The Future of Laptop Upgrade Ability?

oki900 asks: "With laptops becoming more modular, and the use of mini PCI or PCI express cards for most of the components, are we going to start to see more third party upgrade options for laptops. I know that currently a lot of laptops use mini PCI or PCI express for LAN/WLAN cards and some even for the sound cards. It's also becoming more popular to use mini PCI express for the video cards. What will this mean for laptop consumers in the near future and how far will this trend go? Are we going to soon be able to easily upgrade the processors in the laptops as well?"

Comments

modularize the failure components

[yagu]

My laptops have failed around key components. And virtually all of them suffered one or more of:

• power adaptor connector failure. I don't know why these are made the way they are, but there's got to be a better way. Nothing is more susceptible to failure than a rigid plastic and metal plug embedded in the connector receptacle. And, no matter how careful you are someone or something else will come along and give it a good knock. (One machine I have had this break twice, and both times the entire motherboard was replace (under warranty, thank goodness).)
• screens. These need to be more modular and repairable. The most common problem I've seen is a rogue ribbon connector working its way loose from constant opening and closing of the laptop, sometimes even breaking. (Also, for improved resolution, it'd be nice to see this as a DIY option.)
• battery failures
• heat and meltdown failures
• keyboard failures (this would really be nice to standardize and modularize! As of now, my solution is, unless I have to use the laptop keyboard, I hook up a wireless keyboard -- it turns out to be a great solution, but kind of invalidates the notion of "laptop".)

Of the above, battery failure is easy... they usually are modular and easy to replace, though way pricier than necessary (IMO).

The monitor and adaptor problems are trickier. I think for there to be a future in upgradeable and modular laptops, these would have to be improved (snap in video screens, ruggedized connector ports?).

Laptops are highly specialized and customized marvels of engineering and required trick engineering just to get all of the pieces in the box (ever try disassembling one and getting it all back together?).

As components are increasingly tiny in size, and laptops do become more modular, they'll have to become less proprietary and more open architecture -- something I'm not sure manufacturers are wont to do. (I'm thinking laptop manufacturers are more interested in branding, and not pushing sale and profit out to component makers.)

Until laptops as an integrated unit can withstand the everyday rigors and liver longer, "upgrading" (other than memory and maybe disk) may be throwing good money after bad.

The normal way...

[__aaclcg7560]

One piece at a time? Seriously, if you're replacing more than a few parts, buying a whole new laptop might be the best solution.

I doubt it

[tlambert]

I doubt it.

Most laptops are seriously limited by form factor of the particular cards it's expected to accept in such a slot - in general, they are not full sized cards, but as small as they can make them, and potentially oddly shaped, if they are on an internal connector.

The other limitation that a card could throw way off kilter - particularly, a display card replacement - is the thermal budget. You're already seeing vendors selling laptops that *must* have power management to enable them to run within their thermal budget when the ambient temperature is higher than some minimum below which there is no throttling required (say 60 degrees Fahrenheit).

Putting in a very large, high thermal output graphics card, even if it would fit (see first paragraph) will at best blow your thermal budget; at worst, the heat pipes for the card, even if they happened to hput the hot spots in the same place, would be unlikely to be able to dissipate the load - either because they are undersize, or because they share their heat sinks with other components that are already pushing them at their effective limits.

So I seriously doubt you are going to have a lot of component upgradeable laptops available. There might be one or two niche vendors that over-engineer their thermal envelopes so they can handle upgrades, but... expect them to be much heavier in general, for the "generic" heat piping and sinking, and to potentially be noisier, if they also end up with higher air flow fans to cool above the expected default configuration load.

I don't think the "Road Warrior" market is big enough to support someone like a Dell or an Apple building and marketing one of these monsters.

-- Terry

The other way around

[JanneM]

I think that becoming more modular than now is probably not feasible. You have so tight constraints on heat dissipation, for instance, that adding a higher-performance graphics card, or higher clocked cpu could well end up killing your laptop. And with everybody wanting the smallest, lightest package possible within their other design constraints, I don't really see manufacturers adding "spare" capacity in any but the largest, heaviest desktop replacement machines.

You do have quite a bit of upgradeability with PC cards, USB2 and upcoming high-performance connectors. These connectors are easy to design for, in the sense that the manufacturer knows the highest allowable poser draw, heat dissipation and so on. I don't think you'll ever see real modularity beyond that.

Instead, there's been a pretty steady trend the past few years that the highest possible performance is no longer as important. It used to be you needed to upgrade your machine with every new high-impact game, or every new version of your word processing app. Purely anectotally, this does not seem to be the case anymore; a three year old machine is still perfectly able to run just about everything you want to throw at it. And for laptops, the upgrade cycle is definitively dampened by other constraints; the newest version of my (soon) two year old machine has an 1.3Ghz cpu rather than mine 1.1Ghz, and the integrated graphics are presumably a bit faster.

So, my feeling on this is that instead of becoming a lot modular, it's becoming steadily less important to be upgradeable in the first place. There's little point in being able to upgrade the CPU if the original one is still well in the game after three or four years, when you'd be thinking about replacing the machine anyhow.

Those who want to have all the latest and greatest are most likely to use a desktop in any case, since the absolute performance of a fast tower machine is going to kill any laptop, and at a lower cost. That's where upgradeability makes sense.