this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2025
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Of course, having replaceable CPUs on laptops would open up a huge market for people buying new CPUs to install.
My laptop I used through university just a few years ago, an HP Elitebook 840 G3 had a toolless bottom panel that popped off to allow access to the battery, wifi card, m.2, SATA drive, and RAM. I upped to to 16gb RAM and put a m.2 drive in both for cheap and it was a capable computer and still gets used today. Why can't we still do that?
You can still do that, but you typically have to get a chunky "gaming laptop" with SO-DIMM memory.
That, but also, I think that ability to upgrade the GPU is likely more important than the CPU, these days. CPU performance and capabilities aren't changing as quickly as those of the GPU, and there are more non-gaming parallel compute applications coming to the fore. If you want to extend an older computer's longevity by putting a modern component in, I'd think that the GPU would be more critical.
I have an old alienware laptop where you could swap the CPU and GPU on it. It was still trash (the thing died after about 3yrs; idk why I still have it), but it was a cool hidden feature.
Edit: of course, a normal CPU or GPU wouldn't work in it, you needed one that used a different socket than their desktop equivalents and were significantly more expensive. Still a neat feature though.