Maybe in the late 90s and early 2000s. These days hardware from over a decade ago works fine. I am typing this comment on a 2011 Dell E6410. Install Debian / Arch Linux and the machine is surprisingly capable. Just running HTOP I am using 2.5G of ram (out of 8GB) and the CPU is at 2%.

TBH, I have a Ryzen 5950X based tower and while it is faster than my previous desktop which was a i7 4970K (or whatever it is), the previous machine would be fine tbh. I am not even sure why I upgraded tbh.

I guess its a byproduct of a faster moving curve with improved technology. 20 years ago you didn't need to replace the entire platform for at least 10 years.

If there's an ability to upgrade my GPU 3 years in but I can't, then yes. It's artificial. We just got way too comfortable with the mentality of throwing out everything and getting new cheap tech overtime.

I guess the one thing AI is doing that's good for this scene will be to make people value what they have more.

I'm pretty sure part of the reason of integrating everything on the board has some nefarious reasons, at least on Laptop's. Louis Rossman talked about a design flaw in Apple Macbooks where if the SSD fails, in my cases, your system will fail to power up because the mainboard is designed to fail when the SSD fails.(If I am interpreting that correctly)[0]. Remember this flaw is in the Macbooks where the SSD's are soldiered into the board. IMHO there are ways to design integrated hardware in such a way where failures minimize damage and I think many companies decide its not in there best interest to design hardware to prevent that. IMHO this is done in bad faith.

[0}: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qbrLiGY4Cg

I’m in the same boat as your partner except that I generally max the RAM in my laptop when buying it.

The thing is it would probably be the same issue with a Framework or any other brand of laptop as they all have some final limit on RAM or GPU RAM.

If you upgrade the GPU or motherboard you have to ask what will happen to the old one. You can reuse some of them but most probably will just be e-waste.

There’s a chance when upgrading a whole laptop that the old one will a new use somewhere.