Just in time for RAM, SSD, and HDD prices to skyrocket and make personal computers unaffordable.
I guess if you can afford one now, at least you’ll be able to repair it.
When buying a laptop in 2026, you really need to consider how easy it’s going to be to keep it running with parts you’ve scavenged from other road-warriors.
Old off-lease ThinkPads from corporate fleets as always.
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You could buy an anemic one now, and then upgrade the RAM & storage once prices come down.
prices come down.
They will come down after the AI bubble inevitably pops. Maybe not back to where they were before but they will come back down.
Once the bubble pops, assuming it doesn’t take economies with it, none of the product will be compatible with consumer devices. Manufacturing will have to be reoriented back to consumer products, then those parts will need to be manufactured, then the rush of people trying to get the parts will have to pass. THEN maybe prices will come down.
I suspect the datacenters will just pivot and repurposed to rent consumers “cloud compute” and cloud subscription services and continue to fuck the entire consumer market for years to come.
But then again I now hate everything so maybe I’m just pessimistic.
none of the product will be compatible with consumer devices.
…why would it need to be?
I suspect the datacenters will just pivot and repurposed to rent consumers “cloud compute” and cloud subscription services and continue to fuck the entire consumer market for years to come.
I mean they already have been and will continue to be, yes.
…why would it need to be?
It doesn’t need to, but if it were that would be the only reason I’d say prices might drop anytime soon. A glut of used consumer-compatible parts would push prices down. That or maybe if the rising Chinese suppliers manage to ramp up and find a way to enter the western market.
The price is currently high and is rising because resources and manufacturing capacity are limited. Those who own the capacity have found that providing for a small number of companies that are flush with cash and will throw money around just to ensure their competitors don’t gain an advantage is far more lucrative than providing for consumers or businesses that integrate parts into consumer devices. The entire market segment is shifting away from consumer and focusing on datacenter hardware.
The longer this goes on, the further the major players will be from being able to pivot back to consumer products… and there are only major players in the memory and NAND industry. You can’t just form a new memory or NAND company and start manufacturing this stuff. It takes years and a lot of investment to build the facilities and the kind of capacity we’re used to.
Edit: I’ve also seen a number of non-tech folks excited for cheap used datacenter memory and gpus to flood the market after the bubble pops, as if the parts were at all compatible with consumer devices. I wanted to make sure that was not part of your calculation.
but if it were that would be the only reason I’d say prices might drop anytime soon
…how about cratering demand? Basically the opposite of what we have now? That’s not enough?
Oh stop it. Plenty of used computers are perfectly fine. There isn’t a single thing you need done that can’t be done with a 15 year old PC. You don’t need “agentic AI” to generate horse slop in your home, you don’t need terabytes of pirated content you can’t watch anyway, you don’t need video games.
We live in the golden era of thrifting PCs and disconnecting from the slop and nonsense of modern computing.
My apologies! I didn’t realize you were the arbiter of what I do and don’t need. I feel so relieved now that I can just ignore all of the demands on my life and just hand over such authority to some opinionated jackass I met on lemmy.
I mean I never had any issues with ThinkPad repairs ever, I think you still get parts for like real dinosaurs.
hell ya for being able to buy these used as office surplus in 5 or so years
First time I’ve seen CAMM memory in a real product. Pretty cool, but not sure if I prefer it to traditional DIMM slots though.
But the removable ports are a fucking godsend. So sick of a broken port making an entire motherboard unusable.
Honestly the only thing more I can ask for is for the battery to be on the outside of the case (like old school laptops) so you can replace it without opening it which not everyone is comfortable with doing. Otherwise this is really good. The only thing stopping me from buying this laptop is the fact that my current 6 year old Lenovo still works perfectly after I replaced the battery (honestly Thinkpads have always been pretty repairable, this is going above and beyond).
still using many non-standard and proprietary parts though, like most laptops. far from ideal still.
really wish they’d bring this kind of repairability back to their yogas; the upcoming T14s 2-in-1 gen 2 is still as locked down as ever.
the X41T to X230T was peak creative workstation and i’d kill to have something like that with modern internals. or hell, even the P40.
