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PowerBook 15" and 12" Disassembly

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the violating-your-warranty dept.

questamor writes "The ever gadget-driven among us are at it again, with a Japanese site disassembling a brand new 15" PowerBook. Of interest is dual blowers. Quite a good deal packed into that sleek Al case. An older photo article on the same site details a 12" takeapart. That's stunning for barely an inch thick. Kudos to Apple's designers for a machine that looks as well designed in as out, and to the guys willing to unscrew the screws on a machine barely 5 days into warranty."

9 of 180 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Why buys Macs? by catwh0re · · Score: 4, Interesting
    depends what you call faster. during the war on iraq a 15" powerbook was shipped in as the intel based note books couldn't handle opening the massive satellite recon images.

    Plus Apple laptops currently make up 30% of new laptops, the closest competitor is dell at 24%.

  2. Re:Why buys Macs? by techathead · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Actually, I own a PowerBook G3 500 and ordered a PB 15" 1.25 GHz the morning they came out (should be here this week) and I have never regreted having a PowerBook. I had a Compaq Notebook from my school district this year, for a competition I was in, and there was no comparison. My PowerBook was faster (yet it was older by a year), much lighter, much more durable, and worked more consistently. Even the most diehard PC users I know, would ask to borrow my PowerBook for a presentation, etc. So to answer your question, yes I am very happy I own a PowerBook.

  3. Re:Why buys Macs? by GauteL · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This is a joke right?

    People buy Macs because they like macs better. Personally I own a PC and an iBook and used to have a PC-laptop. My PC run both Linux and Windows, so did my PC-laptop.

    The iBook beats the crap out of most PC-laptops at this price. The battery life and the silence of the thing is incredible compared to similiarly priced PCs.

    Sure the PC laptops have a higher clock speed, but that is not always what you want.

    Ultimately you normally buy a Mac because you want it to run MacOS (though some people actually buys Macs to run Linux on it because the hardware is just so much nicer than the comparable PC-hardware).

  4. Is the new 12" still hot? by cras · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Has anyone tried the new 12" powerbooks yet? I have the old one and it's a bit annoying that it gets quite hot after a while. I don't think the 15" and 17" models were nearly that hot. How about the new 12" one? Should I bother buying it or maybe switch to 15"?

  5. Non-removable keyboard by Mwongozi · · Score: 2, Interesting
    The fact that the keyboard isn't removable is interesting. I have the old model 1GHz 15" PowerBook, and I've always wondered whether someone would make replacement keyboards for it, perhaps silver, or backlit.

    I guess not, now.

  6. Re:Why buys Macs? by herko_cl · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'll second this. Right now I am typing on my HP notebook, which has 3 fans running to keep its Pentium 4 cool AS I TYPE, which is not precisely a processor-intensive task. My old iBook is silent, much lighter than this beast, and a joy to use, even though its waaaay slower than this HP. I also had to disassemble the iBook recently to perform a hard disk upgrade and I found the build quality to be amazing compared to Wintel notebooks. This HP feels solid enough, and looks decent, but the care and design that went into the Mac are incredible.

    I had to buy a PC notebook because my school required it, but given a choice I'd have bought a Powerbook in a heartbeat (and I'd always been a PC fanboy that scorned at the Macheads before that little white iBook).

    --
    No .sig for you! ONE YEAR!
  7. Re:Bahh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    You mean strip it down to a bare PCB and then resolder the components on? Probability of success is near zero. The processor is likely Ball Grid Array (BGA) (I can't tell for sure, since the site is slashdotted), which means the solder joints are UNDERNEATH and you can't stick it on with a solder iron. You'd have to use low-melt solder to stick 300+ balls of high-temperature solder in exactly the right places on the bottomside of the processor, then put low-melt solder paste on the correct spots on the PCB, then apply localized heat until the low-melt paste reflows and sticks everything back together again.

    We do that at work sometimes when trying to confirm if a fault is in a processor or elsewhere, but it only works about 60% of the time, on a single component. If you have a half-dozen BGA modules on the PCB, you're at a 0.6^6 chance of success. And after that, long-term reliability sucks bigtime. All the additional heat you pumped into the motherboard would have caused the tin in the solder to combine with the copper in the traces, creating brittle intermetallic compounds. Put the laptop down a bit too hard, and all your solderjoints would crack apart, leaving you with a nice paperweight.

  8. Yikes by joel8x · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'm not crazy about the fact that the hard drive is directly under the trackpad - some people like to tap the pad instead of using the button. I can imagine that taping while the drive heads are reading/writing could turn out disastrous!

    Then again, I'm sure they put some sort of safeguard in place to prevent that from happening (I hope).

    --
    Sound waves should be free!
  9. iMac internals. by Oscar_Wilde · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Bah! Packing square parts into square cases isn't all that interesting.

    Putting square parts into dome shaped cases is more exciting.

    Why is all the good step-by-step disassembly stuff in Japanese?