it's CAD models and specs.
- It's mostly a reference design aimed at maximizing flexibility for OEMs.
- There's an archived copy of that repo on GitHub.
- Sadly it wasn't much of a commercial success despite having good specs at the time...
- It's mostly a reference design aimed at maximizing flexibility for OEMs.
- They are known to make obscure and hard to come by upgrade mainboards with new parts for older ThinkPad laptops, mostly if only X-Series devices like the X201.