Digital Home Thoughts: Shuttle Wants To Sell You A Notebook, Piecemeal

"In fact, if this works," the Shuttle rep continued, "it could spark a revolution in laptop upgradability. You drop $2000 on a high-end laptop, and it doesn't matter, because in a year the new laptop platform comes out, and you take it to a shop to upgrade for a few hundred bucks."

Desktops have always held an advantage over laptops owing to their modular design. Need a better graphics card? No problem! Want more internal storage? Here you go! Laptops, notebooks, netbooks, whatever you want to call them, have largely been computers that you leave as is. Sure, there have been some modest attempts at making them upgradable, like being able to swap the CPU, hard drive, or upgrade the memory, but Shuttle appears to be taking the idea to the extreme. In some ways, I like the idea, as it will let you do incremental upgrades on your laptop, and their design appears to be not too bulky, at least compared to other largish notebooks. But of course, there is a but! Over time, I have found that because of the infrastructure change that seems to happen every couple of years, I tend to buy new computers, instead of upgrade my existing one. For example, switching from a Core 2 Duo system to a Core i7 would also require a new CPU, memory and motherboard. If I go that far, I might as well get a new baby!