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Soviet level of journalism...

“Did you hear? On Red Square they’re giving away cars.”

“Not quite. First, it’s not on Red Square but on Dzerzhinsky Square. Second, they’re not cars but bicycles. And third, they’re not giving them away, they’re stealing them.”


"Did you hear, Russians went to space", "All of them?", "No, just one", "Then why do you bother me."

Probably because this is not repairability, but rather dividing device into smaller not repairable parts that can be replaced by purchasing parts from the manufacturer at inflated cost.

Much worse compared to other laptops where everything is soldered and glued together and you have to throw the whole thing away when something fails

Is there any laptop that you can replace individual pieces of the motherboard? Laptop motherboards are all the same.

I thought the issue with the soldered on RAM wasn't the fact that it was soldered, but that manufacturers would use chips that are not easy to source and in some way serialised. So even if you got larger chips, you would still have to figure out other parts to swap that tell the CPU it's 32GB now, not 24GB.

Being soldered on is a huge issue to 99% of people and businesses wanting to repair or upgrade something.

I don’t have the tools or skills to replace soldered on memory chips when they fail. Nobody at my place of work does. Nobody was doing that type of work in a warranty centre I worked in either.

I’d need to buy an entire motherboard which will much more expensive, and likely more time consuming, than swapping a couple of memory modules.


In the almost 30 years of using Mac’s at home and various desktop pc’s in the workplace I don’t think I have ever seen ram fail. Replaced plenty of old school failed disk drives however.

> I don’t think I have ever seen ram fail.

I think making it impossible to upgrade is a somewhat bigger problem, at least while the machine is still in-warranty.

Traditionally, RAM has been one of the more-common upgrades to make as needs or budgets change, so soldering it in looks like planned-obsolescence.


Failing RAM is rarer than it seems from posts online. My theory is that it's so easy to test for that everyone says to do it even if it's unlikely to be your problem. It reminds me of people who needlessly recap (replace capacitors) everything in hopes of it fixing a problem, often not even bothering to test each cap or exhausting other options first. IME dirt/corrosion/oxidation (often solved by cleaning) is a much more prevalent problem than bad caps. After that, solder that needs reflowing is still a more common issue than bad caps.

That being said, I really did have one bad stick of RAM once in my life, and it really does cause strange seemingly random problems.


I think it is less of a concern to the businesses buying these things brand new and more of a concern to the tinkerers who buy/repair/resell/use older models. There's a lot of people who still use ThinkPads made in early 2010s (and earlier). I had RAM module fail on an x270 and replacing it only required opening the laptop (RAM sticks just snap into place). If soldered-on RAM fails, it's game over, or at least full board swap.

Plus, no way to put more RAM/replace RAM with larger module if it's soldered on.


Lucky. Working in repairs I was only seeing the ones that didn’t work, and I’ve seen failures of just about everything. It probably skews my experience.

One time upgrading workstations, 4 of the 20 Corsair kits were sent for RMA. Those aren’t great odds.

I would guess that soldering them to the board reduces the points of failure, the slots can and do fail. However, I’ve also seen soldered components coming off as the cause of failures, but it is usually a part that gets hot combined with a design flaw.


Does it mean I can buy chips that are on the boards and solder them if they go bad?

It sounds like repairability means dividing device into smaller not repairable parts and make extra money off of it.

For instance, can I get those replaceable ports on Mouser?

Repairwashing.


Whenever I point out that Apple's "security by obscurity" strategy is a complete failure I get downvotes.

Person suspecting their iPhone has been hacked has no way to check it. Apple only offer cope mechanism in form of "lockdown mode", which likely can be bypassed just as well.

This situation shows that Apple devices are not secure and liability.

They'll likely protect your grandma from getting low effort malware, but if you are a CEO - buy something else.


What do you mean by "security by obscurity"? What's your comparand that doesn't have the same software defects iPhone-targeting CNE is exploiting?

One for instance is that Apple doesn't offer an API for deep system scanning. So if your phone is infected, you have no way of knowing this, because there is no software that can scan it. You cannot trust it.

Or things like Memory Tagging Extension (MTE) Apple has implemented, but they have not released specification and implementation details, so you don't know if it has backdoors.


I don't think you know what security by obscurity is.

> A person suspecting their iPhone has been hacked has no way to check it. Apple only offers a cope mechanism in the form of "lockdown mode", which likely can be bypassed just as well.

In the past, Apple alerted users (journalists, political activists, dissidents) when a "state-level actor" attempted to hack their iPhones [1].

Apparently, the FBI couldn't get past Lockdown Mode: FBI stymied by Apple’s Lockdown Mode after seizing journalist’s iPhone [2]"

And don't forget about Memory Integrity Enforcement (MIE) that debuted on iPhone 17 and iPhone Air [3]:

MIE is described as the industry's first always-on, comprehensive memory safety protection, built on the Enhanced Memory Tagging Extension (EMTE) in synchronous mode, combined with secure typed allocators and tag confidentiality protections.

[1]: https://www.sentinelone.com/blog/so-state-sponsored-attacker...

[2]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/fbi-stymied-by-a...

[3]: https://security.apple.com/blog/memory-integrity-enforcement


Yes, Apple controls who gets alerted about security breach. This means not everyone with compromised phone will get alerted. You are still in the dark.

Maybe they could maybe they couldn't, doesn't mean criminals couldn't.

MIE is opaque - Apple has not disclosed its design - it also means it can contain intentional backdoors and other security holes.

In other words this is just meaningless PR and doesn't change the fact that Apple's security is poor.


Whenever I point out that Apple's "security by obscurity" strategy is a complete failure I get downvotes.

Maybe because you apparently don’t know what “security by obscurity” means? Regardless, what’s your recommendation for “buy something else”?


Not only that, I found 5.2 to be biased in terms of corporations and government. Chats about corruption or any kind of wrong doing turn into 5.2 defending the institution and gaslighting you. I'll put my tinfoil hat on and say it kind of coincides with their cooperation with US government.

That only works if purchasers in the organisation are immune to kickbacks.

If it's not aggressive then quickly laptop will be too hot to touch. For instance, I did tune the fan on my friend's laptop so that it wouldn't be waking up everyone for light browsing, but then it was getting uncomfortably hot. None of such issues on Macs.

I've been saying this for years. GDPR and Cookie Law were created for big corporations to legitimise data trade where before it was grey area. Now they get consent as people blindly click accept and they can make money. It was never about privacy.

If it was about privacy they would simply make all tracking and profiling opt in.

100 percent agreed

Same here. If the had 256GB option I'd pull a trigger. Now I might be looking for alternatives.

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