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Sorry, I didn't properly include the link.

My analysis about how the 802.11n stuff works related to an iPod touch, such as explaining what single-stream 802.11n means as a media server is here at TidBITS. The iFixIt tear down is here.

It might help if the summary contained a link to the original article.

WTF is this link-less entry supposed to be?

Here's the story mentioned above:
http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPod-touch-3rd-Generation/1158/2

I don't know if it's still applicable to the new MacBooks, but on my 3-4 year old G4s, reinstalling the keyboard is a ton of work (I assume the keyboard cable has to be taken out to reprogram it???):
http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Repair/Installing-PowerBook-G4-Aluminum-15-Inch-1-1-5-GHz-Keyboard/223/1

Takes about an hour, less if you're skilled at it. With that much access to the actual machine... this is nothing but a proof of concept, as there are easier ways to do it, imo.

You sound like the guy who needs to look inside the new MacBook Pros and figure out how to put an additional battery in the space for the DVD drive. Make it a nice package deal with an aluminum usb shell for the removed DVD (for most people, a DVD in a shell would be fine because the reality is that most people don't use their DVDs all that much, but most people use their laptop unplugged frequently). It would rock to have 12 or 14 hours of battery life.

Here's an inside shot: http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook-Pro-13-Inch-Unibody/814/1
Take a look at step five for the space.

Now get cracking -- I want a laptop I can use all day unplugged! $175-200 would seem a reasonable price for an extra battery/DVD shell combo package, as long as the shell doesn't look like junk. No blue LEDs please.

Wait, how do you remove the iPhone's battery again ?

Like this (or 1st gen).

Wait, how do you remove the iPhone's battery again ?

Like this (or 1st gen).

If you are wondering what this is, here is a picture and here.
More info here.

Quoting the article,

The most surprising find on the DSi's motherboard was a family of Italian terrorists who leaped out and attacked this writer's cat. These illegal immigrant stowaways had folded themselves in between the main bus and the integrated sound co-processor and had sustained themselves on sunflower seeds while trapped in the plastic casing. Nintendo's spokesperson was unavailable for comment.

I have always warned that Barack "Giuseppe" Obama was in league with Japanese financiers to spirit Italian extremist provocateurs into our nation's heartland. Now what do you nay-sayers say?

If you really spent $400 on a wireless card that everyone else sells for not-$400, then you should probably do a better job of sourcing your parts in the future. (Even the original, 802.11b, hasn't-been-made-in-6-years AirPort isn't more than $200, unless you're either an idiot or not in the US. Even the new N cards, which you can't use in a PowerPC Mac, aren't $400.) There's a ton of parts out there, and a ton of upgradability - moreso than for PCs of similar vintage, I think; you can shove a 1.4GHz G4 in that G4/350 if you want to, and up to 2GB RAM, and for a lot of the parts (memory, hard drive and optical drives), they're the same stuff you'd get for a PC of similar vintage.

I agree. Looking at this picture, there are no "DRM chips" in the remote: http://s2.guide-images.ifixit.com/igi/kFbNaWbE3NBPWbew.large It's probably just a few resistors between the buttons and ground connection to signal which button has been pressed. This is no different to the fact that my Nokia phone, which works as an audio player has a 2.5mm socket rather than a 3.5mm socket. Just like with my phone, it's only a matter of time before attachments become available that have the same set of buttons on a small attachment that then allows connectivity from standard earphones.

...and already someones pulled it to bits

And here's the content in PDF format in case you want to keep it for later reference: http://www.ifixit.com/pdf/guide_660_en.pdf

The summary says the actual content is on iFixit, but the link goes to some useless blog which then links to iFixit.

Link directly to the content, include a via link if you want to reference where you got the link from.

For the record, the proper article URL where the actual content is follows:
http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Repair/Mac-mini-A1283-Terabyte-Drive/660/1

I call BS. Look at the photo from TFA.
The page: http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/First-Look/MacBook-Pro-17-Inch-Unibody/618/2

The actual pic: http://s1.guide-images.ifixit.com/igi/Gf2GPJlfKvbLJLDZ.large

That doesn't look unusual to me. I have difficulty believing that couldn't be made replaceable if they had cared. It might have made it *slightly* larger. Oh noes. Most likely it would have cost more, and damaged Apple's revenue stream.

I call BS. Look at the photo from TFA.
The page: http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/First-Look/MacBook-Pro-17-Inch-Unibody/618/2

The actual pic: http://s1.guide-images.ifixit.com/igi/Gf2GPJlfKvbLJLDZ.large

That doesn't look unusual to me. I have difficulty believing that couldn't be made replaceable if they had cared. It might have made it *slightly* larger. Oh noes. Most likely it would have cost more, and damaged Apple's revenue stream.

this doesn't look like a pancake or a vinyl record or "irregular" at all. this looks like a rectangle that is located in a corner of the case. it is longer than normal for a laptop battery, but it could still be made to be removable if that is what they wanted to do...

Did you even look at the fixit guide? It may be 10 screws (a whole 4 more screws!) to take the back off, but that's hardly a chore -- no prying apart plastic tabs etc. And then the HDD is sitting right there and is pretty easy to replace (2 screws), along with a lot of other things. You're replacing a HDD -- does it really matter if it takes an extra 30 seconds on top of everything else involved? Perhaps the keyboard is another matter, but a small price to pay for a keyboard that doesn't bounce, IMHO. The magsafe connector is also on a separate board -- even though there is less chance of damaging it to begin with.

How about a working link to the tear down instead of a slashdotted page that just links to it anyway.

Well, PC Authority is dead after just 15 minutes.
Why don't they link to the actual disassembly over at iFixit!?

Funny, that size thing really hit home with me when I saw pictures of the latest iPod Touch disassembled; it's crazy that there is an entire *nix based computer on such a tiny circuit board(s): http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/First-Look/iPod/iPod-Touch/Page-6

There's already a 240Gb drive that would fit in the 160Gb Classic housing. Apple's justification/excuse for killing off the thicker model was that not many people were buying it (though if true, it's not clear if they didn't need the storage, didn't like the form factor, or didn't want to pay the rather steep asking price). It's likely that the capacity of the Classic will be dictated by the largest drive that will fit in the slimmer shell of the current 120Gb model, unless or until the hard drive iPods are killed off altogether. There is a market for very high capacity devices (I'm in it!), but it's obviously much smaller than the demand for more compact flash-based players that Apple and everyone else are concentrating on.

That said, Apple seem to have gone out of their way to make both the software (as in the subject of this thread) and the hardware as inaccessible as possible, blocking both interoperability and upgrades/repairs (has anyone tried to replace the 160Gb drive with a 240Gb?). See for example the 25 difficult and potentially damaging steps required just to get at the hard disk in a Classic:

http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPod/iPod-Classic/Hard-Drive/130/4/Page-1

Changing the battery is just as hard. Is it too much to ask for a user-upgradable pocket media player with no software lockdown and a decent interface, which can be opened up with a screwdriver..?

I think that they wanted $0.25 per end-user.

I don't think so. I think they just couldn't fit the firewire chip onto the board.

Look here.

That's pretty packed. Where would they have put it?

More information at ifixit.com with complete tear-aparts as usual:
MacBook: http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/First-Look/Mac/MacBook-Unibody
Pro: http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/First-Look/Mac/MacBook-Pro-Unibody

More information at ifixit.com with complete tear-aparts as usual:
MacBook: http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/First-Look/Mac/MacBook-Unibody
Pro: http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/First-Look/Mac/MacBook-Pro-Unibody

Do it yourself then. If they're not repairing it then you probably don't have any warranty left to void.
http://www.ifixit.com/

$240 for a 15"mbp case bottom.

The newer non-Pro MacBooks are simple enough (as the other replier said), but the MacBook Pro still makes it puzzlingly difficult to replace the hard drive. iFixit's great guide shows how using a phillips screwdriver, a torx screwdriver, and a spudger to get at the hard drive by removing the battery, RAM shield, the entire upper case, and hard drive retaining bracket. I counted 21 phillips crews and 6 torx screws that need to be removed.

It's nice to know that Apple made things easy on at least one of their models, but try replacing the hard drive on an iBook, or even a Mac Book Pro and you won't be quite so ready to dismiss it as trivial. You have to completely remove the plam rest, and on an iBook the bottom of the casing as well. Thirty screws in 6 different sizes (okay I don't know for sure, but lots), and far too many plastic clippy bits later you can finally get your hands on the drive.

See www.ifixit.com/Guide/Mac/ for step by step instructions.

I'm usually down to help friends with their computer issues, but when it comes to upgrading Mac hardware they are on their own. Maybe that's why apple can charge so much for upgrades.

...and those are the people who are getting fleeced because they don't know how to swap out some computer parts.

I'm not sure if the newer macbooks are better, but it was a HUGE pain to replace the hard drives in the old iBooks. I suspect there are quite a few who know how to do it, but would rather pay more for someone else to do it for them.

replace hdd on macbook pro: You were thinking of a macbook pro, not a macbook. I know, I know, its stupid of apple to make two dissimilar models of the same basename, but they did it anyways. SO uh, the "pro" version of the mbp is much harder to replace the hdd than the non-pro. A T6 is an absolute must have tool. I just did this a couple of weeks ago. It was easy for anyone who's ever been inside a laptop before.

Nice idea! I was thinking the opposite: I've got an old mac laptop that I'm thinking of using as a DHCP server for some windows machines that drive some instruments that I don't want on the internet because of the security hassle. (Yeah yeah, I know windows can be made to be safe, but I have neither the time nor the inclination to learn how to do that, macs and linux are easier and I know how to do it already.) Apple makes this easy, I use the wifi connection to the local DHCP server, and then share the connection over the ethernet port to a hub.

Also, I know the submitter already has plenty of tinkering computers lying around, but I have to plug my favorite old laptop shop, ifixit. The reason I like them is because they'll sell you refurbished parts for just about any apple laptop and they have great step by step instructions full of pictures to on how to replace it. I've replaced the logic board on my titanium DVI G4 and am currently working on a powerbook lombard 400 MHz that won't recognize the battery. The nice thing about the lombard is that it's built like a tank and it's got those ports on the side that you can switch modular components out of, which means you can put two batteries in instead of a battery and a CD drive and you get something like 10 hours of battery life. Not too shabby. Also, enlighenment (e17) and debian runs great on it once you turn off the dropshadow and some of the other graphics intensive stuff, and get the wireless working.

I've seen the MacBook Air in person and it is an amazing design. It really is incredible how light it is. That said, it's pricey (not that Apple minds that) and what I really wish they would have made would have been...
- 10 or 11" screen
- 8 or 16 GB solid-state drive--for a secondary machine which WON'T be used for lots of DV capture, storing your whole iTunes library, etc., a small drive is fine
- built-in CF reader, and you could get a big CF card to be used as a TimeMachine volume

In other news, I do have a (non-Pro, non-Air) MacBook and the drive is ridicuously easy to get in and out. (Remove the battery, loosen three captive screws, pull away the L-shaped piece of metal, slide out the drive) and I'd like to experiment with some kind of SSD, either a 'proper' drive or a CF/SD/whatever card in a SATA adapter. Any suggestions on where to start? A newegg search for 'sata ssd' shows an 8 GB unit for $210 and a 16 GB one for $340. Searching for 'sata cf adapter' shows a $40 unit--could I just get one of those and a fast CF card? This page ends with the conclusion "A serious SSD a CompactFlash card is not" but it is from 2000 (but then again, shows as being updated a just a few months ago. I've written to the author.) Any thoughts?

Apple memory is expensive, but having bought the wrong ram for the onboard video when I built my home machine (running Debian), I'm happy to let them bother about finding what ram to use. But, you do know don't you that the memory in apple computers is the same as everywhere else right? That means if you're so inclined you can buy it from newegg or whatever. They even tell you what kind to buy in the instruction manual that comes with the machine.

As for replacing stuff: you're out of you mind if you think that replacing things for powerbooks is difficult (well, maybe the display). This place will sell you just a refurbished part for just about any apple laptop within the last 10 years or so. Not only that, they have free instructions on how to replace the part on the site. I used this myself just a few months ago to replace the logic board in my 2002 Tibook that I beat to hell biking to work with it every day for four years and now it runs like new. Incidentally, adding a hard-drive or additional card to a desktop is trivially easy. You don't even need a screw-driver, I just added a 1 TB drive I bought on newegg to my desktop. (Compare that to pounding on the old dells and the huge number of cuts just to remove the cover.) As for service calls, the applecare work just fine: one phone call and a box shows up at your door the next day, put the computer in the box, a few days later you have your PC back.

If the problem is that the system won't power on, then remove the hard drive.

That's all well and good if you have a Thinkpad (such as my x60, which requires removing one screw), but what if you have an iBook (such as my old 12" G4, which requires removing 41 screws of various types including Torx, prying apart the fragile plastic case, and takes 17 steps to describe)? Geek Squad itself isn't technically capable enough to accomplish that (and especially not the dumbasses at the in-store service desk), let alone a random end-user. So what do you suggest then (and "don't buy a Mac" is not a valid answer, because a reasonable, normal person would already have it before encountering the problem)?

From random pictures of the things being taken apart (iPhone; iPod Touch), it looks like the difference is that the iPhone has two stacked PCBs (one of them for the phone part) where as the iPod just has one big one, plus a much smaller touchscreen controller (which presumable the phone has elsewhere).

It seems like the phone bits do take up some room - SIM slot, GSM chip, amplifier, bluetooth, and misc control circuitry for all that.

(Thanks for making me look, this is fun)

From random pictures of the things being taken apart (iPhone; iPod Touch), it looks like the difference is that the iPhone has two stacked PCBs (one of them for the phone part) where as the iPod just has one big one, plus a much smaller touchscreen controller (which presumable the phone has elsewhere).

It seems like the phone bits do take up some room - SIM slot, GSM chip, amplifier, bluetooth, and misc control circuitry for all that.

(Thanks for making me look, this is fun)

You should look up replacing the hard disk on a 12" iBook G4, it's an hour long job your first time. Here's a great walkthrough: http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Mac/iBook-G4-12-Inch/Hard-Drive-Replacement/83/14/.

A bit of clarification: the drive in a MacBook is super-cinchy to replace: take out the battery, loosen three captive screws, take off the cover, slide out the drive. MacBook Pros (MacBooks Pro?), on the other hand, are a huge PITA--you've practically got to take apart the whole machine. Awesome guides for these and many other Macs are here. (I have no connection to them, I'm just a happy reader.)

From the website you sent, here are the instructions, which back up what I've stated:
http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Mac/MacBook-Core-Duo/Hard-Drive-Replacement/86/5/Page-1/Battery

You're probably thinking of a macbook pro, which I agree has a PITA installation procedure (hence it's definitely worth the $160 to replace the drive, even for geeks like us). The original author said that he had a 'black macbook', and I can only assume that this means a non-pro model (which has the very easy and straighforward removal process linked to above).

Reid

One doesn't have to be a hardware snob to replace a hard drive in an Apple product. They just have to be reasonably competent and print out the guide for their machine at iFixit.

It seems somebody who is technically inclined (i.e., writing source code for something) would have the skills to follow instructions, use torx screwdrivers and open a case.

While metal is shiny and slick, when it is too close to an antenna, the bandwidth decreases. So the antenna designer has a choice of which frequencies to focus their design effort. Since their initial target market was the USA, they probably targeted GSM850 (AT&T's GSM network). From the antenna photos, the GSM 1800/1900 part of the antenna is the part closest to the battery/metal covers, which further degrades performance in this band. One of the earlier replies said their iPhone worked fine in the country-side of the UK. This is most likely due to the GSM850/900 part of the antenna being furthest away from the battery/metal covers.

iPhone disassembled:
http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPhone/Communications-Board/105/8/Page-7/Communications-Board

One can see a small little cable going from the RF Module to the antenna. In almost 99% of the GSM phones on the market today, the antenna is right next to the RF Module. This is to minimize the RF losses between the RFIC and the antenna. By using a cable, significant losses are introduced into the system by both the cable and the miss-match at both ends of the cable. The antenna is also at the bottom of the phone and is more likely to be covered by the user's hand (further decreasing sensitivity); though there are quite a few phone on the market with antennas at the bottom--it is how they get around the SAR limits which are specified as the peak radiation a user receives next to their ear (the mouth area is not measured in the FCC/EU tests.

So, while from an anecdotal perspective, it appears the iPhone has random sensitivity issues; from an antenna engineer's perspective however, it is no surprise why the iPhone has lower performance than most phones (but would still have similar performance to other phones with poor antenna designs--of which there are several for different reasons than cable losses).

If you are interested in reading more technical reports about antenna performance in mobile phones, go to the following website:

http://antennas.astri.org/antennas_mirror

PDF Password = astriantennas

http://www.ifixit.com/ is a great resource for everthing Mac mobile. (iPods and lappys)

Translation: you've never actually seen one.

Have you? Instructions here for the Macbook Pro.

Short:
You have to remove the battery, the ram, no less than 23 screws, keyboard and trackpad, and bluetooth module to get the harddrive.

2) iPod touch is crippled. The Bluetooth is physically there (supposedly) but not enabled.

You've got to have space for the wires and a secondary capture mechanism

I think these guys have done the best job so far disassembling iPhone.... http://stream.ifixit.com/

http://stream.ifixit.com/

they did it some time yesterday, about an hour after it came out i think.

and by the looks of it, they didn't destroy it.

They did destroy some stuff inside though, which didn't happen here, from the looks of it.

Five hours? I used the guide available here: http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Mac/iBook-G4-12-Inch/H ard-Drive-Replacement/83/14 It took me about 45 minutes. I'd never taken apart a laptop in my life.