2026 is here. It’s both an incredible and terrifying time to be in tech: AI is disrupting every industry, and is inflating computer hardware prices to all-time highs.
Software is advancing at an incredible pace with agentic coding becoming an increasingly common way to develop said software. LLMs are getting better and better as time has gone on, and the demand for a local workstation that allows users to run their own LLMs to escape privacy concerns and subscriptions is at an all-time high.
In addition to all this, there is a growing trend in the computer industry surrounding the actual hardware: prices are increasing, and while onboard hardware is getting better for the price, it comes with a hidden cost of becoming increasingly non-repairable and inserviceable. Software bloating up and utilizing more of those system resources (even at idle) creates an ecosystem where base models of any new computer are rapidly becoming obsolete.
Macbooks are one of the most prolific modern examples of this. While I love my Macbook Pro M1 Pro, I’ve lately found myself longing for more. More RAM, more disk space, and less Liquid Glass hogging up all my resources. Don’t get me wrong: I love this machine. It’s great for most things I would need it to do. While macOS has become more and more bloated over time, it’s still my preferred operating system and ecosystem for work and for my personal devices.
But the soldered RAM, the soldered SSD, having little to no upgrade paths, the fact that at idle my system uses roughly 8 out of the 16 gigabytes available on board, I’ve got little to no overhead for anything else after running Comet tabs, Cursor, and the occasional Orca Slicer, Gimp, Notion, Claude, Android Studio, XCode, etc.
After everything is said and done, things like Docker or Ollama are an afterthought, even if I ran with some CPU-friendly LLMs.
For some of the things I’ve been working on lately, I’m really capped by my compute capacity: 8 gigs of RAM isn’t getting me very far with scripts I’m running to generate levels for me for a game I’m trying to develop. I really would like to get 32-36 or even 64 gigabytes of RAM, but I don’t really want to fork over the thousands of dollars it would take to get a new, reliable system with those specifications, and my dream of eventually owning a Framework Desktop 64gb is getting increasingly more expensive as time goes on.
And this all started to make me remember how I used to be able to upgrade my computer hardware…
My Macbook Pro that I purchased in 2014 didn’t age very gracefully, BUT in the 8 or so years I actively used it, I was able to upgrade it a couple of times to give it a new lease on life, so to speak.
First was the RAM upgrade. I believe when I first purchased it, it had 4 gigabytes of RAM. Then, a couple years later, I upgraded the RAM to 8 gigabytes, giving it a little more headroom to run things. Then, a couple years after that, I got an SSD for Christmas from my wife and not only doubled its storage capacity, but considerably boosted the speed.
Over a decade later, it’s not doing anything.
Not because I don’t want it to or haven’t tried, but because it can’t, really.
This non-retina Macbook Pro is essentially an EOL product. There’s no path to upgrade the onboard hardware or the operating system in any way that makes it useable. Even software that I try to download that claims it can run on an “Intel Mac” won’t run on my Mac because my Mac still runs Mac OS X, and can’t be upgraded to macOS at all.
I could throw Linux on it, but that kind of defeats the entire purpose of having a Mac at all. I could try to sell it, but compared to the money I put into it, I’d practically be giving it away.
I start looking at Framework and I start to get very envious… I start to realize that I love my Macbook Pros until they… Really don’t work for me anymore.
It’s got me wondering for how much longer I’m going to actually be able to use this device I’m typing on right now. Sure, I bought it refurbed for a good price a couple years back, but as I continue to use this device, I grow increasingly worried about this device succumbing to planned obsolescence.
But you’re thinking “dude it’s an M1 Pro, relax, you’re still good for a while”. Am I though? I couldn’t even use iCloud Passwords in Comet because I didn’t upgrade to Tahoe. Not even software developers, or Apple themselves, tolerate choice when it comes to software or hardware anymore, unless you’re using the latest and greatest of everything.
And while the claims are that Apple “uses RAM differently/more efficiently” on the M-series silicon, I have to wonder how true that claim actually is when I’m staring at Activity Monitor at startup and half of the available on-board RAM is just… Gone. You can certainly say Apple devices are “built different”, but I’d argue after having one of these things for so long, the whole “efficiency” claim is really not backed up by actual fact anymore.
Thank goodness for open source and Linux and companies still willing to make DDR3 RAM.
This also really got me thinking about Microsoft as well. The first computer I was ever given for work was a Lenovo W540 back in 2014 (kinda funny how I got both of those devices around the same time).
This thing, by 2026 standards, is what most people would consider to be kind of a piece of crap: it’s heavier than pretty much every other modern device, it only came with 16 gigs of RAM when I got it back from Cerner, it has a 256gb SSD in it, which is small for modern devices, and doesn’t come with “modern” ports like USB-C. It came with Windows 7 that I eventually was able to upgrade to Windows 10, but when it came to getting Windows 11, I was told by Microsoft’s tool that my computer was too old for their new operating system. It gets warm enough that using it as a laptop gets uncomfortable after a while.
And holy bejeezus, no matter what I do, this thing has by far the worst touchpad on any computer I’ve ever used. You so much as breathe on it and it registers a click, much less brushing your hand against the touchpad while you’re typing.
However, for what it lacks in “modernity” it makes up for in a number of different ways:
I’ll come back to that last part for a second, but I wanted to stay on topic for the whole Windows 10/11 debacle. When Microsoft came out with Windows 11, they announced that only computers with UEFI secure boot were able to upgrade to Windows 11.
Guess what the W540 doesn’t have? Guess what my W540 can’t have as a result?
Thank goodness for open source and Linux and companies still willing to make DDR3 RAM.
When Microsoft’s Windows 11 Upgrade Eligibility told me I couldn’t upgrade, I took it very personally as an affront to me and all that me has become.
Just kidding, I downloaded Linux Mint onto a bootable USB drive and installed that instead. I hadn’t really used Linux or had a machine with Linux on it in quite some time. This may not come as a shock to anyone reading this, but I was surprised at how little Linux actually needs to run. At idle, Linux Mint is taking up only about 2 gigabytes of RAM.
14 out of an available 16 gigabytes of RAM? That’s my kind of overhead. And for what it is, it’s still an excellent device for being over 12 years old at this point! I’ve got Cursor, Claude Code, Docker, all kinds of stuff installed on it. I can actually take advantage of the resources on board as opposed to all the hardware being held hostage by the operating system.
Then recently, after asking Claude, I realized that it could have up to 32gb of RAM on it! The only problem was actually finding the RAM. It’s DDR3L 1600 Mhz RAM, and only gets so big. But Amazon of all places had 4x8gb kits available of this RAM! for only about $80!! Far less money than what I’d spend on any new device.
The formatted capacity of the 4 sticks I bought ended up registering 33gb of RAM total, and again, Linux at idle is only taking around 2 of that. For my use-cases only revolving around raw compute and time, this is really fantastic for me! Now, I can run the memory-intensive scripts on Linux without having to worry about macOS hogging it all.
This recent experience has really become a turning point for me in how I think about longevity of all of my devices, and in various ways:
I have two different Apple devices, one of which I couldn’t sustainably use anymore unless I got rid of the operating system that all the hardware is designed around, and one that lacks the lustre of upgradeability and will eventually become obsolete.
At the same time, I’ve also got something completely different in the Lenovo: a loss of hardware and software cohesion in exchange for having a significant amount of modularity. On top of being able to easily access many of the core parts of the PC, the W540 could also potentially be upgraded with network cards, CD-ROM and/or disk expansion bays, and has many parts that could easily be replaced or repaired, including the battery, the keyboard, the awful trackpad, etc.
If something fails in this laptop in the future, I likely could repair it, and it would probably be cheaper than buying a different PC that likely would run into the same issues with obsolescence, repairability, and sustainability as my M1 Pro Macbook Pro.
I think about how we got here, and I respect the decisions behind how we got here: professional-grade devices that prioritize power over everything. Soldered RAM that exists closer to the CPU/GPU/APU/NPU allows for a significant boost in speed, and an extremely flexible architecture that allows RAM to be dynamically allocated to serve graphics and compute. That’s not possible with expandable/repairable memory modules like most people have in their desktop rigs.
It’s not for a lack of trying either: Framework, in the development of the Framework Desktop, attempted to work with AMD to see if the Ryzen AI Max 385/395+ could use traditional DDR5 RAM. AMD, in response, basically told Framework that it’s not possible to do that without dramatic signal loss between the chip and the RAM.
As an industry though: how hard are PC manufacturers really trying? Ever since Apple released the M-series Macbooks, soldered RAM, SSDs, and everything in between started to become more and more commonplace. It used to be that most laptops had expandable RAM and storage. Nowadays, it seems like everyone is jumping on the professional-grade upgrade-locked hardware hype train. Everything from Mac Minis, to DGX Spark, to the recently announced RTX Spark: it’ll all be so good that it’ll be the last device you ever need.
But is that really true? I want to use macOS on this device, but will that even be feasible a few years from now? Is my W540 more well-positioned to outlast my M1 Pro Macbook? For being a decade-old device, it’s still chugging along well enough to last me into the future. Even if I just used it as a desktop, it’s doing the job right now I need it to do, and very well might for years to come. The Linux Mint upgrades will likely keep flowing indefinitely, and as long as the support exists, I’ll likely be able to use Mint on this PC for the foreseeable future, and if not Mint, then whatever other successful Linux distribution exists at the time. I’ve heard lots of good things about Omarchy…
I’m still really heavily embedded in the Apple ecosystem, and my M1 isn’t going anywhere soon, but as far as future PC purchases go, I think I might end up prioritizing repairability a lot more than I currently do. The idea of having computing devices that can potentially withstand the test of time is something that is becoming more appealing to me as time goes on, especially as I begin to realize how much time is a factor in how long all of my devices will actually last.