You can still do that, at least clevo had a laptop that took am4 cpus (so you can stick a 100+w 16 core in there if you wanted to) but you do get a desktop cpu. Hell the beefier amd laptop cpus are straight up just the desktop ones with slightly different profiles. This however comes at a cost not everyone is willing to pay, mostly bulk and low load power efficiency.
Id love to have an in between, something the size of an x260 but filled with battery and heatsinks instead of the old mainboard. And edge to edge display of course XD.
Unfortunately, one thing is soldering a tiny BGA, another is soldering a full CPU, it is a huge component that needs a specialized SMD rework station and great skills to correctly solder the thousands of pads/balls.
Most affordable SMD rework stations have a head that is too small to heat up (or even hold) the whole CPU. Another way you could go is a full board reflow but it will shorten your components’ life (there is a recommended maximum number of reflows for sensitive components) and that needs either specialized equipment or a janky diy oven (even though I wouldn’t reccomend it for CPU solder jobs hahaha)
Likely the price to swap a mobile soldered CPU is higher than buying a new motherboard.
Yeah I’ve watched BGA CPU/GPU reworkings and it’s a real skill to do. Lots of practice and attention to detail.
Again this is fanciful nonsense to ask for this type of thing. We won’t see socketed mobile cpus ever again unless someone like the EU mandates it as an option or for all.
How’s the repairability of board level repairs if other components, not the CPU itself, fail, compared to other laptops? Since it’s much more economical and eco friendly to repair said components compared to replacing the whole motherboard
I think (I’m not someone who has performed any board level repairs, just parroting what I’ve heard) that from a physical standpoint the board itself isn’t meaningfully easier to repair (although some laptops have memory/storage soldered to the board so this is more repairable than those laptop).
The big difference is that Framework has done a lot more in terms of releasing schematics, which helps a lot with the process of determining what part of the board needs to be repaired and how to repair it. They haven’t publicly released complete schematics (some of the components on the boards are from companies that want to protect their IP by not allowing schematics showing those components to be published so they prevent Framework from doing so), however they have released detailed schematics to repair shops (that sign agreements to not share stuff) as well as some public schematics with some details redacted.
Ironically it’s probably easier to get the schematics for other laptops (just floating around on the internet for the more common models like thinkpads and latitudes or paying a couple bucks to some sketchy sites for the less common ones) than this one even if you aren’t supposed to get those at all but you can get them if you are a repair shop and sign an nda and stuff. Honestly not a big fan of that situation but I can somewhat understand it as framework didn’t design the board themselves. I do hope they improve that situation in the future.
From what I can see without the schematic there are very few “unobtanium” parts on the board and the chips that need firmware have that at least technically available.