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Also, I'm curious, can't you solder new memory in the Retina macs?

I'm not sure how hard it would be to un-solder the memory and solder new memory in; the iFixit people say "As in the MacBook Air, the RAM is soldered to the logic board. Max out at 16GB now, or forever hold your peace—you can't upgrade.", which seems to suggest that unless you're cleverer than the iFixit folks, the answer to your question may be "no, you can't".

Also, are they sealed how? With glue or something?

No, the Retina MacBooks Pro aren't sealed. They're screwed together with screws with special pentalobe "slots" that require special screwdrivers. The battery, however, is glued in.

Even at that, the Fed and Military would have a real cow under that architecture since they chop up drives are part of their data security process.

So, at least for the Retina MBP, they'd buy some of these fancy screwdrivers (USD 13, assuming it doesn't turn into something like the USD 436 hammer), open up the Retina MBP, yank out the removable SSD, and crush it into little tiny pieces (dunno whether it's easier to chop an SSD into tiny pieces than to chop a disk drive into tiny pieces - I'd guess so, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear that my "common sense" is wrong there).

Even at that, the Fed and Military would have a real cow under that architecture since they chop up drives are part of their data security process.

So, at least for the Retina MBP, they'd buy some of these fancy screwdrivers (USD 13, assuming it doesn't turn into something like the USD 436 hammer), open up the Retina MBP, yank out the removable SSD, and crush it into little tiny pieces (dunno whether it's easier to chop an SSD into tiny pieces than to chop a disk drive into tiny pieces - I'd guess so, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear that my "common sense" is wrong there).

Nobodies going to make a constructive comment, it's all going to be complaints about wanting to upgrade whatever they want, or how stupid apple is.
Meanwhile, ifixit has a full breakdown of how to replace the battery. http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook-Pro-with-Retina-Display-Teardown/9462/1#.T-EFA7VfE4m

Sure, it's not a 9 volt duracell.

This is not a winning move for Apple.

It's unusual to perform a major upgrade on a modern laptop, but it's not unusual to want to repair it or to extract the hard disk from it if the rest of the machine dies - and I mean without smashing the case into little bits to do it.

The machine in question doesn't have a "hard disk" in the sense of spinning rust-coated platters, but it does have a removable SSD. Opening it up is possible - the whole box is not sealed - but it requires a Special Magical Screwdriver, a version of which the iFixit people are claiming to offer. Hopefully Apple won't go after them....

It very much is the way things are going to be done and it turns out, people like it. The experiment was first tried with the MacBook Air and people bought it without hesitation. Had the Air been a flop this wouldn't be happening.

Or put another way, I've never met someone that "upgraded" their laptop after 2 years anyway. They hand it down or put it to work in the corner of the room, but they aren't upgraded. Whether it is a Dell, Mac, or Thinkpad. I put more ram in mine after 3, but I think I"m by far the exception. The most upgrades laptops probably ever received was in that period of time when you could replace the old hdd with ssd and get a huge bump. Now we're falling out of that even as laptops come stock with ssd.

Besides memory and HDs; how many laptops are truly upgradeable, anyway?

And from the looks of things, it looks like the SSD will be upgradeable, at least at some point. The memory is another story; so get as much as you can when you buy. But isn't that de regeur with most computer purchases, especially laptops?

I don't know why people seem to think the iDevice batteries are hard to replace

History. ifixit's instructions for the original iPhone are illustrative: "Getting the iPhone open is a challenging feat, so don't get discouraged. Take a deep breath and make sure you have plenty of time to get the job done." The competition required just sliding a cover and pulling out the battery, which takes five seconds, tops.

But, it's gotten easier. Three or four screws (two on the outside, one or two on the inside) and you're done. Of course, they now use "penalobe" screws, which you usually have to replace because they strip so easily.

The point remains that Apple actively tries to prevent users from replacing the battery. This has nothing to do with making the battery bigger (which, at best, is a pleasant side effect).

Wearable computers simply aren't happening. What, your password is in your other pants? About the only rational possibility for them would be some sort of hilariously terrible glasses-equivalent. While that'd make DBZ geeks happy (WHAT DOES THE SCOUTER SAY?!?!?), such an interface would be a disaster from the usability - not to mention, sanity - standpoint.

This.

Just look at how poorly bluetooth does.

Bluetooth headsets have been around for what, at least 10 years now, long before phones were smart, and I still rarely see someone using a bluetooth headset, most people are still holding the phone to their ear, even at times when they shouldn't be like while driving. And at less than $20 they're not expensive, they're just not popular.

So they claim we're all going to have wearable computers, any day now, when they can't even get the average person to use a $20 bluetooth headset? Really?

And let's not even mention that more than half of a smartphone's size is due to the battery to run it. So where does that large battery go on wearable computers? Or are we all going to have to suffer with a ~2 hr battery life?

This google team is so out of touch with reality it's not even funny. Will this technology be available to average consumers someday? Sure. Will it "look unusual and awkward when we view someone holding an object in their hand and looking down at it (in three to five years)"? No.

Just don't plan on upgrading if you get a laptop.

Captcha: landfill

Patent? iFixit can't find any patents on it.

http://meta.ifixit.com/Answers/View/1305/Is+the+new+Pentalobe+screw+licensed+or+legally+protected+by+Apple

And wiki has a nice list of screw drives
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_screw_drives

the slight hassle (have to find screwdriver!)

Just wait until he finds out that it's a proprietary screwdriver that requires yet more money...

The Slashdot article has a typo: .org should be .com

I was hoping I could get the non-retina version and swap out the hard drive for a slightly more reasonably priced SSD, but it looks like that won't work.

I couldn't find any available servers to fill your request.

Wait a few seconds and try again, or call us if the problem persists.

sales@iFixit.com | 1-866-61-FIXIT

http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/HP-Z1-Teardown/8840/1 My only concern would be cooking oils and fat ruining the touch screen.

Except for the fact that it's advertised right on the package that in Australia, only 3G speeds will be available. The information is listed on the outside of the box above the model number according to iFixit:

http://guide-images.ifixit.net/igi/Kdi1XOouIp1VDAoN.medium
http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPad-3-4G-Teardown/8277/1

Display, Processor, Chips, Battery, ...But hey, It has an Apple logo!

Actually, Apple has been desperately (and it look like, successfully) trying to become non-dependent upon the technology-thieves at Samsung for a couple of years now. The latest iPad is actually stands as a testament as to the lengths that Apple has gone to cut Samsung completely out of their supply chain.

Display: Designed by Apple. iFixit said it was "probably Samsung". No surprises there. Apple has used Samsung "glass" for years. However, leaked information makes it seem more likely that Apple has turned to Sharp for the iPad 3 Retina display.

SoC (what you quaintly and incorrectly called the "Processor") : Designed by Apple, manufactured in Texas by Apple-owned Fab house, Intrinsity. In fact, Apple's Intrinsity is already the second-largest mobile SoC manufacturer, and ison track to pass Intel as the world's largest mobile chip fab.

Chips: Some are Apple-designed. Most are commodity. I think the iFixit teardown (See steps #15, 17 and 19) identified a number of manufacturers; Apple, TI, Broadcom, Fairchild, Qualcomm, Avago,Toshiba, Triquint, Skyworks... Hmmm. Let's see. What manufacturer's name is MISSING...?

Battery: Apple designed. No one else's battery comes close to size/capacity combination. Manufactured by Simplo Technology, with Dynapak International Technology as Apple's up-and-coming "preferred" source.

But don't let facts disturb your delusions...

http://ifixit.org/1843/new-ipad-teardown/

Vid : http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPad-3-4G-Teardown/8277/1

(I should also disclaim - I've been an Apple fanboi since a blended family and the addition of a fully loaded Apple IIc made our IIe (later 'enhanced' with the 65c02 / rom upgrade) redundant and a permanent fixture in my childhood bedroom. Then the IIgs, Performa 550 (later motherboard-swapped to a 68LC040 575), PowerBook 180, PowerBook 5300/100. Then a long hiatus, during the Dark Times. During the Empire. Windows NT 4 and 95/98, various Linux distributions (generally Slackware), on hand-cobbled x86 hardware. a VAIO PCG-Z505R dual-booting 98SE and RedHat 6.1. A couple of Suns (SPARCstation 4, Ultra 1/143, Ultra 10/440) and a NextStation mono, for good measure. Eventually, back to Apple, about the time Jaguar made the iBook G3/600 a viable daily driver.)

Today, I'm about as Mac-centric as you can get. Finally swapped my camera less BlackBerry 9650 for an iPhone 4S (though I keep the BB around for those places where cameras are verboten, just like I still have ThinkPad X40 for those times I can't lug my MacBook Air). iPad. Apple TV. MacBook (C2D/2.0), MacBook Pro (C2D/2.16), and MacBook Air (C2D/1.86). At the office I have a Mac mini (C2D/2.4). Etc.

The main reason (besides being a UNIX hack from way back, but needing to use Office and Acrobat Pro on a daily basis)? Design. These things are slickly sick in their design. IBM/Lenovo come close, but nothing quite touches Apple.

Samsung, by comparison... A couple of years ago, when I was still lugging a PalmOS device everywhere and smartphones were just on the horizon, I carried a Samsung SPH-A500. ('3G'?!) http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Repairing-Samsung-SPH-A500-Speaker/2693/1 Note the display -- it's off-center! By design! I know I'm a little OCD, but, symmetry counts...

So, just because you refuse to even take the time to google for "ipad battery replacement" that means that it's not possible? Suuuure....

Apple is one of the only companies to have increased production over the past few years, Macs have steadily been gaining market share yet compared to the runaway success of the iPad, it Mac market share seems almost to be standing still & Apple now sells more iPads than they do Macs.

http://www.ifixit.com/blog/2011/05/17/unveiled-audience-powers-iphone-4s-impressive-noise-cancellation/

There's been an Audience chip included in the iPhone 4 since June 2010. When iFixit tore down the iPhone 4S and noticed the chip wasn't there, it was assumed that the chip was either integrated into the A5 design or that Apple opted to do noise-cancellation without the need of an Audience chip.

It's true that the A4 chip doesn't have an Audience subprocessor in it but it doesn't mean that the iPhone 4 doesn't have the chip included somewhere else on its motherboard. The conclusion that the iPhone 4 can't do Siri is absolute garbage. The conclusion that the iPhone 4 can't do Siri technically because of this kind audio subprocessor is not being included in the iPhone 4's design needs to have their head examined and start doing some research. This entire thing is hogwash.

I mean, the trackpad is not a single piece, the keyboard looks nothing like a macbooks, the colors are all wrong, the plastic casing is all wrong, etc.

Huh? It certainly looks like a MacBook Pro 13. For the most part the MacBook Pro hasn't changed much since 2009 Other than the Samsung trackpad having buttons and the Apple trackpad not having buttons, I don't see how you can can say they look nothing alike.

I just posted above about the volatile nature of lithium polymer batteries, a poor choice for consumer electronics.

Perhaps that's why the iPhone battery is Lithium Ion

Although, from TFA: "The Kindle Fire's 512MB of RAM does not provide enough room to play a game app while reading a magazine or running another app, he said. Its 8G bytes of storage is not enough to hold media for those situations where the user is not connected to the Internet."

Excuse me, what?! The iPad (which I have and use daily) has 256MB RAM (http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPad-Teardown/2183/1); the iPad 2 has 512MB RAM (http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPad-2-Wi-Fi-Teardown/5071/1). Both of those devices can "play a game app while reading a magazine or running another app." Likewise, I have a rooted Nook Color with an 8GB SD Card and it contains more than enough media for those times when I don't have a WiFi signal; hours upon hours of video, tons of books and other documents, etc (everything from lightweight ePubs to fairly dense scanned PDFs). My 16GB iPad isn't half filled and I've had it almost a year. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for 'better specs,' but the attacks on the Kindle Fire appear unfounded in reality. Hyperbole at best...

Although, from TFA: "The Kindle Fire's 512MB of RAM does not provide enough room to play a game app while reading a magazine or running another app, he said. Its 8G bytes of storage is not enough to hold media for those situations where the user is not connected to the Internet."

Excuse me, what?! The iPad (which I have and use daily) has 256MB RAM (http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPad-Teardown/2183/1); the iPad 2 has 512MB RAM (http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPad-2-Wi-Fi-Teardown/5071/1). Both of those devices can "play a game app while reading a magazine or running another app." Likewise, I have a rooted Nook Color with an 8GB SD Card and it contains more than enough media for those times when I don't have a WiFi signal; hours upon hours of video, tons of books and other documents, etc (everything from lightweight ePubs to fairly dense scanned PDFs). My 16GB iPad isn't half filled and I've had it almost a year. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for 'better specs,' but the attacks on the Kindle Fire appear unfounded in reality. Hyperbole at best...

The first thing I thought about after skimming the article is, "what about all the hackers making a dime these days." It seems that folks like Lady Ada and some of the folks over at iFixit are making a decent shot of it.

It is another face of the same coin. When everyone (well, ... many a guy/gal) is doing creative work themselves just for fun of it, then good business is selling them the means to do it and ideas to inspire them. So the answer to the lament for creative class is: "Sell your knowledge, not your work. Teach and consult aspiring creative amateurs for a fee."

The first thing I thought about after skimming the article is, "what about all the hackers making a dime these days." It seems that folks like Lady Ada and some of the folks over at iFixit are making a decent shot of it. I have no idea what their finances are, but their sites and offerings continue to grow. It looks to me like they are making some decent and honest money based off of the industry of others.

Jonathan Coulton of Code_Monkey fame is doing alright. I heard a pice on NPR about him recently. He's making a living writing fun songs and distributing them himself.

Obviously not everyone who gets into the on-line creative business is going to make a fortune, but it looks like there's plenty of niches that aren't all occupied.

Batteries do have an expiry date and Apple charges a quite bit more than $20 for a new battery, which means that you are not most people. Most people will either pay the (what I consider to be gouging) price for a new battery or decide to upgrade. Planned obsolescence is by no means a new concept, but Apple has certainly embraced it

Well both you and the poster are correct. The current A4 and A5 are stacked as other many other package on package chips. However, normally the memory is stacked on the CPU. In the case of the A4 and A5 the L2 cache is stacked on the ARM cores. The CPUs are not stacked probably for the heat problems that you mention.

whenever i have needed to change the battery on my phone, i just took it to the shop where they sell batteries and they change it for me. i neer have to do it myself. is this not possible with iphones? i doubt it.

See, you almost seemed human there, trying to improve your information. But with the last line, 'I doubt it', you prove that you are one of those subspecies of nerds, the weasly dipshit, who was not wedgied anywhere near enough while growing up.

FYI, if you in any way should belong on a site that is 'news for nerds', replacing a battery on any iPhone or iPod touch should be a no brainer. The current iPhone requires only a few steps for battery replacement. Remove screws, open case, remove another screw, remove battery. I understand that this highly complicated and technical procedure probably requires a chipfab clean room, super sensitive instruments, and years of training, but I bet one, maybe two people on this site (and at your mall battery kiosk) could figure it out.

Should I have have need to replace the battery in my phone, I'll video my 10yo kid doing it and then post it on YouTube for your benefit.

Hot swap HDDS -at least the mac pro has easy to get to HDD bays

The minis these days make it very easy to get to HDD and RAM. You just unscrew a large cap on the bottom.

Nope, gotta remove the logic board to get the HDD out of there. Nice try though.

http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Mac-Mini-Mid-2011-Teardown/6131/1 - step 6, not even half-way down page 1, and the hard drive is already out - and place for a second. Gee, not even a nice try.

The most recent Mini you can get the HDD out without pulling the logic board - you need to remove the WLAN antenna but thats it - have a look here for a teardown of the newly released model: http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Mac-Mini-Mid-2011-Teardown/6131/1

It's actually not that terribly difficult to replace the "non-replaceable" batteries in the unibody MacBook Pros.

Electronics can survive literally being shot out of a canon. A little-known secret is that you have to do practically nothing to harden modern electronics against high g-forces. It's not that hard - since they're extremely lightweight with no moving parts, COTS electronics can usually survive in excess of a hundred g. If the circuit board didn't flex enough to snap, I would expect any piece of consumer electronics this small to survive a fall at terminal velocity.

If by "expensive" you mean a $0.15 transistor to keep the signal level stable at the remote end, then yes.

Here, have a dose of reality, it's on me.

And for those that would rather skip the nerd porn, this sums it up nicely:

We found two Gennum GN2033 chips in the connector, one on each side. They were flanked by other, much smaller chips that surely added to the cableâ(TM)s cost: two chips labeled S6A 1JG on one side, and chips labeled 1102F SS8370 and 131 3S on the other. Of course, there were tons of little resistors (providing impedance as needed) all around the larger chips.

If I'm ever married to someone who doesn't have any moral or ethical problems with putting a GPS tracker on my vehicle just to get dirt on me, and they want a divorce .. they can have it with my blessings.

Not that they're hard to find or disable if you know what you're looking for. (Or if you, say, "accidentally" lose it on the highway somewhere.) (And it's not like we need that many excuses to crawl under our vehicles looking for interesting things to see.. ;)

We will see how this works. The Apple method has been to provide a reliable and high speed external bus so users could hook anything up essentially plug and play. This was back to the SCSI days. Those cable were more reliable than these. Though the move to USB certainly reduced costs, it was not as elegant as the FIrewire. It will be a while for current users to upgrade to thunderbolt. Hopefully by that time we will see other manufacturers.

You do know that the iPhone 4 has screws to allow you to remove the back? Or are you just trolling? Checkout the fourth picture in this teardown article. The battery is on a proper connector, so can be easily replaced by a reasonable competent end user.

Uhh, not really, no. http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone-4-Teardown/3130/1

Apple devices are very densely packed: they're the ones who are pushing for this, so other "phones" don't matter -- its not like they're pushing to mandate everyone use these.

Yeah, the Micro SIM is pretty small: its getting small enough that it might be a pain for some people to handle if it gets smaller. But Apple doesn't care -- and not for absurd paranoid rantings about this being a lock-in attempt (seriously? This would be the lamest and most pointless strategy to go about that) -- but because MOST people don't really care about the hot-swapability of a SIM card-- it won't stop people from buying the phones for the most part. If they could reduce that tiny space by 20%, or even 50%, they could maybe fit in a whole new sensor -- or another chip, or more battery room. Who knows what? But it'd open the possibility for them to grow the features and capability even more... which WILL sell phones.

They want EVERYTHING to get smaller. The iPhone will never get any bigger, and I doubt it'll get much smaller, but the stuff inside will continue to shrink -- except for the battery -- until the laws of physics put a stop to it, and Apple will keep cramming the shell as absolutely full as they can figure out how.

Every little bit counts.

besides controllers via blu-tooth would be piss easy to support with a firmware upgrade.

i reckon an appleTV style box for say 300 dollars with ipad 2 hardware would be well within the ballpark given that it won't need gps, 3g, gyroscope, touch screen, etc.

There's a HUGE developer base currently writing for IOS who will be able to do some pretty interesting things with more powerful hardware. to develop for a console has previously required learning a new API/toolkit, etc. IOS is already familiar.

This may be the real reason behind the AppleTV 2. Look at it so far - it plays media, yet is capable of running apps (it's iOS under there, after all) and can be jailbroken all the same.

It's WiFi module does Bluetooth as well.

It's quite well on its way to being a cheap console box - $99 plus $50 for a controller, and the App Store. Apple's approval process is far less draconian than Microsoft/Nintendo/Sony, and their development requirements are far lower than those three as well.

Apple may have inadvertently re-entered the console market. Perhaps that's something for iOS 5. Maybe even unified gaming (play on your iPhone/iPad or AppleTV). Or control your AppleTV game with your iPhone/iPad (lots of situations where you want to do things without letting everyone else playing on the couch know what you're doing - e.g., sports games and plays).

The only thing strange is that people bought this bullshit of an excuse given that the iPhone 4's camera comes in a fully self contained unit and couldn't give a shit what colour the glass it painted.

I'm sure that's what the Apple engineers thought too when they were designing things. Hence the plan to release both colored versions at the same time. However once they got actual samples in their hands, surprise. Feel free to get back to us after you scrape the paint off an iPhone's glass and try one for yourself. I'm open to the notion that the problem was something else but your speculation is merely that and does really disprove Apple's official explanation. That the camera is in a fully contained unit seems irrelevant. The lens still seems to be sitting against the interior side of the glass. Ever pick up a plastic clip board and notice how the edges seem to glow from the internally reflected light? Similar stuff could be happening on the glass the lens is looking through.

The only thing strange is that people bought this bullshit of an excuse given that the iPhone 4's camera comes in a fully self contained unit and couldn't give a shit what colour the glass it painted.

Apple's marketing department spurts just as much bullshit as any other, imagine that!

The trouble is, it isn't the cost of connectors that doomed ubiquitous firewire(FW connectors are a little bit more complex than USB ones, FW800 a bit more complex again, but the price difference isn't too drastic); but the fact that including firewire always meant including an additional chip and supporting circuitry. Essentially every chipset, and a wide variety of SoCs and whatnot, ended up supporting at least 1 USB port, often substantially more. Firewire always meant an extra chip.

If thunderbolt ends up embedded in Intel chipsets, its future is likely assured(unless they really run away with using it as a price discrimination feature). If it remains a distinct chip with almost the same die area as an upper midrange discrete mobile Radeon, or one of Intel's platform controller hubs, that sucker is going to remain a premium feature.

If anything, the fact that Intel decided to combine their high speed data link port with displayport could make things trickier: If it were a data-only port, a PCIe 2.0 4x port, quite common on nicer motherboards, would neatly support adding a thunderbolt chip. However, that wouldn't support video-out without some hairy and bandwidth intensive cooperation with the video card. That will make adoption in the desktop and workstation market rather more all-or-nothing: unless we go down the delightful route of having "thunderbolt with video" and "thunderbolt without video; but looks the same", the only way to get it will either be on-motherboard(with potential compatibility headaches on the desktop/workstation segment if you want a discrete video card) or on video card, which will tie the thunderbolt chip to a component that is commonly either omitted entirely or replaced extremely frequently.

It will be interesting to see if it overcomes that; but I would be less than entirely surprised if it ends up as the next firewire.

When iFixit did a tear down of the 2011 MacBook Pro, they found way too much thermal compound applied. I would be willing to bet that this is the primary cause of the crashes. See step 10 from their teardown guide: http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook-Pro-15-Inch-Unibody-Early-2011-Teardown/4990/2

http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPad-2-Wi-Fi-Teardown/5071/1

Stellar job as usual, editors, allowing someone to post a shitty blog link instead of the real article.

Why the main article this summary is about is not linked is beyond me...

http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPad-2-Wi-Fi-Teardown/5071/1

Here's a link to the original article with teardown pictures. Beware blatant product placement of ifixit tools.

Looks like Apple wasn't happy enough putting proprietary tamper-resistant fasteners on this device though, the iPad 2 is glued together.

Wow! Way to drink the kool aid!

As for better specifications. Which particular goalpost did you want to set and then move?

As for the trackpad. FUCK TRACKPADS. They're only marginally useful in the absence of a mouse. Trying to turn it into some huge selling point highlights how simply pathetic your argument is.

As for "better specifications and build quality".

Browse out here: http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook-Pro-15-Inch-Unibody-Early-2011-Teardown/4990/1

Then tell me about how great Apple's build quality is. It's simply another machine that's built in a sweatshop by badly abused wage slaves.

Then you'll start arguing "well none of them run MacOS, therefore they lose by default". I've heard it all from you refugees from the RDF before.

In short, your idea of what constitutes "better" is vastly different from mine.

And please don't try throwing the bullshit "average user" argument either. Because that's just an attempt to co-opt a nebulous non-class of users for who Macs may or may not be an appropriate purchase.

After a year or 2 your Ipad2 is going to have a battery life of an hour or two and you're not going to be able to replace the battery. Throw-away society I guess.

21 steps to battery replacement. Actually not bad. My 1st gen Mac Mini hard drive upgrade was something like 43 steps. And unlike the ipods, the ipad doesn't require soldering.

http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Repair/Installing-iPad-Wi-Fi-Battery-Replacement/2198/1

If you refuse to do it, thats OK, give me your "throw away" device with a dead battery, I'll replace the battery and either use it myself or sell it / give it away.

Apple hardware is generally superior to other consumer devices. The batteries do tend to last quite awhile. A year or two, only if you drain and charge the battery daily.

Sorry, I see what you're getting at. I'm not English so forgive the semantic interpretation I intended for the word 'marvel'.

I meant of course to compare it to current and recent laptop computers, not monumental construction in limestone.

For example, to compare to something new from another manufacturer like http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Motorola-Xoom-Teardown/4989/1

Good to hear - the one I repaired was an A1212 - instructions here. Not much fun.