Have you considered that the current landscape is a product of a competitive market? Historically laptops were never as repairable as desktops. Most parts of those bulky 1990s Powerbooks, Latitudes, and Compaqs were hard to access due to proprietary screws. Every laptop manufacturer had non-standard components and non-standard ports and those components and ports would evolve every 6 months. If you wanted replacement parts and you weren't a corporate repair shop, you were shit out luck before Ebay existed. The adhesive-sealed laptop that you resent is a product of the standardization that corporations and suppliers eventually sought after going through the Wild West phase of the mass market PC.
A competitive market isn't a marry-go-round where every idea gets its turn under the sun for all eternity. It's an arena where some rise and many perish. In the '90s and '00s, many ideas fell through, many companies collapsed, and many technologies become outmoded. What has come out of that is the sealed computer of today.
"Have you considered that the current landscape is a product of a competitive market?"
I have. I note that large numbers of people build PCs from components and that this market is large enough to be a primary concern for a constellation of manufacturers and has been for decades. You can buy an IC with 1200 contacts and install it yourself on the kitchen table. There is no other segment of the microelectronics world were this level of commoditization exists and yet it has stood the test of time. Transferring this behavior to mobile machines seems like an inevitable and long overdue step to me.
"Historically laptops were never as repairable as desktops."
History is a poor yardstick here. A number of forces have emerged that change the landscape. Among these are amazing design tools that enable a startup to go from zero to a complete, shipping modular design in 18 months (establishing a defacto standard, btw), tooling that delivers rapid fabrication in small volume, standardized, high performance serial busses that enable simple yet powerful architectures, robust solid state storage devices and the integration of some difficult components into CPUs. It used to require the resources of major manufacturers and their proprietary knowledge and capabilities to pull off marketable mobile designs. That era has passed and the commodity era is here.
"The adhesive-sealed laptop that you resent"
I do not resent monolithic products. I own several. I will buy more. I resent the lack of a choice. I expect that modular mobile machines will take their place among the equipment I acquire, and that these will become the major focus of my concern, whereas the monoliths will be relegated to ancillary tasks.
"What has come out of that is the sealed computer."
And they won't go away. The question is how much room is there for modular systems. I believe there is a lot. I imagine a Newegg filled with commodity mix and match mobile components from a vast number of vendors.
A competitive market isn't a marry-go-round where every idea gets its turn under the sun for all eternity. It's an arena where some rise and many perish. In the '90s and '00s, many ideas fell through, many companies collapsed, and many technologies become outmoded. What has come out of that is the sealed computer of today.