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.
> The race to make laptops thinner is pointless.
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.
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).
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 genuinely don't think people care that much about thin laptops.
Could it be that thin laptops are largely an excuse to provide a need to solder RAM; which in turn encourages consumption through obsolescence?
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.
You definitely can. There's the framework laptop, and also many Lenovo models are bulkier and more robust.