Hello. Many of the older thinkpads were regarded as being peak for the ability to repair and easily see into them at both the hardware and software levels.
I was wondering, what PC, if any, is similar in this regard? Aside from building your own PC ofc. Any opinions are welcome. Thank you.
To be fair, everything about a Thinkpad is proprietary too. It’s accepted because it’s a laptop.
A lot of things, yes, but not everything.
This is from iFixit:
Lenovo ThinkPad T14 Gen 3 2022 PROS Most repairs are very straightforward and require only basic tools. The keyboard replacement procedure is best in class. CONS Partially soldered memory and I/O ports hinder certain repairs.It scores 7/10 on their repairability meter. Definitely not the best, but far from the worst.
You didn’t say repairability. You were critical of the proprietary parts.
Dell and HP desktops are even easier to repair than home built because of the no-tool clips for parts and custom sized cables. (But in my opinion that ease of repair doesn’t offset the proprietary parts they use.)
In laptops, there aren’t a whole lot of parts that can be standardized. Thinkpads have standard storage (NVMe drives) and half standard RAM (some have soldered or partially soldered RAM). So yeah, they’re fairly standardized. In terms of laptops, so are Dell and HP. But in terms of desktops, where everything can be standard, Dell and HP use a lot of proprietary parts, hence they are the opposite of a Thinkpad in terms of desktop.