I'm stunned that "mapping out" blocks of bad RAM is a thing you can do. It reminds me of the old days when hard disks had to be "low-level formatted" first (ask your parents, kids) and it would ask you for a list of bad sectors to map out. Sometimes hard disks would even come with a list of known bad ones printed on the top.
'Ask your grandparents' would be more accurate. Sales of models of hard drive that could be low level formatted had almost entirely ended by the year 1992. Primitive PC's that only ran DOS and had 20MB or 40MB hard drives were considered obsolete over thirty years ago, when windows 3.11 onwards existed.
In the summer of 1989, I had completed all my work for my BS-CS degree, and was waiting for the University to give me a diploma. I took a summer internship at Imprimis (later bought by Seagate), and I was honored to work with the Manufacturing Engineers for the Wren IV through Wren VII hard drive lines.
The Wren VII was the first consumer-grade SCSI hard drive with a capacity of 1GB or more — at 5.25” full height. The company had done a commercial-grade SAS drive based on the same chassis the year before. You had to be super careful with those magnets — they could cut off a finger, if you weren’t looking. And they were virtually impossible to remove from a fridge, once applied.
My job was to write a software system that could be used to monitor quality control issues in the manufacturing line, towards a goal of continual process improvement. I didn’t manage to get the whole management system built before I left, but I did get the full toolkit built, and the management system was intended to be a relatively simple layer on top of the toolkit.
Did the drive give you more sectors when you used a smaller sector size and fewer sectors when you used a larger sector size? If the number of sectors didn't change, it probably didn't actually do a low-level format and instead just toggled whether the drive firmware would skip over the extra bytes as if they didn't exist.
"Bad" ram re-mapping is handy for equipment that has special areas of memory shared with hardware like accelerator ASIC, other cpu, or unknown features. Also useful in extreme environment contexts, where the chips may get heavily damaged while in use.
>hard disks would even come with a list of known bad ones printed on the top.
HDD still do, but the flash on the controller quietly handles sector sparing, and remapping. This is why one can't just swap unmodified controller PCB anymore for data-recovery without secret vendor software. =3
Also hard drives, from about the last fifteen years, have calibration data for the specific individual heads that read and write the data to/from the platter.
Some, not all, harddrives have an eeprom that can be transplanted to a different pcb when trying to do data recovery on a drive with a faulty circuit board.
>harddrives have an eeprom that can be transplanted to a different pcb
It is not that simple, as the identical part number may have a lot# with slightly different PCB/chips/firmware. If folks have done forensic recovery, than they get a rather quick education about the constant changes to retail HDD design. =3
The race to make laptops thinner is pointless. I wish I could buy a thicker laptop that is more robust, repairable, expandable, and has better cooling, with the extra space filled with batteries.
Perhaps for you, but I very much care about my laptop's size and especially it's weight, as I carry it around on a daily basis.
Repairing or upgrading it aren't really of interest to me, as I wouldn't be able to aquire the parts where I typically live anyway. And performance and cooling have already been more than good enough for me in most laptops for the last decade.
I have lots of family and friends who bring me their broken "thin laptops." Their thinness makes them super fragile, and they break all the time. They're also getting harder to repair as assembly becomes more convoluted each year. Even basic maintenance, like cleaning the fans, requires increasingly super difficult disassembly.
The latest models require repeatedly disassembling the sandwich from both sides. You have to remove the keyboard to access a screw, open the bottom, remove another screw to lift the top, then go back and forth between both sides just to reach a fan that frequently gets clogged with dust and needs frequent, regular cleaning.
Even worse, the unavoidable cleaning voids the warranty.
I don't think most people do maintenance on their laptops at all, which is probably why they usually end up with that one friend/family member who does.
Laptop manufacturers would like to have you think cleaning them or removing a "warranty void if removed" sticker over a screw actually voids the warranty but it usually doesn't actually.
Most people do repairs all the time but that doesn’t mean it has to be ib their garage with their own tools and bare hands. Point is getting it repaired
Easily
Affordably
Anywhere (almost anywhere)
In other words: not having to face something like this: “ah, so your A and G key don’t work? Lovely. Let’s look. Got it! The chassis needs changing and motherboard which is soldered into it. Good news, we can let you reuse the battery” and all that a bright grin that puts my house’s brightest LED to utter shame.
I just had a MacBook fixed. The hinge area had accumulated crunchy food debris, and it ended up busting the hinge angle sensor. But this sensor is paired with the top case, so the top case had to get replaced too, so the entire bill came to close to one thousand.
So.. can someone tell me again why a humble hinge angle sensor is paired with an entire hideously expensive top case assembly ?
The post you replied to literally doesn't care about upgrades.
More enforcement also doesn't matter if its what you need to get specifically _what was asked for_, which is a thinner device in this case.
I also wouldn't like an X60 if it meant I have to leave things out of my bag.
What is the profit for a manufacturer if you buy one laptop and use it for 10 years straight instead of buying a new one every 3 years?
Also they not only solder DRAM, now they solder keyboards so that you cannot replace it easily. My garbage keyboard broke after just 2 years of using and I had to solder ~100 plastic pins to replace it (and the replacement keyboard turned out to be not of a great quality).
I think this opinion is pretty out of touch, I can't think of a single family member who would say that upgrading RAM is important to them, I doubt most would be able to explain what RAM even is.
I care more about weight and these things aren’t really light anyway. Also people, imho, unnecessarily obsessed about thinness — because the difference is not 0.5 inch vs 2.5 inch, it’s something that no self-respecting laptop bah will register the difference in any meaningful way, unless someone likes to stuff their 13-16 inch laptops in the jeans pockets :)
Until very recently, the low power version of RAM had to be soldered to the motherboard.
If you want the battery life improvements, bear in mind that there is a hard limit on how large a battery you are allowed to fly with, so low power components are important.
I find it difficult to believe that any touch typist favors a thinner laptop, since their keyboards are inevitably worse to type on due to the reduced key travel. Typing on a Macbook Pro keyboard reminds me of this old toy:
Framework does exactly what the GP claims to want.
Unfortunately, not many people making those claims _actually_ want them by revealed preferences. They overwhelmingly want the lower price laptops with similar performance specs.
Or… there’s a level of value that people will assign to the repairability offered by Framework, but the current cost is too high?
I like and support what Framework offers. But when I last bought a laptop (a couple of years ago now) the FW13 was almost double the price of a similarly-specc’d and thinner/lighter Asus. (From €1000 to ~€18-1900).
I’d probably pay a ~40% premium for FW, all else being equal, but 80-90% is just too much: it just doesn’t make sense to whatever value-assessment algorithms I’ve developed over time.
But a 40% premium is not enough to sustain framework imho. The business model of framework is that you don't buy a new laptop, but just upgrade. Therefore, the lifetime value of one customer on framework is less than that of an Asus buyer (who would have to buy a new laptop every new CPU generation or when batteries die, which is probably at most 5 years).
Therefore, framework has to charge a lot more per customer to make the business make sense. 2x premium is not unreasonable under this sort of assumption.
I personally do think they're doing a good job of course, but i do also wonder the long term viability because their customers are so niche.
Depends on the margin on upgrade components. There may be a point that’s high enough for profit but still cheaper for the consumer than a new laptop of comparable specs.
> Therefore, framework has to charge a lot more per customer to make the business make sense. 2x premium is not unreasonable under this sort of assumption.
If Framework makes the same margin as other manufacturers its viable. If they get more sales than they otherwise would because people want to buy something that will last it is better business sense than making something just like everyone else. its their USP.
Framework would have higher fixed cost compared to the incumbent manufacturers, if their number of customers are smaller. Therefore, to even get the same fixed margin, they'd have to charge a higher price (not to mention the same margin is unlikely to sustain them unlike the other manufacturers).
But with the current increase in prices of hardware, i expect people to start thinking about repairability and upgradeability, which would increase the total size of potential customer base.
Firstly, unless the manufacture themselves then the difference in fixed cost may not be significant. Its very unlikely that they are high enough by enough to require charging double. Most of the costs of manufacturing something like this will be variable cost.
This is also an entirely different issue from the lifetime value of a customer.
> But a 40% premium is not enough to sustain framework imho. The business model of framework is that you don't buy a new laptop, but just upgrade. Therefore, the lifetime value of one customer on framework is less than that of an Asus buyer (who would have to buy a new laptop every new CPU generation or when batteries die, which is probably at most 5 years).
> Therefore, framework has to charge a lot more per customer to make the business make sense. 2x premium is not unreasonable under this sort of assumption.
If this is their model, maybe it makes sense from an MBA perspective, but I'm more in the MBAs-are-ruining-the-world camp, and I hate it.
A few points:
- I suspect that private buyers of laptops rarely have strong loyalty to a single brand, so Asus et al can't assume a long chain of purchases over time - they have to continue to compete on price and specs. Framework can probably assume stronger brand loyalty than every other manufacturer out there, based on a) if you've paid their hefty premium, you're really into what they're offering, and b) you've paid the high price of entry for the promise of lower-cost upgrades down the line, which you can only get from Framework. So Framework can probably assume a longer guaranteed income from each customer than any other manufacturer, even if the actual value decreases over time (due to lower cost of upgrades vs. full systems). However, if the upgrades are profitable as individual items, they still win.
- I'd prefer to see Framework sell computers and components at the lowest possible price they can while still being a viable business, with the margin of those items each justifying their existence individually. I appreciate that their economies of scale are different to larger manufacturers and their designs may be more expensive to deliver - this would be covered by a (modest) premium.
- Ultimately, I'd characterise the business model you described as "we'll f*k you on entry, and you might claw back some value over time". I'd rather aim for "we'll sell you a good product for a reasonable price today, and then delight you with the bonus of upgradability later on".
- I wonder whether their issue might actually be scale of manufacturing: that they can't deliver enough systems quickly/reliably enough to compete for a broader market (which would require lower margins to attract more price-sensitive customers) thereby driving them to target a more limited market of nerds who love the repairability concept, and also price higher per system to make the numbers work?
> If this is their model, maybe it makes sense from an MBA perspective
It does not. An MBA would hopefully teach someone to understand it gives Framework a USP and they only need the same margins as anyone else.
> A few points
Of those the first and last are the sort of things an MBA should teach someone to think about. The second is much the same and part wanting an efficient market (i.e. what free market capitalism is supposed to deliver). the third is entirely right.
I got the Framework 12 for about 800€ by bringing my own SSD and RAM and charging. Specced that way it's only about a 200€ premium, which I don't mind in exchange for repairability and hassle-free Linux install.
That was before prices went crazy, though. Now the RAM alone is over 500€. Also, whether the repairability is worth anything I'll find out down the line, but so far it's looking good.
Speaking as someone who did buy a framework as my primary computer (and has been happy with it), my hesitation had much more to do with uncertainty about the execution than with price, which is pretty competitive when you diy. Especially because for the value proposition to pay off, the company/ecosystem has to survive for several years at least and continue making compatible product in the categories I would want. It's a big investment for most people and it's not surprising most go with a safe/known option.
My memory is more like 20% premium for the practical options that I could find on the market at the time (spring 2024). But ymmv depending what specs you actually care about. If the off the shelf thinkpads or whatever actually match the set of specs you want, then they will be cheaper than the equally-speced framework by a bigger margin. Also worth noting that there have been a lot of sales on the framework end, so that could give different perceptions depending on timing.
Oh, and also I'm talking about buying the memory and SSD elsewhere, not as part of the kit. That was a chunk of savings too.
Digging around with Wayback Machine, a DIY Ryzen 7840 (I wrote 8840 incorrectly earlier) with 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, Windows Home, a power adapter, and four basic expansion cards would have been 1768 EUR in 1H 2024.
Instead, I got an ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED with those specs (albeit a slightly bigger better screen) for exactly 1000 EUR in a local shop.
Now, yes, I could remove the Windows cost (ahem), not pay for a charger, and save a little buying RAM and an SSD from elsewhere, but then it's not remotely an apples-to-apples comparison.
But that's exactly the point: removing the charger, windows and buying ram elsewhere is exactly the comparison that makes sense if you have a good charger, don't run windows, and don't mind your ram coming on a different day of the week. Ymmv as I said.
If you want to quibble with words, you're right that I could have hedged more in my original comment, e.g. "cost can be competitive depending what exactly you are looking for". I'm not denying your experience for what you wanted, but for what I wanted, the costs were pretty close.
I’m really not just trying to be argumentative, but it’s more than quibbling with words.
Pirate Windows and using an existing charger saves ~€200. You can shave a little more sourcing your own RAM and SSD but probably not huge amounts, from memory at the time.
So the comparison becomes something like “if you spend your time and energy sourcing multiple components, and don’t mind pirating your OS, and have an old charger to use, you can maybe reduce the premium you pay for a Framework to 30-50%”.
As a Linux user I didn't have to pirate anything, just one more way we are different. I also got one tier down in CPU from the one you considered, not surprised if it was a lower markup for that one. I could probably find the receipts for ram and SSD to prove my numbers make sense for me, but isn't that all profoundly uninteresting?
As someone who likes small-screen laptops: no. The screen size is not the problem (unless it is also low-resolution), it's the battery size, and what the battery can power for a "reasonable" amount of time.
13-14" is the sweet spot between power storage, size, and energy efficiency in my opinion.
13 seems to have emerged as the generally best compromise for using at your desk and traveling. Even a 15” is still small relative to an external monitor and is getting large to fly with.
I read it as being not powerful enough and didn't parse the size issue properly. What exactly is the problem? I'm regularly using 12" laptops and don't see much wrong with it. Just changes the workflow a bit, as I normally use a 52" screen.
It's not ideal, but then working on a laptop never is.
"bestest" CPU is not required, but with 13 inch screen you have to either make everything tiny and strain your eyes, or have only 10-15 lines of code in the screen. Also, modern websites and apps use gigantic font size and you will have like 3 paragraphs of text in one screen.
Companies have standardized on, mostly, 13” laptops with whatever accessories. But, honestly, for some people who never leave their desk, a desktop of some sort is probably a better choice— though just connecting to a server works too.
I wish that my MBP14 was as thin as my partner’s MBA13.
Not to mention how often I long for my MBA11 with the tapered body which almost made it feel like it was floating in my lap when working from the couch.
My lenovo work laptop is crippled by poor cooling and can only sustain ~1GHz clocks on extended tasks. An old personal laptop 10 years older outperforms it.
the fact no component supplier, not even alibaba sells LPCAMM2 sockets tells you everything you need to know. The only prices I can find are in $30 range per socket
Connectors are expensive, high-speed ones particularly. $30 is fine, though it makes a giant difference at what quantity that is. Did you look at a single one or 1k?
No, $30 is not fine :) This isnt a magic connector, its not more complicated than $7 AM5, $6 LGA1851 or $5 LGA1700 all in single quantities, and those prices go way down bulk. Those are all banged out by machines running 24/7 lights out.
No supplier carries those connectors, there are no 1K prices I could find anywhere.
I've been eyeing LPCAMM2 interposers for non-RAM uses - as an off the shelf connector for stacked PCB designs. The conclusion was that it wasn't produced or used at sufficient scale for it to work.
We used to buy Dells with minimum RAM and add quality third party RAM for way less than Dell wanted for it. They also use ram quantity to leverage other specs we're not bothered about. Of course they are moving to soldered.
It is fairly simple business to desolder the old BGA chip and replace with a new one.
There are specialized shops willing to do this around the world. This is especially common in third world countries, Eastern Europe, China etc.. There are people who would do this change for around 5-10 USD in India (as long as you can find the replacement yourself).
I am amazed at how many people on this forum think of this as some scary dark magic.
I enjoy soldering, but I would not consider replacing soldered RAM/SSD realistic for myself or most people, just as soldered CPUs aren't often replaced by users.
The anecdote about it being a common job in third world countries is interesting. I wonder where they learn to do it, and what all tools are involved. Maybe it's a family business thing and your kids take over.
I am so glad that people like Louis Rossmann[1], Electronics Repair School[2], NorthridgeFix[3] and countless others have worked to change that perception.
Chip-level repair SHOULD be the norm.
China has been the master at this stuff for a while with institutes like Wantong Training School, Shenzhen etc.
It is a real shame that much of this knowledge is either on Chinese or Russian Internet forums or buried in obscure and unsearchable YouTube videos.
I read that Chinese found a way to upgrade DRAM on GPUs, for example, making RTX 2080 Ti with 22 Gb DRAM, or RTX 4090 with 48 Gb. The modded cards are better (by price and RAM size) than the new ones manufactured by NVIDIA, although some say they are not reliable.
Since the OP mentions Lenovo, look at their other product lines for ones that still have socketed RAM. I'm currently running an E16 with 40GB RAM, 8GB soldered, 32GB socketed. And aside from that it leaves my previous X1 for dead in terms of performance. Lenovo's replacing the carbon fiber case, the whole reason the X1 line is called "Carbon", with crappy black plastic was the last straw.
The RAM situation is beyond helpless. I was meaning to buy another 32GB stick for my Framework, but they're out of stock and so are any validated alternatives.
I've found just one store that carries them, but seeing as they reported "50+ units in stock" I called the store and learned that "the item is available through a third party vendor within four business days", but looking at that the ratings it would be more like three weeks.
All manufacturers have just decided not to produce any this year. Think about how absolutely crazy that is. 100% of the year's production is for AI. The good news is in 3 years when dollars are worthless, there will be a glut of also worthless server RAM.
I've heard that this year 70% of all production capacity went to HBM.
Just an hour ago I found a stick that isn't officially supported, but has all the right parameters, so 5600MHz, CL46, JEDEC compliance (of course), no XMP. We'll see if it's going to be an expensive mistake.
On that topic: the other day a friend of mine was complaining that his parents' laptop has locked-down UEFI, aside from other anti-consumer practices.
That laptop, with 16GB RAM, costed 16.6% less than the stick I just bought.
Gone back to my old T480 here for that. I don’t need a lot of CPU but I do need a lot of RAM. Managed to get 2x16Gb sticks for not much money. And a better screen than the newer T14 I have.
T480 also has dual batteries with one being removable. I upgraded the top cover to magnesium, added WiFi 7, upgraded to 32 GiB, swapped from a HDD to a SSD, and changed the motherboard from i3-7300U to the i7-8650U. The only repair I ever did was replace the screen because I messed up once and dropped it. Oddly enough, it supports an eGPU over Thunderbolt 3 and 25W TDP unlocking so it was once used as my compact gaming machine. Mine also has 3 spare extended batteries and a custom external charger for them.
T480s and T490 are inferior compared to the T480's usability of ports and batteries.
I'm looking to replace my "eats batteries inside 4 months" (set to charge to no more than 90%, health is 60% in 4 months after less than 20 cycles) second-hand Carbon, and urgh, so many soldered RAM or memory on package designs. Some of Lenovo's 14 inch laptops are still SODIMM or LPCAMM2, but most appear to have gone the non-maintainable route.
Tried a Tuxedo laptop, lovely 120Hz display, but keyboard layout and I disagree. Turns out I really like the older ThinkPad inverted T with pgup/pgdown bracketing, and the 4 keys to the right of the F keys. Problem is, that locks me to ThinkPad/Lenovo, as everyone else seems to use the split up/down cursor with Fn to get page keys. Also really prefer physical mouse buttons over the trackpad, and the Tuxedo was haptic only.
The upgrade cost on the LP RAM though.. 940 EUR for 32 -> 64. Sure, 23% is VAT, but damn the hardware costs hurt right now. At least SODIMM is still cheaper.
I can’t lie you sound like you really just have an inordinately specific taste in laptop layout compared to standard laptop users. I’ve never used the pgup/pgdown keys on any machine I’ve owned. Unsure of what your requirements are but my partner has been using an M1 Air fine for going on 6 years now and we have no plans to upgrade it. Soldered ≠ instant e-waste.
Bash me all you want, but after CPU, GPU, memory controller & a host of other things integrated in modern System-on-Chips (SoC), I've long held the belief that next logical step would be to integrate RAM.
Optimal: piecemeal. As in: X sockets on a board, each socket takes a chip that adds CPU core(s), GPU cores, and some amount of main RAM. More chips, more powerful computer.
Keyword: socket. Read: replaceable. Bad chip out, good chip in. Slow chip out, faster chip in. Soldered onto board = reliable, but a defect could junk the whole machine.
Considering the current trend is for SoCs to deintegrate: don't count on it.
Putting RAM inside the logic die is crazy expensive - just look at how much footprint L3 cache takes up on a modern chip. It'll always make more sense to put it in a separate die, made using RAM-specific processes. With Zen the memory controller and GPU has (once again) moved to a separate die, and with X3D we're now even seeing separate cache dies.
There's of course HBM if you want to consider that "integrated", but the large cost bump, additional manufacturing risks, and loss of flexibility don't make that an attractive proposition unless you really need the extra speed. Regular DDR dies? You gain basically nothing by co-packaging those.
> Bash me all you want, but after CPU, GPU, memory controller & a host of other things integrated in modern System-on-Chips (SoC), I've long held the belief that next logical step would be to integrate RAM
Haven't Apple (A-series, M-series) and others been copackaging memory for a while? (SiP or MCM?)
Manufacturing processes for RAM and processor cores are not one and the same and use different tradeoffs. It's the main problem in-memory processing is running into, which is akin to what you're describing here. The die space required for the same level of performance makes the idea of on-die RAM intractible. The best they're able to do with RAM optimised manufacturing processes are tiny RISC-V cores that lack most of the feature sets. What apple does with moving the RAM chips on to the package really is the only viable option.
DRAM problems used to be a common thing, at least AFAIK in the 90s up to early 10s. I wonder if that still the case or is it now a non-issue for the first 5 years of usage. Our Watch, iPad, Phones all have more memory than old computers. Even Apple Watch Ultra now has 4GB of memory which I thought was crazy.
If it is not, how would all these appliance with memory doubt with bad memory?
It is - anything short of HBM can be replaced that way.
The issue, of course, is just how much time, effort and skill is required to do it.
It might become a viable commercial process outside third world countries if RAM prices spike even more - or if someone finds a way to teach an off the shelf $1000 robot arm advanced autonomous microsoldering.
Then there's the problem of forcing the device itself to recognize the new RAM. It's a device-specific trick. RAM sticks have a little tag chip that tells a PC "how much RAM this stick has", but RAM chips themselves don't - so the device has to infer its RAM capacity from elsewhere. Like strap resistors on the board. Which you have to find and adjust for the new RAM capacity. That, or fix the RAM values in firmware, which is also device-specific.
> or if someone finds a way to teach an off the shelf $1000 robot arm advanced autonomous microsoldering.
This sounds like an ideal application test case for precision industrial robotics, and I hafta wonder why we haven't seen an example posted here at HN.
> RAM sticks have a little tag chip that tells a PC "how much RAM this stick has", but RAM chips themselves don't - so the device has to infer its RAM capacity from elsewhere
I'm surprised that in 2026 this is still true.
You could easily fit a little microcontroller on the die of each RAM chip which reports its make/model/manufacturing date, capacity and capabilities, can be triggered to run self-tests, etc. If they aren't doing that yet, I'm surprised that they aren't.
Well, it turns out they actually are bothering – while in DDR thru DDR4, the mode registers are write-only, LPDDR2 onwards have an MRR (Mode Register Read) command, which the CPU/chipset can use to inspect the manufacturer and capacity; and DDR5 has copied the same facility from LPDDR.
If you live in Shenzhen, it's a subway trip away. Good repair services elsewhere can do it too. Either way any warranty you have is probably getting called into question after that, even if that's supposed to be illegal in some places (e.g. the US - they're supposed to prove that your modification/repair is what caused the warranty fault, but in practice…).
Yes, of course. It says - ball grid (array) in the article. Doing it by hand, e.g. with just hot air is proper hard. It's not hard with specialized equipment (that cost way more than the laptop, itself). Sourcing the chips is not easy either.
As for the videos and the Macs, you can see the same people (likely) soldering RAM as well.
To counterweight all the cynical takes about soldering RAM being a conspiracy to force device obsolescence, I can think of at least one other dynamic that could have resulted in today's scenario: smartphones.
Smartphones also need RAM and are especially subject to requirements of always being thinner, lighter, and have a durable battery, yet have spacious amounts of RAM.
Growing demand for smartphone RAM pushed for its optimization and production scaling and since all its requirements also match laptops, this convergence was inevitable.
Hopefully the growing demand for datacenter RAM density will make modular interface standards like LPCAMM2 more available (soldered has no place in datacenter).
Am I the only one who wonders if there is a way to get the kind of performance we want out of non-soldered components/SOC designs? Like from what I've heard, it's a "physics says no" problem, but I'm not sure if that's actually true (not being an expert in this technology) or if it's just the excuse many companies use to justify soldering everything to make serviceability impossible. And it would be really neat if this is actually being looked into by labs right now (possibly with AI's help), since areas like that are where I think (non) LLM AIs might be very useful. Same thing for medicine, materials, etc.
The boards using LPDDR don't have socketed CPUs. Also, every connector is a huge hit to your signal integrity, so one versus two might indeed be a big deal.
And yeah, it can be, but that's how you end up with the far slower regular DDR. Fast, repairable, cheap: pick (at most) two.
Effectively there are no socketed CPUs for laptops, though, for way more than a decade already. Saying that as I'd fully support modular components, as in desktops.
While it's true that you can get better performance out of soldered memory than a socket, that's also not why vendors use it. Desktop computers, with their very much not soldered memory, get great performance after all. The laptop vendors solder the memory because it lets them make more money off selling units with more memory soldered in. That's all.
> Besides, since RAM isn't getting cheaper for a while, this isn't a big issue now.
I would argue the exact opposite, actually! My home machine has 32GB of RAM and is already over 7 years old. If it were to die right now I'd ideally go for an upgrade with 64GB so it would be good for another 7 or so. But that's completely unaffordable, and I could survive with 16GB for a year or two, so going for the bare minimum now and upgrading it later is looking very attractive...
I don't know if they're asking for them, but they sure seem to appreciate them and see them as "better".
At work, the standard issue laptop is some form of HP Elitebook. These have been getting thinner, and people seem to like that. We're not a tech shop, and even the IT dept. is mainly barely-technical project-managers. An 8th gen i5 would be plenty powerful for what they do, but fortunately for them we have to replace the laptops regularly because for some reason we buy them with the least amount of RAM possible (even before the prices exploded).
Anyway, at the start of the year I was fed up with the ridiculous screen quality of the HPs and other annoyances, so I got myself an Lenvo p14 something-or-other. It's almost twice as thick and much heavier than the HPs, and everyone who sees it makes fun of it.
"Smartphone makers glue them because it's cheaper and they can make more money ..." No. It's what the consumers want. Thinner phones, water resistant phones, and thinner laptops.
I can't recall the last time someone mentioned a phone or laptop being too thick as a downside in a review. Thin and light devices have been widely available for well over a decade, even to the point of caricature like the iPhone Air. It just isn't a feature worth caring about anymore.
Water resistant? Those ratings are lies anyways, and nobody is going to bring their expensive smartphone on a diving trip to take pictures - or even take it surfing without a waterproof case. In practice "water resistant" means "won't die from an occasional splash", and that can be achieved perfectly fine by repairable phones.
People seem to care about "thin and light" laptops, at least my colleagues do. But since they don't pay for these out of pocket, I can't tell how important it is to them, measured in currency.
Now, I don't know about surfing, but I regularly strap my iphone to my motorbike's handlebars to use as a GPS. No case. I don't particularly enjoy doing this under pouring rain, but it does happen, and the phone gets drenched. However, to the point about people wanting this, yes, I do. I would also love a replaceable battery. My old Galaxy S5 had both features, so saying that waterproofing means non-user-replaceable battery is a lie.
> I can't recall the last time someone mentioned a phone or laptop being too thick as a downside in a review.
It's the "elephant in the room" sort of thing that doesn't need to be said because it's apparent and viewers know what they want in that regard. It does get acknowledged when reviewers that don't normally review toughbooks, review toughbooks, but it's an acknowledgement rather than a complaint. Why would someone even view a review of a toughbook if they cared so much about thickness?
I'm washing my expensive flagship phone with water and soap every week, for almost a decade now. Never had a problem because of this (except the USB port getting disabled for a few hours until it dries).
I was programming already in the mid 80s and helping my dad figure out 20MB "Winchesters" in the late 80s/early 90s.
The Wren VII was the first consumer-grade SCSI hard drive with a capacity of 1GB or more — at 5.25” full height. The company had done a commercial-grade SAS drive based on the same chassis the year before. You had to be super careful with those magnets — they could cut off a finger, if you weren’t looking. And they were virtually impossible to remove from a fridge, once applied.
My job was to write a software system that could be used to monitor quality control issues in the manufacturing line, towards a goal of continual process improvement. I didn’t manage to get the whole management system built before I left, but I did get the full toolkit built, and the management system was intended to be a relatively simple layer on top of the toolkit.
Fun times!
>hard disks would even come with a list of known bad ones printed on the top.
HDD still do, but the flash on the controller quietly handles sector sparing, and remapping. This is why one can't just swap unmodified controller PCB anymore for data-recovery without secret vendor software. =3
Some, not all, harddrives have an eeprom that can be transplanted to a different pcb when trying to do data recovery on a drive with a faulty circuit board.
It is not that simple, as the identical part number may have a lot# with slightly different PCB/chips/firmware. If folks have done forensic recovery, than they get a rather quick education about the constant changes to retail HDD design. =3
Perhaps for you, but I very much care about my laptop's size and especially it's weight, as I carry it around on a daily basis.
Repairing or upgrading it aren't really of interest to me, as I wouldn't be able to aquire the parts where I typically live anyway. And performance and cooling have already been more than good enough for me in most laptops for the last decade.
The latest models require repeatedly disassembling the sandwich from both sides. You have to remove the keyboard to access a screw, open the bottom, remove another screw to lift the top, then go back and forth between both sides just to reach a fan that frequently gets clogged with dust and needs frequent, regular cleaning.
Even worse, the unavoidable cleaning voids the warranty.
Laptop manufacturers would like to have you think cleaning them or removing a "warranty void if removed" sticker over a screw actually voids the warranty but it usually doesn't actually.
Easily
Affordably
Anywhere (almost anywhere)
In other words: not having to face something like this: “ah, so your A and G key don’t work? Lovely. Let’s look. Got it! The chassis needs changing and motherboard which is soldered into it. Good news, we can let you reuse the battery” and all that a bright grin that puts my house’s brightest LED to utter shame.
Unless you live in India or a similarly developing country, this hasn't been true for many decades.
The local cost of labor is simply too high to make it economical to repair even simple things, let alone complex electronics.
So.. can someone tell me again why a humble hinge angle sensor is paired with an entire hideously expensive top case assembly ?
Thinner devices need more solid enforcement to stay stiff. My Thinkpad X60s weighs the same as a Macbook Air and it's infinitely more upgradable.
Also they not only solder DRAM, now they solder keyboards so that you cannot replace it easily. My garbage keyboard broke after just 2 years of using and I had to solder ~100 plastic pins to replace it (and the replacement keyboard turned out to be not of a great quality).
Could it be that thin laptops are largely an excuse to provide a need to solder RAM; which in turn encourages consumption through obsolescence?
There’s plenty of laptops with 99.9 Wh batteries already… and more than that is challenging to travel with by air, restricting the market drastically.
If you want the battery life improvements, bear in mind that there is a hard limit on how large a battery you are allowed to fly with, so low power components are important.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxGQBzXWJfA
Unfortunately, not many people making those claims _actually_ want them by revealed preferences. They overwhelmingly want the lower price laptops with similar performance specs.
I like and support what Framework offers. But when I last bought a laptop (a couple of years ago now) the FW13 was almost double the price of a similarly-specc’d and thinner/lighter Asus. (From €1000 to ~€18-1900).
I’d probably pay a ~40% premium for FW, all else being equal, but 80-90% is just too much: it just doesn’t make sense to whatever value-assessment algorithms I’ve developed over time.
and you'd be one of the higher ones.
But a 40% premium is not enough to sustain framework imho. The business model of framework is that you don't buy a new laptop, but just upgrade. Therefore, the lifetime value of one customer on framework is less than that of an Asus buyer (who would have to buy a new laptop every new CPU generation or when batteries die, which is probably at most 5 years).
Therefore, framework has to charge a lot more per customer to make the business make sense. 2x premium is not unreasonable under this sort of assumption.
I personally do think they're doing a good job of course, but i do also wonder the long term viability because their customers are so niche.
If Framework makes the same margin as other manufacturers its viable. If they get more sales than they otherwise would because people want to buy something that will last it is better business sense than making something just like everyone else. its their USP.
But with the current increase in prices of hardware, i expect people to start thinking about repairability and upgradeability, which would increase the total size of potential customer base.
This is also an entirely different issue from the lifetime value of a customer.
> Therefore, framework has to charge a lot more per customer to make the business make sense. 2x premium is not unreasonable under this sort of assumption.
If this is their model, maybe it makes sense from an MBA perspective, but I'm more in the MBAs-are-ruining-the-world camp, and I hate it.
A few points:
- I suspect that private buyers of laptops rarely have strong loyalty to a single brand, so Asus et al can't assume a long chain of purchases over time - they have to continue to compete on price and specs. Framework can probably assume stronger brand loyalty than every other manufacturer out there, based on a) if you've paid their hefty premium, you're really into what they're offering, and b) you've paid the high price of entry for the promise of lower-cost upgrades down the line, which you can only get from Framework. So Framework can probably assume a longer guaranteed income from each customer than any other manufacturer, even if the actual value decreases over time (due to lower cost of upgrades vs. full systems). However, if the upgrades are profitable as individual items, they still win.
- I'd prefer to see Framework sell computers and components at the lowest possible price they can while still being a viable business, with the margin of those items each justifying their existence individually. I appreciate that their economies of scale are different to larger manufacturers and their designs may be more expensive to deliver - this would be covered by a (modest) premium.
- Ultimately, I'd characterise the business model you described as "we'll f*k you on entry, and you might claw back some value over time". I'd rather aim for "we'll sell you a good product for a reasonable price today, and then delight you with the bonus of upgradability later on".
- I wonder whether their issue might actually be scale of manufacturing: that they can't deliver enough systems quickly/reliably enough to compete for a broader market (which would require lower margins to attract more price-sensitive customers) thereby driving them to target a more limited market of nerds who love the repairability concept, and also price higher per system to make the numbers work?
It does not. An MBA would hopefully teach someone to understand it gives Framework a USP and they only need the same margins as anyone else.
> A few points
Of those the first and last are the sort of things an MBA should teach someone to think about. The second is much the same and part wanting an efficient market (i.e. what free market capitalism is supposed to deliver). the third is entirely right.
That was before prices went crazy, though. Now the RAM alone is over 500€. Also, whether the repairability is worth anything I'll find out down the line, but so far it's looking good.
I'm pretty sure my memory is correct, and for a DIY Ryzen 8840/16GB/1TB it was roughly an 80-90% premium, which I'd not describe as competitive.
Instead, I got an ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED with those specs (albeit a slightly bigger better screen) for exactly 1000 EUR in a local shop.
Now, yes, I could remove the Windows cost (ahem), not pay for a charger, and save a little buying RAM and an SSD from elsewhere, but then it's not remotely an apples-to-apples comparison.
If you want to quibble with words, you're right that I could have hedged more in my original comment, e.g. "cost can be competitive depending what exactly you are looking for". I'm not denying your experience for what you wanted, but for what I wanted, the costs were pretty close.
Pirate Windows and using an existing charger saves ~€200. You can shave a little more sourcing your own RAM and SSD but probably not huge amounts, from memory at the time.
So the comparison becomes something like “if you spend your time and energy sourcing multiple components, and don’t mind pirating your OS, and have an old charger to use, you can maybe reduce the premium you pay for a Framework to 30-50%”.
I used to use an 11" as my daily driver (and that was before retina-resolutions were a thing). It wasn't ideal, but it was fine for development work.
13-14" is the sweet spot between power storage, size, and energy efficiency in my opinion.
It's not ideal, but then working on a laptop never is.
Not to mention how often I long for my MBA11 with the tapered body which almost made it feel like it was floating in my lap when working from the couch.
https://frame.work/blog/framework-laptop-13-pro-deep-dive-lp...
No supplier carries those connectors, there are no 1K prices I could find anywhere.
I've been eyeing LPCAMM2 interposers for non-RAM uses - as an off the shelf connector for stacked PCB designs. The conclusion was that it wasn't produced or used at sufficient scale for it to work.
https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/business/tech-science/20260420/...
There are specialized shops willing to do this around the world. This is especially common in third world countries, Eastern Europe, China etc.. There are people who would do this change for around 5-10 USD in India (as long as you can find the replacement yourself).
I am amazed at how many people on this forum think of this as some scary dark magic.
The anecdote about it being a common job in third world countries is interesting. I wonder where they learn to do it, and what all tools are involved. Maybe it's a family business thing and your kids take over.
Chip-level repair SHOULD be the norm.
China has been the master at this stuff for a while with institutes like Wantong Training School, Shenzhen etc.
It is a real shame that much of this knowledge is either on Chinese or Russian Internet forums or buried in obscure and unsearchable YouTube videos.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl2mFZoRqjw_ELax4Yisf6w
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/@electronicsrepairschool
[3]: https://www.youtube.com/@NorthridgeFix
The problem here is that too many people have a vested interest to be unreliable, so we are never sure one way or another.
One can also DIY such mods/repairs but it requires some extra equipment and supplies.
Searching for "bga soldered ram chip change laptop" on YouTube returns like thousands of results of people doing this.
Although I now realize how skewed my perception of microsoldering and other such skills because such skills seem to be extremely niche in the west.
I've found just one store that carries them, but seeing as they reported "50+ units in stock" I called the store and learned that "the item is available through a third party vendor within four business days", but looking at that the ratings it would be more like three weeks.
Just an hour ago I found a stick that isn't officially supported, but has all the right parameters, so 5600MHz, CL46, JEDEC compliance (of course), no XMP. We'll see if it's going to be an expensive mistake.
On that topic: the other day a friend of mine was complaining that his parents' laptop has locked-down UEFI, aside from other anti-consumer practices.
That laptop, with 16GB RAM, costed 16.6% less than the stick I just bought.
T480s and T490 are inferior compared to the T480's usability of ports and batteries.
Tried a Tuxedo laptop, lovely 120Hz display, but keyboard layout and I disagree. Turns out I really like the older ThinkPad inverted T with pgup/pgdown bracketing, and the 4 keys to the right of the F keys. Problem is, that locks me to ThinkPad/Lenovo, as everyone else seems to use the split up/down cursor with Fn to get page keys. Also really prefer physical mouse buttons over the trackpad, and the Tuxedo was haptic only.
The upgrade cost on the LP RAM though.. 940 EUR for 32 -> 64. Sure, 23% is VAT, but damn the hardware costs hurt right now. At least SODIMM is still cheaper.
Can't you select and copy the text in the photo (on most smartphones and PCs at least)?
The LP in LPDDRx isn't about creating thinner devices.
The LP stands for Low Power and is aimed at making devices that draw less power resulting in a longer battery life.
Optimal: piecemeal. As in: X sockets on a board, each socket takes a chip that adds CPU core(s), GPU cores, and some amount of main RAM. More chips, more powerful computer.
Keyword: socket. Read: replaceable. Bad chip out, good chip in. Slow chip out, faster chip in. Soldered onto board = reliable, but a defect could junk the whole machine.
Putting RAM inside the logic die is crazy expensive - just look at how much footprint L3 cache takes up on a modern chip. It'll always make more sense to put it in a separate die, made using RAM-specific processes. With Zen the memory controller and GPU has (once again) moved to a separate die, and with X3D we're now even seeing separate cache dies.
There's of course HBM if you want to consider that "integrated", but the large cost bump, additional manufacturing risks, and loss of flexibility don't make that an attractive proposition unless you really need the extra speed. Regular DDR dies? You gain basically nothing by co-packaging those.
Haven't Apple (A-series, M-series) and others been copackaging memory for a while? (SiP or MCM?)
Then there is the HBM which is an expensive process to mount on the chip.
If it is not, how would all these appliance with memory doubt with bad memory?
But I suppose when one has to amputate, not being able to run a marathon isn't really a blocking factor...
With the increase of soldered RAM it must be more important than it used to be ten years ago.
Just search for “bcdedit and ‘bad memory’” for more documentation
Agree non user service parts is not good for consumers.
Use tools as d search Youtube videos memory upgrade device name before you buy a laptop to check if the memory is user upgradeable without soldering.
The issue, of course, is just how much time, effort and skill is required to do it.
It might become a viable commercial process outside third world countries if RAM prices spike even more - or if someone finds a way to teach an off the shelf $1000 robot arm advanced autonomous microsoldering.
Then there's the problem of forcing the device itself to recognize the new RAM. It's a device-specific trick. RAM sticks have a little tag chip that tells a PC "how much RAM this stick has", but RAM chips themselves don't - so the device has to infer its RAM capacity from elsewhere. Like strap resistors on the board. Which you have to find and adjust for the new RAM capacity. That, or fix the RAM values in firmware, which is also device-specific.
This sounds like an ideal application test case for precision industrial robotics, and I hafta wonder why we haven't seen an example posted here at HN.
I'm surprised that in 2026 this is still true.
You could easily fit a little microcontroller on the die of each RAM chip which reports its make/model/manufacturing date, capacity and capabilities, can be triggered to run self-tests, etc. If they aren't doing that yet, I'm surprised that they aren't.
I'm assuming if it were still under warranty, dead RAM chip would be enough to get a free repair/replacement from the manufacturer
As for the videos and the Macs, you can see the same people (likely) soldering RAM as well.
Good BGA experience and a steady hand seems required
Smartphones also need RAM and are especially subject to requirements of always being thinner, lighter, and have a durable battery, yet have spacious amounts of RAM.
Growing demand for smartphone RAM pushed for its optimization and production scaling and since all its requirements also match laptops, this convergence was inevitable.
Hopefully the growing demand for datacenter RAM density will make modular interface standards like LPCAMM2 more available (soldered has no place in datacenter).
And yeah, it can be, but that's how you end up with the far slower regular DDR. Fast, repairable, cheap: pick (at most) two.
I agree there is draw back when using socket(mostly size), but performance is not the big issue.
MRDIMM RAM can reach even higher Transfer rate than LPDDR5, yet still socktable.
CPU and RAM are socketed. Clevo had socketed graphics cards too
Besides, since RAM isn't getting cheaper for a while, this isn't a big issue now.
I would argue the exact opposite, actually! My home machine has 32GB of RAM and is already over 7 years old. If it were to die right now I'd ideally go for an upgrade with 64GB so it would be good for another 7 or so. But that's completely unaffordable, and I could survive with 16GB for a year or two, so going for the bare minimum now and upgrading it later is looking very attractive...
At work, the standard issue laptop is some form of HP Elitebook. These have been getting thinner, and people seem to like that. We're not a tech shop, and even the IT dept. is mainly barely-technical project-managers. An 8th gen i5 would be plenty powerful for what they do, but fortunately for them we have to replace the laptops regularly because for some reason we buy them with the least amount of RAM possible (even before the prices exploded).
Anyway, at the start of the year I was fed up with the ridiculous screen quality of the HPs and other annoyances, so I got myself an Lenvo p14 something-or-other. It's almost twice as thick and much heavier than the HPs, and everyone who sees it makes fun of it.
"Smartphone makers glue them because it's cheaper and they can make more money ..." No. It's what the consumers want. Thinner phones, water resistant phones, and thinner laptops.
Water resistant? Those ratings are lies anyways, and nobody is going to bring their expensive smartphone on a diving trip to take pictures - or even take it surfing without a waterproof case. In practice "water resistant" means "won't die from an occasional splash", and that can be achieved perfectly fine by repairable phones.
Now, I don't know about surfing, but I regularly strap my iphone to my motorbike's handlebars to use as a GPS. No case. I don't particularly enjoy doing this under pouring rain, but it does happen, and the phone gets drenched. However, to the point about people wanting this, yes, I do. I would also love a replaceable battery. My old Galaxy S5 had both features, so saying that waterproofing means non-user-replaceable battery is a lie.
It's the "elephant in the room" sort of thing that doesn't need to be said because it's apparent and viewers know what they want in that regard. It does get acknowledged when reviewers that don't normally review toughbooks, review toughbooks, but it's an acknowledgement rather than a complaint. Why would someone even view a review of a toughbook if they cared so much about thickness?