I strongly believe the tech just wasn’t there 10 years ago. It shouldn’t have taken as long as it did to make a modular laptop, but making some ten billion smartphones (and the constant drive to make them ever thinner and smaller) made it so we can pack far more power into a smaller space.
Modularity and repairability is always going to lead to less space efficient designs. I will gladly concur that Apple and others have taken severe advantage of this in an excuse to push planned obsolescence, long after anyone cared about shaving another millimeter from a device. But there was absolutely a time where it just wasn’t feasible to make a laptop do what people wanted, at the desired price point, and also make it modular. Computer architecture’s all about tradeoffs and there just wasn’t a viable product on that part of the “efficient frontier.” Similar argument explains why gaming laptops were also a massive disappointment for so many years. There are conflicting requirements.
People also didn’t really care as much about right to repair, when hardware improvements made you want to upgrade every few years anyway, and we didn’t have such rapacious anti-consumer monopolies.
Modularity and repairability is always going to lead to less space efficient designs. I will gladly concur that Apple and others have taken severe advantage of this in an excuse to push planned obsolescence, long after anyone cared about shaving another millimeter from a device. But there was absolutely a time where it just wasn’t feasible to make a laptop do what people wanted, at the desired price point, and also make it modular. Computer architecture’s all about tradeoffs and there just wasn’t a viable product on that part of the “efficient frontier.” Similar argument explains why gaming laptops were also a massive disappointment for so many years. There are conflicting requirements.
People also didn’t really care as much about right to repair, when hardware improvements made you want to upgrade every few years anyway, and we didn’t have such rapacious anti-consumer monopolies.