Today at someone’s place I came across a laptop that represented an alternative future: one where manufacturers didn’t relentlessly choose size and weight over extendability. Where a portable machine – just like an assembled desktop – could be upgraded over time instead of having to buy an entirely new one.
This is the Dell Inspiron 14R N4110 from 2011, which runs Windows 7 just fine.
In return for having to lug around over two kilos, you get a DVD read/write drive, three USB ports, two of them USB 3.0, an ethernet port, a VGA port, an HDMI port, an SD card slot, an eSATA port, and audio in and out – and a Kensington lock slot.
Plus, you get a removable battery, a user-accessible slot to pop RAM modules in and out to expand RAM (although only up to 8GB), the ability to replace not just the hard drive with an SSD, not just the display with a higher-resolution one, but also the processor itself!
In fact, Dell itself published a detailed manual [PDF] for laptop owners to access – in addition to the RAM, display, processor and battery – the optical drive, the keyboard, the wireless card, the bluetooth card, the motherboard, the speakers, camera, I/O board, AC adapter and even the coin-cell battery that the boards use to keep internal time. With all this, you could not just use the laptop for well over a decade, but keep it current over that time, simply by upgrading the components that became bottlenecks, or that wore out.
Granted, our laptops would be a lot thicker than the iPad Pro:
In this alternate future, Dell and its ilk would be component manufacturers more than laptop manufacturers – and it’d be a lot more exciting because we’d see a large variety in such components.
I imagine that in this future’s 2020, people forced to work from home who suddenly wanted a better webcam could buy an high-resolution one from Dell and plug it into their laptop’s display. Maybe there’d be a choice of lenses. Instead, our only choices are to either buy an external webcam, becoming one more accessory and cable to carry, or buy a whole new laptop. In that universe, as things improved in the coming years and people began working from a variety of remote places instead of returning to offices, they’d buy larger batteries from Dell – all for the same laptop.
Today we have laptops that are ever-lighter, with some improvement in battery life than in 2011, when the Dell in question was first manufactured. But we have lost nearly all repairability and upgradability. With minimal ports, we have lost a lot of extensibility, unless we buy even more adapters and dongles and cables. We’re turning our computers into appliances and, like appliances, replacing them instead of repairing them – because we can’t.