There was a time when buying a laptop didn't necessarily mean accepting the machine exactly as it came.
Need more RAM? Add some.
Running out of storage? Replace the drive.
Battery getting tired after a few years? Buy another one.
You could even open the bottom cover without feeling like you were performing surgery on something that really didn't want to be opened.
Somewhere along the way, we decided this was old-fashioned.
Laptops became thinner, lighter and undeniably better looking. But RAM started getting soldered to the motherboard. Storage became harder to replace on some machines. Batteries disappeared behind screws, adhesive and increasingly complicated internal layouts.
We gained thinness.
I'm not convinced everything we gave up was worth it.
That's why I'm increasingly interested whenever a manufacturer releases a laptop designed around upgradeability and repairability.
Framework is probably the best-known example of taking this idea seriously. Its laptops are designed so components such as memory, storage, ports and other parts can be replaced or upgraded rather than treating the entire machine as one disposable unit. Framework Laptop
And the funny thing is, none of this should feel revolutionary.
We've done it before.
I remember when checking whether a laptop had an accessible RAM slot was perfectly normal. Buying a machine with less memory and upgrading it yourself later could save money. A hard drive upgrade could give an ageing laptop another couple of years of useful life.
Today, we're often encouraged to make those decisions before clicking the Buy button.
8GB or 16GB?
16GB or 32GB?
512GB or 1TB?
Choose carefully because you may be living with that configuration for the life of the machine.
That is fantastic for manufacturers selling expensive upgrades at checkout. I'm less sure it's fantastic for us.
And this matters even more now.
RAM requirements aren't going down. Applications aren't getting smaller. AI features are arriving on PCs. Photos and video files keep getting larger. A laptop that feels perfectly adequate today might have very different requirements three or four years from now.
Being able to upgrade it isn't just a geeky feature.
It can extend the useful life of the machine.
I'm not arguing that every laptop should become a thick plastic box with twelve removable panels. There is clearly a market for extremely thin machines where integration is part of the appeal.
But perhaps we pushed too far in one direction.
We started treating thin as automatically better.
We accepted soldered components because the laptop was a few millimetres slimmer. We accepted fewer ports and bought dongles. We accepted machines that became increasingly difficult to repair because everything looked beautifully integrated.
Twenty years of playing with computers has taught me that the component you think you'll never need to upgrade has an annoying habit of becoming the component you wish you could upgrade.
So seeing laptops designed around repairability again feels strangely refreshing.
Not because it's a completely new idea.
Because it's an old idea that probably shouldn't have disappeared in the first place.
Maybe the future of laptops doesn't need another revolutionary feature.
Maybe it just needs a screwdriver.