When someone says sbc, they are talking about single board computers such as a raspberry pi. It is a single pcb with everything required onboard. Alot of these SBC's have SOC's aswell. A SOC is a system on a chip. This means that the cpu, ram, io, and everything besides the interfaces and supporting chips (such as the wifi card) are all embedded onto one chip. Super convenient. I love SBC's. Im a big fan of raspberry pi's. I also use Arduino's when i teach classes from time to time. I love these devices because of how cheap they are and how much freedom they permit me to have. The GPIO lets me interface with anything, the small size makes it great for embedded use cases. the small power requirements enable me to have even more options of where to deploy. Lots of freedom. wait. Lets take a look at a SBC. no, not those SBC. im talking about a single board computer. Fuck i hate those things. Chromebooks, most macbooks, budget laptops, mini desktops, thin-clients.... raspberry pi's? They are some of the most irreparable e-waste possible. Everything is soldered down, everything is designed for 1 use case and wont permit anything else. These devices have the storage, most often emmc, stuck to the pcb, never to be upgraded or replaced when it inevitably fails. The ram, not socketed ofcourse, will never let you expand beyond its value from factory. Im **not** going to talk alot here about the anti-consumer practices with these devices. Go watch lous rossman or salem techsperts if you wana watch something fun. If you would rather read, checkout ifixits info [here](https://www.ifixit.com/about-us) and [here](https://www.ifixit.com/Right-to-Repair) or [repair.org](https://www.repair.org/history/) aswell as basically all of the fsf initiatives [primary ryf](https://ryf.fsf.org/) regarding hardware. So whats the difference between these devices? Simple. How i look at them. This is where some internal conflict ensues. A pi is a cheap device, its just as hard to repair as many of these budget laptops are. Take a look at how to swap the ram from [this](https://www.reddit.com/user/Pi800/submitted/) absolute Chad on reddit. Why is this acceptable but when apple [does it](https://www.devicemag.com/macbook-pro-soldered-ssd-upgrade/) its hated by everyone. Once again, its how i look at it. I see a macbook as mega-corp greed. They know that users wont be able to fix or swap their ram and ssd. they know that this means that most consumers will pay exorbitant prices to have apple "fix" it, or they will just buy the newest model. They claim its for performance and to make the model slim. First off, the performance difference is not that great of difference, and secondly, the slim-ness is only nice when everything is OK and running fine. Peoples opinion changes when they bring it to me to get a fix, and suddenly they wish they had the bulkiest modular laptop from a decade ago. I repair electronics. Its not really part of my business. What i mean is that i dont advertise it at the moment. However if a client of mine ask for suggestions for a new fleet of computers for their employees, my go to is a hp eliete book or lenovo thinkpad. why? because they trust me, and that means when something happens in 2 years, their coming to me to solve it and i dont want to cause problems for future me. I dont serve big companies. Not outta choice, its just they already have a tech consultant. I serve small local businesses. Most of these businesses will have 20 or so employees. What they will not have is money. They come back to me with ideapads, yogas, surfaces, pavilions(laptop version). I will straight up reject to work on it. They suddenly dont think that being slim is a perk when they realize that it means they are stuck with their specs and a repair aint worth it. They go get a quote elsewhere, and suddenly their consumer grade laptop gets recycled and they go buy.... yet another slim consumer grade laptop for all their employees. I myself actually own a few chromebooks. My school was selling about 300 for almost nothing. They ended up selling about 200. the remaining was sent to a recycler. I bought 4 at that time. Cost me about $24 for the lot. These things have 14gb internal emmc. Throw antiX on it, and now you have a computer when your smartphone only, mid 20's, friend ask to borrow a computer because they need to do something other then be on social media all day, can use. run on sentences are fun. Why was i ok with doing this. Well 1, they were prevented from being thrown away at the "recycling" center. And 2 they do have some simple use cases if you understand that they are designed to fail after certain time. I would never buy one new because i know when they fail, there is nothing that I can do. How does this differ from a pi? It dont. They are seen different because of how pi's and other sbc's are marketed towards tinkers. We would all agree a $1300 apple product should be repairable. But when its a $50-$100 pi, its ok. Because its so cheap, and small, its not a big environmental hit when it dies. But, by that logic, a chromebook is the same. its cheap, small, and going to fail and be a pain to repair. Now to be fair, pi's use pretty common parts so if the wifi card dies, or the ram (and linked above) fails, its not hard to find a replacement aslong as you are comfortable with micro soldering. Meanwhile most super budget laptops will use hard to find parts, or parts that dont even get onto the market and are only available by buying an entire duplicate of your model and cannibalizing it for parts. So in this regard a pi is better. Soldering is not something most people want to do, and the price that i will charge is justifiably high when im dealing with a client. Hence the internal conflict. On one hand i love SBC's in their traditional meaning of SBC. meanwhile i hate SBC's which arent called that, but rather thin n cheap laptops. Why are they not called sbc's? because of the battery and screen? Dont kid yourself. Its because we dont want to adjust the way we look at things. We dont want to group our loved microcomputers with literal consumer e-waste. We dont want to realize that we are giving a get out of jail free pass to these amazingly handy machines. We dont want to dirty our view of our electronic toys by affiliating them with universally hated garbage. I know that its not an apples to apples comparison. I know its not possible to fit a dimm slot on a pi zero. I know that to keep the cost down emmc is used rather then putting a sata interface and telling your users to buy a drive. i get all this. still, if its just disregarded with, its so cheap, dont worry about it, then that logic must be applied to budget laptops & chromebooks. There is no way 0% waste can be achieved. Plus even ordering spare parts requires some shipping since we dont have any microcenters or radioshacks near me. If anyone has the mental gymnastics to provide a line of reasoning for how to differ these sbc's from their unofficial sbc counterpart i would be grateful. For now ill keep my heat gun ready.