lapisnev

Don't squeeze me, I fart

Things that make you go 🤌. Weird computer stuff. Artist and general creative type. Occasionally funny. Gentoo on main. I play rhythm games!

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Recently I got a new (to me) laptop for a project, a Dell Inspiron 3593. The project itself is not important right now; I want to talk about how this laptop's design has been bizarrely cost-optimized in a way I hadn't thought about before.

I am absolutely baffled by some of the decisions made inside this laptop that only Dell could pull off through sheer economy of scale. (And maybe HP or Lenovo, but I don't think they have the audacity. Please prove me wrong for our mutual entertainment, I'm genuinely asking!)


M.2 SSD size support is kinda dumb

Only M.2 drives of the 2230 and 2280 form factors are supported. 2230 drives require a Thermal Shield (a metal bracket) that the SSD is screwed into, which adapts it to 2280 size. This is not exactly the same thing as an extension bracket like you might be familiar with from mini-PCIe wireless cards, it has a hook on one side and a captive screw on an arm on the other that help mechanically stabilize the SSD to keep it from breaking in the event of dropping the laptop. It's also a piece of metal that can sink heat, which is good because the SSD lives way in the corner of the laptop in the middle of a bunch of plastic that isn't helping.

2280 drives have a completely different Thermal Shield that doesn't support fitting a 2230 drive at all. It's almost identical to the 2230 one but doesn't have the screw thread to attach to the 2230 drive..?

Hmm. I wonder if you could have designed a single Thermal Shield that fits both sizes. More importantly, what am I supposed to do as the second owner of a corporate machine, where computers that need bespoke drive mounting hardware basically never include said drive mounting hardware because it would waste too much company time to shuck the drive? Fuck me, I guess. Speaking of which...

The Fuck You Tab

Only single-sided M.2s are supported due to what I am going to start calling The Fuck You Tab. There's plenty of chassis space to fit a dual-sided M.2, but there's just enough extra PCB in front of the slim M.2 connector that it's impossible to fit dual-sided models. You have to source a single-sided SSD. Of course my spares are all double-sided and I gotta go buy one.

I have seen ONE laptop with the M.2 connector right at the edge of the board that doesn't pretentiously stop you from using a dual-sided drive. It's a Samsung. I'm actually very surprised Samsung got this part right because that laptop is... built like a Samsung phone. I might talk about it another time.

Why does this 2020 laptop even have a DVD drive?

This laptop comes in two variants, one with an internal DVD drive and one without. Weird, but OK.

This laptop has an extra USB port and an SD card reader towards the front of the machine on the same side as the DVD drive. The version of the laptop without a DVD drive has the same extra ports, but... they moved? They're in the middle of where the DVD drive would have gone.

It gets weirder. The non-DVD drive model has a completely different bottom cover with a bunch of bracing molded into it to take up the empty space, never mind the alternate location for the extra ports. Ergo, there's no chance of fitting a DVD drive after the fact. If you want to do that then you'd need to upgrade the bottom cover and relocate the ports that moved for some God forsaken reason.

If you look inside the non-DVD model, there's actually two locations to mount the daughterboard with the extra ports on it. The first is the intended standoffs, for the location towards the front of the laptop, that are molded into the top deck, with the threaded inserts placed but left unused. The second is... some weird bracket that screws in where the DVD drive would have gone.

It's also almost-but-not-quite the same daughterboard as the DVD version. The clock battery (Oh, by the way, you read that right, the RTC battery is on this stupid daugherboard with two ports on it in the middle of buttfuck nowhere inside the laptop) is heatshrinked and plugged in with a little cable and connector, whereas the DVD model has a traditional battery holder mounted to the board.

Why are there two different daughterboards? They're almost identical. Is the CR2032 battery holder really that much more expensive..? Also, why were the ports moved right there in particular?

The motherboard

Shockingly, the motherboard itself is identical between both versions of the chassis. But with the number of parts that are bespoke customized for this one SKU because it doesn't ship with a DVD drive, that actually looks really bizarre all of a sudden.

This laptop's design is a few weird decisions away from having been possible to pop out a blank and install a DVD drive assembly. It probably wouldn't have sold very well, but what are you supposed to do with this thing if you find out you actually needed it? Replace the entire laptop? And if Dell wanted to sell a version with a third internal HDD, there would be a third different bottom cover, surely.

There's an entire extra SATA port that's inaccessible to tinkerers after resale that was intended to communicate with a DVD drive you can't install because the laptop is not designed to be user-serviceable in a way that grants it an obvious second life. You need another little daughterboard to adapt to a regular mini-SATA port for the DVD drive, which is not included on the version that cannot fit a DVD drive.

Related aside: Buying Screws

This laptop came to me missing all of the non-captive bottom cover screws. The bottom cover is a structural element, because of course, so I need to replace them.

It's cheaper to buy the missing screws I need as a bag of 50 M2.5x7 screws than to search for the screw set for a specific machine, where I would pay twice as much for the privilege of no more or less than precisely the set of screws needed. Buying the bag of generic screws worked for me because I'm a Dell Girl and I'm definitely going to use them if I keep collecting more beat-up laptops, but holy shit, what if I was just getting started in computer hobby and I really don't know what I'm supposed to do with a bag of 44 screws?

Curveball!

There is another model of laptop, the Dell G3 series, that reuses a bunch of Inspiron parts to build a Gaming Laptop with RGB and nVidia. (Ech.)

Wouldn't you know it, the weird port placement on the non-DVD Inspiron I foreshadowed earlier has an explanation after all! It lines up precisely with the ports on the G3. This laptop has a very different motherboard, which takes up the entire width of the laptop to fit that extra GPU and more cooling. The ports aren't on a weird daughterboard in this machine, they're integrated right onto the motherboard, and this means that... actually it's the DVD version of the Inspiron that's the one with the ports in a weird place?

The thing is, the G3... really doesn't reuse many parts. It's the same shape of laptop but almost entirely different on the inside. And this laptop probably also needs another different bottom panel on account of the larger board and wouldn't reuse the one from the non-DVD Inspiron.

So if I'm reading between the lines right...

It's like Dell went mad with power and hyper-optimized their economy of scale to reuse as many little sub-assemblies and brackets and trinkets and widgets as possible to save fractions of a penny because when you're moving hundreds of billions of dollars of product then those savings start adding up to several millions and you lose focus on having any kind of internal consistency in the individual SKUs in the product line.

It's how you end up with two almost identical laptops, where the only practical difference is the presence of a DVD drive, and they share absolutely none of the parts that would enable you to change one into the other easily. And this is Fine and the Dell execs were OK with it because it was cheaper than putting a blank in the same shell to not ship a DVD drive.

I feel like I just accidentally learned something about economics without actively looking for an economics lesson, just by working backwards from the end result. Huge corporations are working at an unimaginable scale that's divorced from the reality of one end-user trying to reuse the damn thing after end-of-life.

laptop's still an 8/10 tho, very nice, AVX512 was a pleasant surprise


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in reply to @lapisnev's post:

The sad thing is, it probably wasn't cheaper. This probably happened because stuff got designed and tooling made, then an executive had a demand that wasn't considered, so they had to do a bunch of additional shit to satisfy that but didn't want to waste the SKU that was already tooled up for

This sort of shit happens constantly. you should see the amount of duplicated effort and pointless non-compatibility in the car industry

I have a HP laptop from 2020 that is very much a similar state of affairs, a whole mess of unnecessary daughterboards, an M.2 slot you cannot populate with a dual sided module, and inexplicably it came with a mechanical HDD as its only storage medium. In 2020! It's all the worst manufacturing decisions that probably save them pennies per unit and just mean that when the device breaks, it's already basically obsolete so you might as well let it fulfill its destiny as ewaste.

I was running a mechanical drive by my own choice in that Samsung laptop I mention in the essay. Oh my God it slogged so badly. I have a couple of Electron apps I want running in the tray at all times and those alone were responsible for making the laptop thrash for two minutes on boot instead of maybe 20 seconds if they didn't start automatically. I got it an SSD, and I'm still mad that I absolutely needed it to compensate for Electron, but it's a completely different machine with faster storage.