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Sealed-Box Macs: Should Computers Be Disposable?
An anonymous reader writes "Apple's new Retina MacBook Pro is essentially completely non-upgradable, a sealed-box, following a trend started with the MacBook Air in 2008. It's a given that hardware companies are in the business of selling hardware, and would love for computers to have iPhone-like replacement cycles of 1-3 years. But does this mean we're moving irresistibly into an era of 'sealed-unit computing,' even for power users?"
Only if you want to spend money with Apple. I'll stick with building my own, or using a laptop from a brand where I can upgrade it if I want.
... wait, what?
According to your sig, this is what we call insightful. ;-)
Since the design inside in constrained by the design outside, this is the result. Every component that's integrated to the board eliminates plug, sockets and cables. This is how Apple gives the then, clean lines that consumers love.
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.
to see how well planned obsolescence worked out for the American auto industry.
Maybe computer illiterate art-students and older people will be okay with being cowed into buying a new 'sealed' computer every few years.
However, anybody who knows anything about computers likely wouldn't be okay with that. Personally, I built my own computer, and couldn't imagine handing over 3x as much money to Apple for them to give me a less powerful, un-upgradeable, 'pretty' white box.
Can't tell if troll or just stupid.
No thanks, Apple. I've had enough. The custom temp sensors / connectors for hard drives in the iMac? The obliteration of your Server OS in 10.7... countless other slights, rough terms/conditions... I always somehow managed to keep pulling for Mac and OS X because I felt it was the best UNIX workstation you could buy. Yeah, keep closing up.. as your market share grows you'll see more of this -- your restriction of choice will eventually get the best of you if you're not careful.
Honestly, they're not "sealed" to sell more hardware. Nobody in their right mind is buying a new $3000 laptop every three years.
The reasons are twofold:
1) It is easier to make the laptop thinner and smaller if it does not have to have the mechanics necessary to facilitate taking it apart (screws, bulkheads, etc), or to make it modular (why not just mount a bunch of SMT flash to the motherboard for a disk drive rather than have a 9mm thick 2.5" wide 3" long metal box with yet another circuit board in it? It's more profitable to just integrate everything on one board.
2) We're in a state of development where hardware is a decade or more ahead of software. There is too much computer and not enough problem. My Athlon X2 from 2005 does everything I need it to do, and will do so for years to come. So, why bother with upgrades anymore? They are unnecessary unless you're a hardcore gamer, in which case you're not buying a laptop.
does this mean we're moving irresistibly into an era of 'sealed-unit computing,' even for power users?
No. Next question, please.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
The manufacturer should pay S&H to receive such sealed units for recycling and it should be as simple as submitting a request on their website for a prepaid addressed bag/envelope/box to be sent to the customer.
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
This isn't exactly new. The original Macintosh was rather deliberately designed to be a sealed unit, with no user-upgradable/replaceable components inside.
Just like pretty much every other piece of consumer electronics. How easy is it to upgrade your Blu-Ray player, or replace components in your clock radio? Microcomputers have been the exception to this, beginning as kits and retaining some level of user-customization (most of the time). But as they get closer in size a pocket calculator than to a refrigerator, with the components getting smaller and closer together in the process, the notion that you can open up and tinker with your laptop becomes about as practical as suggesting that you do the same with your wrist watch.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I'm sorry if someone came out with a $25,000 disposable car, that needed no service, was virtually indestructible for 5 years and then had to be turned in for the next $25,000 disposable car, I'm guessing most folks would tell Detroit to stick it where the sun don't shine. Certainly there would be a few who had the money and if it was a great driving experience, with super tires that last the life of the car, a super electric motor, and sealed systems so there was simply no need for maintenance, those few who wanted to drive without concern might enjoy it. The rest of us want to sell it when we're done, many want the value of a used car. A disposable car is great for the dealer and the wealthy guy who can afford a $25,000 expense every 5 years.
A computer is not a phone. Trying to make it into one, because you like the phone model (and it pays better, and you lock your customer into your sandbox better) isn't just creepy, its a dis-service to your customer. Of course you can rationalize that we'll better care of you than anybody else, but that just smacks of a clingy lover whose jealousy and possessiveness is bound to kill the relationship. Stop trying to lock down your customer and just take good care of them instead. Sure, offer a closed solution as a premium product for those who want no concerns whatsoever. But leave the open box for the rest of us who will do with computers what we please, and certainly not what you had planned for.
If it was a $20 issue, it lasted a year, and could be recycled, maybe. At $3000, or even $300, they can shove their nicely sealed hardware up their collective asses with a nice solid twist.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Pocket calculators are designed to do one specific task. Yes, there are some more advanced models that can do other tasks, but they fall under the same category.
What is a Mac or PC designed to do? Everything you can imagine. If it can be written in software, it should be usable on a machine like that. However, some software needs more RAM or a better graphics unit, or some users need more HDD space. That's why they're "upgradable", they're meant to be modular.
However that being said, this doesn't surprise me and should come as no surprise to any die-hard Mac users. Vote with your money.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
apple sells an experience, it hasnt sold computers or catered to the "power user" since the 1980s. Instead, Jobs expanded upon the initial notion of easy to use computing thats attractive and modern and comes at a premium price. Part of that experience is acknowledging that in order to provide uniformity to the target demographic, the Mac-anything is going to be a closed box. when it breaks, the consumer need only buy a new one. Never fault the customer or insist they understand how to do anymore than consume the product and have fun within the lines.
Apple users, largely but not exclusively, are less computer owner and more internet user. For those of us who wanted a real computer, the kind you can get into and tinker with, we built one from parts.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Upgradeability of thin laptops has been pretty... slim for quite a while. DIY repairability is usually even more limited. Nobody forces you to buy one of those, if you don't want to. It just appears people want thin and light more than upgradeable and repairable. It's their choice - at least as long as they're not fooled into buying something differing from their promises.
Personally, I can't remember a piece of computing machinery I've owned that would have seen mentionable amount of use after fifth year after purchase, which should be technically less than properly functioning lifetime of much blamed Retina Macbook Pro with one battery replacement on Apple shop. The cost of that battery replacement is almost marginal expense, when you think upfront cost of the laptop itself. For most people buying those machines it really doesn't matter much.
Tell me of the problem when market is really running out of options that support replaceable components. Then I might get worried. Or - I don't know - since non-upgradeability of many smartphone components has seemed to be complete non-issue for most of the Retina-concerned Slashdot crowd. Yet, both smartphones and laptops are computing machinery, each targeting some specific form-factor niche, which tend to exhibit their own compromises.
This story is complaining although we have a lot of competitive products because apple chose a design not for you, you should complain.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I think that this is a "Big Laptop" competition. Dell is going to monkey Apple and HP as well as several others are going to follow suit.
Sealed box machines are not a disruptive technology so there isn't any real incentive to move to (apart from personal preference) it unless your manufacturer railroads you into it. 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.
Also, in my opinion, there will be plenty of people who will have a hard time justifying spending $1500+ for a machine to only allow it to potentially live 3 years. That being said, I do think it will shrink the market for repairable laptops... in about 5 years.
Mod me down, I shall become more off-topic than you could possibly imagine.
Maybe some people do this, but very few people I know could afford to. I have a nice benefit at work where I can get a new computer once every 3 years, and they will pay for it, then deduct the cost out of my salary over the course of a year. Since I know I'll have that computer for at least 3 years, I always get the max RAM & HD for my computer along with the best video card I can get. I usually alternate between an iMac and a MacBook Pro laptop computer and give away the older computer to a family member when I get a new one of the same kind (desktop/laptop).
Apple Computers tend to have a long shelf life and retain their value better than most PCs. My family's gotten over 7 years of use out of an old PowerBook I bought when I first took advantage of the offer at work. I've given away some other computers to family members or friends' kids too. What might not be useful for you anymore may be a big upgrade for someone else.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Replace "power users" with "99% of users" and I would say yes. Definitely yes. Computers are becoming (frankly, they are already) disposable consumer products.
Just because I can hook a shark from a boat, I do no offer to wrestle it in the water.
This is horrible. Who would buy anything that they can't easily repaired and/or upgrade themselves? Next thing you know, we won't be able to pull the tubes from our radios and TVs and take them down to the drug store to test them.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
Also, chances are that if you still have a pocket calculator from the 70s or 90s that those devices are still useful for their original intended purpose. They are not made obsolete by new software that chokes on a smaller hard drive or inadequate core memory.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
With the current shortages or rare earth metals I think we should be working towards a fully upgradeable box, just to make them last longer.
Apple really should be hosting this site. Two pro apple articles in a row. They are getting close and closer together now. Used to be 2 per day, now it's 2 in a row.
21st Century Renaissance Man
Non user replaceable batteries were inevitable. Instead of charging $60 or whatever for a battery, why not charge double that?
Apple want a black box that no-one can service, even so much as replacing as battery. Purely a profit thing I imagine, but it does fit into their "don't touch our vision, plebian!" ideology.
At the risk of burning karma, disposing of perfectly functional items because they're a few years old and there's a fancier, flashier model seems to be the encouraged behavior with some Apple stuff anyway. They'd probably be wanting to junk it by the time the battery fails anyway.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with my sweetheart, a market research person placed rather high up in a Fortune 500 company. She's a smart cookie. I consider myself to not be too stupid either. Anyway here's the gist of the argument.
I'm an old dinosaur, having been around the PC since it took off in the 70's. I've always had a PC since my teenage years - Apple II, PC XT, AT, and all the way across the upgrade path to the current i7 quad core I'm writing this on. As a dinosaur, I always have in the back of my mind the modular design of the computer. PC's were originally sold to us on expandability - the ISA slots. With those 8 slots you could increase the memory, add in a co-processor, a graphics card - hard drives, when those came out. The sky was the limit. And no one wanted to buy a computer that had few ISA slots - I mean, why shoot yourself in the foot right at the beginning? Compatibility was also paramount. It had to be IBM-compatible, because that was the "gold standard".
But the market has changed. Kids nowadays, and Joe Public who isn't a computer expert at all - well they really don't give a damn about keeping their options open. They want a neat little package that works with as little hassle as possible. The things I value in a computer are not the things they value in a computer. And unfortunately as I age, I am slowly but surely moving into a very niche market.
Of course I think the current trend is wrong. I am dead set against the top-down model that manufacturers are desperate to impose on people - buy this machine, and then only buy from my store, and only run apps that I say, and eventually, don't run apps at all - lease CPU time from us "in the cloud" (which is just another way of saying the old mainfraime/client model). I think there is great danger in this route - because no one will look after your data, and you can be denied access to your data. And of course you will have to pay to access your data. Without even mentioning security problems. Personal computers had broken through that top-down model and everyone had a mini supercomputer (at least what passed for one in the 70's) on their desk and could do anything they wanted. Now you will only be able to do what you are allowed. But again, the market doesn't care. The market wants facebook and skype and angry birds and a camera and a phone and to be able to watch tv, and that's it.
Apple has seen this, and oh god are they ever cashing in. Others are catching up. But the direction of the technology is the same, be it apple or the competitors. A locked device, and pay for service. I think it's a shame, but I'll be dead soon.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Aside from internal storage(where 3rd parties have already released upgrades) what do they expect to be "upgrading" in these machines? Do they really think we are going to need 32 gigs of RAM in the next 5 years? Do they think that there ate actually laptops that let you upgrade the CPU? Or are they just bitching just to bitch? Don't like the trade offs Apple made to get a small form factor? Then don't ficking buy a retina MacBook pro. Was that REALLY so hard
Monstar L
Consumers love those things, but consumers eat whatever crap is put before them. Customers on the other hand require a bit of respect and insist the manufacturers design to their specs not the other way around.
Which are you....Mindless consumer or paying customer ??
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
It doesn't end there. Eventually you wont be able to build your own devices or find any that support minimal upgrading/repair. When the masses want toasters, eventually that is all that will be manufactured.
I don't like it either, but I'm not going to delude myself that we will *always* have 'open' systems. With a bit of luck ill be retired by then and i wont have to care.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
There is not a single computer market; there are four or five. Apple has little, and lessening, interest in servers or the enterprise, because they believe the cloud obviates them. Apple has no interest in hobbyists, and has not since the Apple //. Apple is interested in consumers of data and apps, mobile or otherwise. They are interested in creators of consumable content and apps. They seem uninterested in embedded systems. Their hardware and software reflect these interests. The enterprise and hobbyist types are over represented here, and meaningless to Apple.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
The T and W-series ThinkPads have socketed CPUs.
And the displays can be upgraded.
And the drive is removable, so you can add Blu-Ray or whatever you'd like.
And Lenovo publishes complete manuals with step-by-step instructions detailing how to disassemble everything and how to replace pretty much any part (along with a list of the FRU numbers for said parts.)
And they let you order individual parts (or you can just get them from any number of third party suppliers.)
And replacing CRUs doesn't void the warranty.
Your turn.
The real litigious bastards...
It will only work that way if that's what we buy.
I like losing arguments, it just means that I can take your point and make it my own.
Should Computers Be Disposable? No and especially not macs. If they never broke or were "future-proof" it wouldn't make much difference but despite the advertising to the contrary they simply aren't THAT good.
If I had the money, and was enough interested in having such a device, the Macbook Pro with Retina display is worth every penny. It's also required that it be non-user upgradeable in order to be what it is. If the parts were upgradeable it would be a more clunky computer and therefore not what was the target of the design. I don't think they logically came to the conclusion of eliminating upgradability as the primary goal. Their goal was to eliminate unnecessary bulk and weight while expanding functional capacity.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
We'd have to ask, "did pocket calculators used to be commonly user-upgradable?"
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
If Apple were a monopoly I would get all the geek hand wringing over how serviceable their computers are, but they aren't by a long shot. As such this speculation makes no sense to me. Perhaps it's because I remember a time when a "PC" meant it came from IBM, or one of a few people who licensed bits of the technology from them. There was no choice.
Today I can build my own from Newegg. I can buy a generic pre-made box from Dell or HP, Acer or PacBell, or hundreds of others. I can buy sexy form-factor machines from Apple, Alienware (a dell company), Sony, Asus, and Shuttle. Tablets and phones that didn't exist even 5 years ago are now widely and cheaply available and have more power than a 10 year old "PC". Pogoplug and Raspberry PI are putting computers where people never thought they would exist.
The notion that an Apple Laptop's "sealed" nature is limiting consumer choice is laughable. Consumers have a lot of choice, and they are choosing a product that they like. Perhaps it's not the right laptop for much of Slashdot, but a lot of consumers are voting with their dollars.
It reminds me a lot about cars in the 80's when the new smog standards and computers came out. "I can't work on this in my driveway" all the old guys said. I need expensive computer gear to fix it that only a shop can own. Some of the new parts require specialized tools that are very expensive! Turns out most consumers didn't change their own oil or adjust their own timing, so the fact that the new computers and tech made a tune up every 50,000 or 100,000 miles rather than 3,000 with points and a carburetor more than offset the fact they couldn't work on it themselves. The benefits to consumers greatly outweighed any of the drawbacks.
I think the computer world is making the same transition. I remember a Toshiba laptop circa 1997 that had a NiCad battery that wouldn't even last an hour, and in less than a year of use wouldn't hold a charge at all. I kept two spares when traveling, and swapped them out. The battery better have been user replaceable in that thing. Now, with modern tech, folks are getting 10 hours out of Apple laptops and tablets, and seeing 5-7 year battery life with minimal degradation. People don't buy spare batteries anymore, even when they are modular. Tech has advanced, so now people want the thinner, lighter more than the replaceable battery.
As long as you can go to any of a hundred other vendors and get modular laptops and desktops complaining about one vendor who makes them non-serviceable is stupid. People have choice, and are voting with their dollars.
I've been using mac laptops since 05 and I have, *every time*, had problems with the battery and needed to upgrade the ram. With the new design I've just said no more. For less money I'm going to get a tablet (not an ipad) and a tower.
On a final note, does no one else realise that Apple is doing what Microsoft has been so heavily criticised for, but no one is mad at Apple for it?
I am not just going to agree with the popular view. In other words I have bad Karma.
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....
in some high security you need to be able to get hdd out for repair and some OEM's even let you destroy a bad HDD and still be able to swap it out under warranty.
You might want to look two articles down for "Apple Is Now the Most Valuable Company In History" and rethink what your definition of "winning" is. Current state of affairs appears to suggest they know what they're doing.
They're good at giving people what they don't yet realize they will like. And they DO tend to be forceful about it. They drag their customers, some of them kicking and screaming, into the future. And when they get there, they suddenly realize that was a change that really helped them. But then there will be another change in the works and another group kicking and screaming over it. Rinse and repeat. They're used to it. But obviously it's a strategy that has gathered momentum because it works well over the long term. They're not selling to the market of today. They're selling to the market of tomorrow, reinventing it, keeping it fresh.
Apple started pushing hard with laptops around '95 when people were complaining how nobody liked them because they were underpowered, overpriced, and lacked upgradeability. Now over half the personal computers in circulation are laptops because they're portable and the price has gone down along with the power going up simply because the manufacturers started using and developing the tech ahead of its heyday.
And now another shift is in full-swing. People want the benefits looming on the horizon but are afraid to let go of some of the security of their existing systems. There are laptops that are modular, kitchen-table-tech friendly, and upgradeable, but they do this at the cost of hanging onto being large and heavy. The netbooks that started landing on the market in '06 were just announcing the new niche. They had the size and runtime but hadn't solved the power issue. They were the stepping stone to ultrabooks.
Ultrabooks recently got off the ground with the macbook air, and now are full-speed-ahead with the macbook pros. Now power is solved, and some of the new ultrabooks are lighter and run longer than most netbooks from just a few years ago. You can't make something that small AND make it hacker-friendly. Accessories give way to built-in. Latches give way to screws. Screws give way to glue. Modules give way to single boards. Shrinking the size and increasing the runtime are what you get, without losing the functionality people value most. And the majority of users are perfectly willing to make that tradeoff. Many don't even see it as a tradeoff, because what they've "given up" they didn't even care about to begin with. For them it only adds value.
There will always be a subset of the users that want to be able to work on their computers, and there will always be computers in the market that they will like, but for the vast majority of computer users today, they'd simply rather have the lower weight, smaller size, and greater runtime, accepting they're not upgradeable. With costs coming down, it becomes much more attractive to pay a little bit more on the cost-per-year to have those benefits. Trying to make a case for your preferred market niche being "the only right way" is just plain foolish.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
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 space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
The percentage of PC, tablet, and tech sales to people in the 3B3K (3 billion people who earn $3K per year) market is doubling every year. Apple tried just selling to rich people during the PC Clone period almost 2 decades ago. They kept the number of buyers, but lost percentage of the rapidly growing market. As soon as someone sells an upgradeable, repairable device, it's going to sell better in the emerging markets, which is where CEA says most of the sales are going.
Gently reply
I welcome sealed unit computers, tablets, phones and iPods... with one caveot. They need to be real world rugged (think cracked screens), long lasting (think batteries to start with) and supported in the long term (Apple shouldn't be abandoning support for machines after just a few years).
The above would be environmentally friendly by reducing manufacturing and eWaste since the devices would last longer. The technology is here. The firmware is already upgradeable. The processors are already exceedingly fast. The media, the content, is available. Lets stop dumping equipment so rapidly. Instead, pass it down, pass it along, sell it used when you want the latest and greatest hardware.
The companies like Apple could still make plenty of money each year off of the old hardware through offering extended warranties, service, support and firmware/OS upgrades as well as all the sales they make for content. No need to keep wasting hardware.
The battery, case, screen and other technologies are available. I, and many people, are quite willing to pay a premium for better quality and build - witness how successful Apple is as the highest valued and arguably most successful company on this planet. Going with sealed units would enhance the real-world rugged and lasting devices while optimizing for form and size.
"My television is made up of several components: a main board, a back light, a screen and a power supply, each one of these parts can be individually replaced."
Sounds pretty close to how a new retina MBP is made. Main board (including memory), backlight/screen assembly (your TV probably has an integrated unit too, unless it's quite old), power supply. The MBP also has a replaceable SSD, batteries that can be replaced, although it requires replacing part of the case as well, and random other stuff like the keyboard and track pad.
You insensitive clod. I've got a HP-41CV. It won't run software written for the the 41-CX. Too weak.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Yes true but on my thinkpad the battery will die then I remove the old battery and replace it with a new one. Try that with your sealed MBPwRD
Seriously, it's great if laptop makers can truly build upgradeable machines that don't sacrifice reliability in the process. But I remember the era of Dell laptops with socketed CPUs and upgradable video cards, and it wasn't all roses and unicorns.
I believe it was the old Latitude CP series where the CPU used to work itself loose from its socket over time, resulting in a system that refused to boot. (One of the "fixes" that used to get one going again was pressing down hard with the palm of one's hand near the center of the keyboard. The keyboard assembly happened to be right over the CPU and would flex enough to allow re-seating the chip, at least for a while.)
The models with the supposedly upgradeable video cards turned out to be more hype than substance too, because the type of video boards they took were proprietary, and no longer manufactured at all after 2 or 3 variations went through their initial production runs.
Ultimately, even on desktop PCs, expansion capabilities really don't get people too far.... Sure, you can upgrade processors -- until AMD or Intel goes and changes the design of the socket and pin layout. Then you're just as stuck as the next guy with his CPU soldered onto the motherboard. Same issue with RAM. Most machines only provide between 2 and 4 DIMM sockets, with a motherboard chipset unable to map/use more than a certain amount of memory. So what usually happens? The RAM upgrade becomes a nice thing to have initially, for the folks who tried to go cheap on the initial system purchase and selected less RAM than was optimal to save a few bucks. They get the chance to "buy now and pay later" to put the RAM in that probably should have really been there from the start. But down the road? You wind up saying "Gee... I'd like to upgrade this PC to 16GB of RAM but the board only supports 8. Oh well...."
Don't get me wrong... I like having a machine I can service myself if I determine a part died. And I've usually upgraded hard drives in most machines I've owned, as well as adding RAM to some, or upgrading the video in my higher-end machines. But as we demand ever lighter weight, slimmer portables with more and more functionality - we're really demanding technology that doesn't have any room for spare sockets, cables and connectors. It all depends on what the goal is, really. Expandability and modularity comes at a price of taking up extra space. Apple is big on going "cutting edge" with the "how small can we make this?" question on their minds -- so it makes perfect sense they wound up where they did, with not even so much as a removable laptop battery.
Good thing the cases aren't sealed then, hey?
Oh, and iPod cases aren't sealed either. You can replace the battery in an iPod in about ten minutes. Probably five if you do it regularly. And despite those "loud complaints" (mostly on Slashdot), recall what the most successful line of personal music players ever is.
I've never met anyone who built a laptop from parts, so maybe you're comparing a desktop to a laptop. Building a desktop from parts is only useful if you can afford to spend the time debugging hardware or software when it's not stable. These days I need to use my computer for work, so it's not acceptable any more to spend 10 hours figuring out which top of the line part is failing so I can return it for warranty replacement. If I ever got another PC, I'd get a Dell. They're not the fastest or cheapest, but at least I know the network card isn't interfere with the video card in some unforeseen way because they've been well tested together before purchase.
On the OS end, there wasn't really such a thing as a power user in the 80s. To do anything remotely interesting, you need to do some heavy reading of Inside Macintosh, know assembly, and how to use Macsbug. Alternately, you could install someone else's hack, but sometimes these did the near impossible and made the OS even less stable. You couldn't even select a custom paper size in the Apple Writer print dialog, you had to pick from one of 5 or so. These days, there are a number of shells and scripting languages installed out of the box and a pretty nice terminal.
Your beloved Lenovo is doing it too:
"We should also point out that this memory is actually soldered to the system's motherboard. So whatever configuration you get from the factory, be it 4GB or 8GB, that's what you've got for good, period."[source]
Any idea which drug store carries a tester for this big plasma tube?
Except the calculator probably takes a couple of AA batteries (or possibly a watch battery of some sort) which is easily procurable and replaceable. You'd be a fool to throw it out and buy a new one when $2 worth of batteries is all you'd need to get it working again. You can't say the same thing for any newer portable electronics devices -- it's all proprietary, custom batteries that likely have to be ordered online and are only useful in a single device.
Apple's devices are some of the worst offenders, of course, because their proprietary, custom batteries aren't even user serviceable.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
Everything can be opened. WTF is the author talking about? Fucking iFixit has a teardown article on it.
I mean, jesus christ. If you don't like it don't buy it. Is that so fucking hard to understand?
The answer is simple enough....don't buy Apple. One of the reasons I bought my current portable, an Asus EEE E350 netbook, is because it has plenty of upgrade options. i was able to upgrade from the default 2Gb to 8Gb of faster RAM for less than $30, there are plenty of tutorials showing how to replace the screen with a touch if you like, or replace the HDD with an SSD, there are even tools to OC or UC the APU if I want more speed or battery life, as well as third party batteries that will let me have all day usage if I need it, although i find the 5-6 hours i get plenty.
Just because Apple is the hipster brand doesn't mean you have to buy it, its not like we don't have plenty of choices. This is why I've built my own desktops for over 15 years, because not only do I get a better quality system at a cheaper price, but I can have it the way I want it, not the way some OEM thinks is best.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
It's more like leasing a car.
You are paying for the use of the computer.
When you are done with it, you give it back to them and they recycle it.
I think the only ports they added over the Air is a second Thunderbolt port (that you can use with literally nothing)
They added USB 3.0. Perhaps you've heard of it?
Thuderbolt has a number of things you can do with it, from true GigE to multiple storage options, and of course also displays - like multiple monitors should you so desire...
But even without all that you can add an expresscard adaptor via Thunderbolt and have all THOSE options too.
I'm not sure why Apple decided to go with the "Pro" brand
Because it's a pretty fast system and also has a pro-level display.
Oh, and with the higher DPI screen that nothing bothers to support.
You mean besides the whole OS, all Apple software (like Safari and Final Cut X) and a number of third party apps (since mostly you just need a few new assets and a recompile to support it).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Motorola has been making phones this way since the late 90's. The original "Razor" was practically glued together; Very few fasteners, very few sub-assemblies, very little to repair. It's all on one chip, one board, one focus of fabrication. Assembly matters, not dis-assembly.
Look at cars, too - the use of adhesives and foams and plastic clips that are effectively "consumables" - as they are often destroyed during dis-assembly - has grown every year. The shift is to pass the cost of assembly off on to the cost of repair - many goods are no longer meant to be repaired as they had in the past. The manufacturing processes have dictated that only the major systems can be replaced, not individual components.
Cars, phones, computers - most products - are better built than in the past (often, by robots) and last longer regardless. The fetish of the new is what most often gets us to purchase anew. There's still a market for the upgrade/repair customer - but it is they who will be paying the premium for this flexibility.
Not just claim, they sell it, I have one and it works great.
They aren't trying to make it impossible. They are drawing a line: joe consumer can take out the philips screws and upgrade what he can, but you're voiding the warranty if you use the ifixit screwdriver.
Hardware available in regular stores is basically end-user hardware, even if professionals like us use it. The last time I upgraded a computer was 4 years ago, when I stuck an extra 2 GB into my 1 GB MacMini. Spare parts work like replacing broken HDDs or memory may be an issue here, but no so much.
Ok, I did stick an 8GB MicroSD Card into my HTC Flyer tablet earlyer this year, but I'd stretch it and say that doesn't count or isn't what we're talking about here.
The point is that
a) computers have become so powerfull, they don't really need upgrading during their lifetime anymore
b) there is an everygrowing seperation between specialist and comodity computer hardware
c) the newest type of computers - tablet and mobile devices - aren't even turing complete by geek standards (to much vendor and/or carrier lockin) - so why would you want to upgrade them anyway?
The future will see specialist devices and computers that are customizable and upgradeable and that people who know what they are doing can repair or maintain themselves and it will see more and more of lockin-consumer-comodity devices, where the device even isn't the most important thing, but the service or brand tied to it.
Heck, I don't even care anymore if my tablet has 64 or 32 GB - and I'm super-geek.
That the MB Pro Retina is all closed up is no big issue. OS and Software Distribution Lockin and less FOSS integration and Apple dropping Unix somewhere down the road is more my concern. If I have the money and the need/want to buy a new shiny protable device, I'll get it with the memory I need right away and I'd rather have Apple built a sturdy, good looking and slim enclosure than make room for screws and seperate compartments for exchangable stuff. My Dell Vostro isn't even in the same game as my MB Air - it's basically a completly different class and generation of hardware.
Bottom line:
Geek tinker hardware and notebooks that you can take apart with a set of screwdrivers and a few extra hours of time are on the way out. I don't see that as much of a big problem.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
That's the thing, you can... just not by going to frys and picking up a couple of double-A batteries.
That's about how some people are acting, I'm still baffled. Sure, macbook air have ram built into the motherboard, but it's also a very customized system built for light weight and size. The pros on the other hand you can upgrade harddisk, ram, and.. well.. what else is there to upgrade on a laptop?
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
Only for the uneducated. It's not sealed box to me. but then the old codgers whined how all electronics were becoming dosposable when we stopped using tubes and started with the new flangled Integrated circuits.
And then I heard the same thing when surface mount stuff became popular....
Only the old codgers or uneducated will see it as a sealed box. The rest of us hackers will still find our way inside and modify or extend the life of these items.
Last TWO ipads I have owned were 100% free. as the previous owner dropped them and broke the screen.. I buy new screen off of ebay and replace the broken one. now I have a $900.00 64gig 3G ipad 2 for the $58.00 the screen cost me and 1 hour of my time.
I love what apple is doing, it means I will get a lot more free stuff as the uneducated throw it away or believe it has no value.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The vast majority of radios and tvs cost a lot less than a retina MacBook Pro. They do a lot less too.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Since the previous article is, "Apple Is Now the Most Valuable Company In History," I'll go with yes.
...if you upgraded your old non-HD tv to HD by buying parts and installing them yourself.
Or if you upgraded your old CRT tv to flatscreen plasma or lcd by buying the parts and installing them yourself.
No one?
So why get your panties in a twist when a computer manufacturer decides to make their computers non-upgradable? There are already so many non-upgradable consumer electronics out there. This is no different.
"Take a look at where computers are used and realize that not everyone cares because they use computers to get work done. As long as it's getting work done, they're happy. If it's broken, they're more than happy to call in someone to fix it, just like they'd call a plumber to fix their plumbing, an electrician to fix the electricals, a mechanic to fix their engines and vehicles, etc."
But the know-how to fix a broken pipe is much lower than the know-how need to fix a sealed-box Mac. You can't just ring up your friendly neighborhood plumber, electrician or mechanic if you're the type who doesn't have the time to D-I-Y. "Smart" homes and cars would probably would probably make your comparison more appropriate.
While a hardcore hardware hacker can still fix most Apple products available in the market today, the know-how and technology to fix future iDevices will probably be limited to members of the Apple tech priesthood, to the exclusion of mere apprentices or tech school graduates.
And here's the greater danger, the technology to manufacture our information devices has become increasingly concentrated in a narrow area of the world. It's a good thing Apple hasn't outsourced its design and product development. But when even this part of the product cycle is relocated to China or nearby east Asian countries, then the only hope of fixing a defective iPhone 10 is to ship it halfway across the globe.
Except the calculator probably takes a couple of AA batteries (or possibly a watch battery of some sort) which is easily procurable and replaceable. You'd be a fool to throw it out and buy a new one when $2 worth of batteries is all you'd need to get it working again. You can't say the same thing for any newer portable electronics devices -- it's all proprietary, custom batteries that likely have to be ordered online and are only useful in a single device.
Apple's devices are some of the worst offenders, of course, because their proprietary, custom batteries aren't even user serviceable.
--Jeremy
I bought a very nice little credit card calculator way, way, back circa 1985. It was very handy. I got it off a blister pack next to the cash register as an impulse purchase - it was only $5 and back then "blister pack" didn't mean "$300 in surgical stitches to open what you'd paid for".
It came with a nice warranty. It said that if the unit failed within 3 years, ship it to the manufacturer along with $5 to cover postage and handling.
Eventually the batteries wore out. They're $6.50 for a new pair.
My Sager laptop can have the HDDs, memory, optical drive, CPU, GPU, and wireless all upgraded by the user easily. The screen and keyboard can also be upgraded, though it is a bit more complex to do.
Now that is not something every laptop has, but as I said it is a high priced laptop, it comes with some features like that. Even my last laptop, a much lower priced MSI was nearly as upgradable. They didn't officially support CPU or GPU upgrades but they both could be done.
The vast majority of radios and tvs cost a lot less than a retina MacBook Pro. They do a lot less too.
Well, that's true now, but back in the day, a nice color TV cost a significantly higher percentage of my annual pay than a MBP does now. In 1978 the average wage was $10,556 and a nice 25" color TV console set cost about $800. That's about 8% of pretax income. (And by then most TVs had quit using most tubes.)
The average US wage in 2010 was $41K. 8% of that would be $3200 which is a lot more than the average price of a MBP.
For a typical MBP to represent 8% of a buyer's income, the buyer would have to be making about $25k/year. I'd be very surprised if very many purchasers of MBP's are making $25K/year.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
Memory? Maybe, there's increasing uses for more RAM. Also it only ships with 8GB by default and 16GB is a highly overpriced upgrade ($200 is not what 16GB of RAM costs these days). One could easily want to go from 8GB to 16GB when it costs less, and pro users might want 32GB. I'm looking at knocking 32GB in my desktop for use with virtual instruments (audio composition).
I do actually think there are laptops that let yo upgrade the CPU. Sager (Clevo), Alienware, and a few others explicitly support it and will keep your warranty if you do. Also most others are capable of it, even if there isn't official support. My old MSI laptop had a socketed CPU (and GPU) since it is cheaper to just have one board with a socket and then drop in the appropriate CPU for what the user wants.
I think some people question if the tradeoffs for the small form factor are worth it. While they may let it be a little thinner, perhaps a tiny bit of thickness is worth it. You can look at one of Dell's new thin laptops: It is so thin a standard Ethernet port won't fit (so they include one that opens up to accommodate the jack) yet doesn't go the "no upgrades of anything" route. Not as thin as the MacBook, but then one can ask how much a few fractions of an inch really matter.
Now this is a laptop........ with power...............but won't run on batteries too long.................. http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/origins_eon17-slx_laptop_ready_dance_dual_gpus
Everything above is my opinion....YMMV
Apple is a bubble that will burst soon enough. The only thing selling their products is style, and eventually people will fall out of love with the Apple style as they do with every style in computing, fashion, and computing fashion. The cheap hardware in Wintel, Lintel, LinMD, WinMD, etc... always sells more units total in a given fiscal year than Apple products sell, it's just that Apple sells for more per unit because they're designer clothing and Apple gets rich from their fans. They even have fans with access to government money to spend on thousands of Apple units in claim that it will help our children learn and grow, only just to get their hands on one shiny new Apple unit for themselves (http://goo.gl/rEb8M) .
More people love a'la carte computing than the Apple approach, markets prove that. Newegg is still here selling PC components, Amazon and Wal Mart even sell PC components on their sites. I mean -- Dell and HP are even still here selling cheap PCs and even not-so-cheap ones. Apple definitely doesn't control the world even though they might have made huge piles of cash selling many luxury goods in a very short period of time.
The answer is simple enough....don't buy Apple.
I wouldn't quite say "simple" for a lot of folks, myself included. There are two reasons why I ended up going with a unibody MacBook Pro (2009-era) when my last laptop died: It has a decently sturdy build quality (much better than the Dell I gave up) and, when something goes wrong, I can take it to a human, point out exactly what's wrong, and say, "Fix it" rather than play phone and shipping tag with some contracted-out support company. At the time, upgradability didn't factor into my decision; it was just as upgradeable as every other system I considered. Since I purchased this machine, I've upped the RAM from 4 GB to 8 GB and swapped the rotational hard drive for an SSD. I've also had to use the Genius Bar to address a charging issue (1 hour of my time, vs. 2-3 months getting the run-around with Toshiba for my wife's previous laptop; there's a brand I'll never touch again).
(Mac OS? It's nice because it has the Unix command line utilities I'm accustomed to; Cygwin and Interix are clunky at best. UI isn't as nice as Windows 7, though.)
Now that Apple has removed the upgradability feature, I'm not quite sure where I'll go next.
This is why I've built my own desktops for over 15 years, because not only do I get a better quality system at a cheaper price, but I can have it the way I want it, not the way some OEM thinks is best.
Oh, I definitely build my own desktops. Laptops are a different beast, though; because the form factors are non-standard, it's difficult to find parts which play nicely. You can't just add a dedicated graphics card, for example, and the motherboard+screen+case are pretty much a unit (though your example of replacing the EEE's screen for a touch-enabled one is impressive).
So of your list of important laptop upgrade features the only one you can't do with a Retina Mac is upgrade the RAM. Sure it is restrictive to force forethought of the appropriate amount of RAM to select for the tasks the laptop will be used for however it is clearly a tradeoff to get a fancy new type of fast RAM. Once it comes in a small form factor stick I imagine it will become upgradable again.
If not being able to upgrade the RAM is all the Apple-haters can drum up against this laptop all I can say is this is a storm in a teacup.
I ate your fish.
Set-top gaming computers went from C64 and Amiga to Genesis and Super NES. The consoles were far more toaster-like, but sufficiently large developers dealt with it because that's where the market was.
I'm still using the same HP48G calculator I bought 18 years ago. I just have to replace the batteries every couple of years.
Out of my computer equipment box I think there is a keyboard that still works. None of my laptops have lasted close to that long.
I suppose calculators might be disposable but they tend to last a very long time.
Because the rest of your post is exactly right - for the vast majority of users, the increase in hardware performance has far outstripped their needs.
True, the vast majority of users aren't iOS application developers. But for them, new major versions of iOS need new versions of Xcode, and new versions of Xcode sometimes need new versions of Mac OS X, and new versions of Mac OS X won't run on an old Mac. Case in point: Mac OS X 10.8 won't run on a four-year-old Mac mini.
for the occasional long trip i have an iphone and an ipad
Say you want to use an application that isn't ported to iOS because of Apple's rules. To use such an application, you'll need to run it on a real computer and display it in a remote desktop on your iPad. How much does the data plan for that cost?
Lemme check......yep, I can still make it say boobies!
Pocket calculators and computers do essentially the same thing, computers just do it more. It's all moving ones and zeros around at the end of the day.
The opposite end of the market is the Raspberry Pi, which is "disposable" for very different reasons. Moore's Law seems to contain an additional "ubiquity" component.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
My VIC20 still works well. It has had a few minor upgrades. Why is there this incessant need to upgrade all the time? That is what we should really be asking.
Yeah, but they didn't try to develop *on* them.
The Genesis used the same ~8 MHz MC68000 CPU as an original Macintosh or Amiga computer. There's no reason that Sega couldn't have sold a computer similar to a Mac or Amiga that used the same chipset as the Genesis, with a few MB of RAM in the cartridge area of the memory map. It'd be like the difference between an SG-1000 and an SC-3000, or a ColecoVision and an Adam, or possibly either of those consoles and an MSX. Hobbyists seeking to enter the budget software market (remember shareware?) could have easily used such a computer to make a Genesis game. But instead, access to "devkit" versions of the consoles capable of running user-written code was tightly controlled.
If you can't open it up and unsolder the chips and replace them then it is not upgradeable. Stupid SMD BGA chips.
a) It just works.
b) It is configurable how you want it. Better RTFM.
Such has been true with all other consumer electronics for years. The only way manufacturers can stay in business is to force the consumer to replace it when it breaks. The best way to accomplish this is to declare all of the technology included in the product to be proprietary and a trade secret. Then not allow repair literature or replacement parts to be freely distributed. Second, hyper inflate any repair parts to cost more than an entire new unit although they really cost pennies to create. And third, offer new models which only tweak minor functions but change superficial properties to engage the consumer in the illusion that newer is cooler and better. And you people just keep confirming that their evil plan works by buying the crap. Demand quality. Demand sustainable technology.
... because nothing says I love you to the environment like chucking out some hazardous chemicals. Mmmm.... arsenic....
I'm astounded - surely the issue here isn't a question of what you as the heavily manipulated consumer are getting for your money. What about the (at the least) *millions* of tonnes of electronic junk this kind of throwaway product is producing? Is the problem being ignored because it is always exported to some country you'll never have to visit? How do you feel?
Why is this acceptable in any way for anybody whatsoever? When did we ALL become so spoiled and greedy and vain?
What the hell are we leaving for our chidren to clear up?
What a waste. Apple? Ingenuity? Are you fucking kidding me?
But does this mean we're moving irresistibly into an era of 'sealed-unit computing,' even for power users?"
No, power users don't use mac's (usually). People who are into paying extra for trendy but no more functional do. Most other companies aren't making disposable iCrap.
Actually I agree that the upgrade issue is somewhat moot - I've never upgraded a laptop. However I have had to have several repaired. This has involved: replacing a dud battery, replacing a dead hard drive and replacing a faulty DVD drive. In each case it was a quick trip to the Apple store, a brief wait and presto my laptop was fixed.
What happens with the new machines is not so clear. While I do have everything backed up do I really want to have the hassle of getting a completely different machine every, single time I need a repair, no matter how trivial it is? Not only that but SSDs have a limited write cycle so, if they give me a different machine (because they cannot fix the old one) will they guarentee that the SSD is of the same age and with similar use characteristics to the machine I handed in? Will they also guarantee to erase any data on the old machine too since I cannot remove the drive and do it myself.
Except for the battery life problem, this would be OK. Few machines today ever have their hardware upgraded. Even for desktop machines, 80% are never opened after they leave the factory.
Apple uses limited battery life as a way to force users to upgrade. If they're going to make a "sealed unit", they should get rid of the connectors, use inductive charging and radios for everything, and make it watertight.
Don't confuse "pc gamer" with "power user." I hear a lot of people call themselves power users, but the real truth is their only "power" is their ability to constantly upgrade their pc every 3 months to play the latest game. I know this all too well being a seasoned software engineer that used to host huge 100+ person rented facility lan parties on a regular basis. Macbooks are extremely popular with developers and actual power users in a plethora of professions from graphics design, server development (c, c++, java), publishing, mobile development, etc. I hear this analogy from many games who think themselves hackers.
> MBP is a professional workstation
How, with it's dual-core (ok, now quad-core stock) and consumer-grade gpu, processor, and RAM is it a professional workstation? Do tell...
Once upon a time you could buy a mbp and add aftermarket RAM yourself. Now you have to pay apple the full pop. I'm amazed people paid for the apple upgades at all, considering they could save hundreds for the same thing with minimal, simple DIY. While the new mbp is a nice laptop to look at (as all mbps are), my test unit still falls way short in the performance department. I guess that's what you pay for battery life.
Memory? Maybe, there's increasing uses for more RAM. Also it only ships with 8GB by default and 16GB is a highly overpriced upgrade ($200 is not what 16GB of RAM costs these days). One could easily want to go from 8GB to 16GB when it costs less, and pro users might want 32GB. I'm looking at knocking 32GB in my desktop for use with virtual instruments (audio composition).
Possibly - right now, 16GB is plenty - unlike the case with my old 4GB MBP, I don't, for example, think "oh, shit, this is going to take a while, and it's going to make everything else on the machine suck horribly as most of their pages are going to get evicted, and god forbid I try doing a compile" before firing up a VM to try something out on Windows or Linux or Solaris or... - but, then again, my old 4GB MBP was super cool and studly when I bought it almost 5 years ago. Dunno when 16GB is going to be "oh, shit, this is going to take a while, and...".
I think some people question if the tradeoffs for the small form factor are worth it
And it might not be worth it for them. It might be worth it for others.
Wait, what do we do now? The headline asks the opposite question as the last line of the summary. Yes becomes no and no becomes yes.
I am confused.
-- The Internet is a too slow way of doing things, you'd never do without it.
"This product has a zero-dollar value.
PowerON has determined that your product has a zero-dollar fair market value.
To proceed with responsible recycling please provide your contact information so PowerON can prepare and email a prepaid shipping label to you.
When you receive your free shipping label, just print it out, pack your product in a box and send it off." :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Many people can treat a $270 laptop as "disposable". Treating a $2700 Apple MacBook Pro as "disposable" is only an option for people with too much money.
in some high security you need to be able to get hdd out for repair and some OEM's even let you destroy a bad HDD and still be able to swap it out under warranty.
...which, other than it being an SSD rather than an HDD, you can do with a Retina MBP, albeit only with the help of the Special Magic Screwdriver mentioned in my linked-to post (available from iFixit) and with a replacement SDD with the appropriate connector (available from Other World Computing, and maybe the high-security customers in question could get them, as well as the Special Magic Screwdriver, from Apple as well).
I stopped replying to your post when it became apparent that you didnt know what you were talking about, and everyone else realized it as well; and that furthermore, there is a large chance that you are a troll. Im letting you know to save you the effort of replying to one of my posts again.
"mean we're moving irresistibly into an era of 'sealed-unit computing,' even for power users?"
Even for power users, open software is more important than sealed or non-sealed hardware. If you have to pay for eventual upgrades (since you can't do it yourself), that could s*ck, but you could live with that. But the important thing is that the OS, the APIs, configurability, programmability, 1st/2nd/3rd party software installation - and so on and so forth - be as open as possible, since that (well, the lack of it) would cause much more harm and trouble than sealed-hardware devices.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
We'd have to ask, "did pocket calculators used to be commonly user-upgradable?"
I upgraded the Nixie tubes in my 70's era pocket calculator... so, yes.
It's true, the CPU is "sealed" (one can upgrade the memory, drive if really necessary).
Drive, yes. Memory, well, it's soldered to the system board - can one safely un-solder the memory chips and solder in replacements? Apparently the iFixit people don't think so.
Yeah - some people here seem to lack the engineering imagination to realise how much weight you save by using 'no user servicable parts' designs. The 'fixed battery' is a good example - you'd have to add extra bulkheads to protect the internals when the battery was removed, doors, latches, spring-loaded electrical contacts and a thicker shell for the battery itself so that it was safe for klutzes to handle outside of the computer.
You also missed one:
(3) upgradability of laptops - certainly beyond RAM - is not a high priority for many people. Its fiddly and non-techies are nervous about breaking stuff. Plus, computers and consumer electronics in general are pretty damn reliable these days (some of us remember the days when you would be nuts to buy your own TV, because it would pop a valve a couple of times a year).
No, the problem with Apple (and many other manufacturers) is that they still charge over-the-odds for BTO RAM and HD upgrades. (I think the 8->16GB upgrade for the Retina is £160 - about 3x what I recently paid for an extra 8GB for last-year's model MBP - I'd expect a small premium for newer, faster chips but not 3x). The main reason I've ever upgraded RAM in recent years is that it cost too much over the odds to buy the machine with adequate RAM in the first place. There's really no reason, these days, for a 'premium' product like the Retina not to come with 16GB of RAM as standard.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
It's funny that you consider laptops so much opposed to appliances.
To me, with the rise of iOS, 'walled' tablets in general, and specifically for Apple the permanent, active push from MacOSX to iOS (with the same aim for signed, centralized applications, etc.) I clearly consider Apple indeed is pushing laptops and macs *towards* the 'appliance' model...
I read elsewhere in this thread there is no danger because tablets just cannot do what laptops do. Well. We'll see, but I'd never bet on this.
All the innovative applications are now created, not ported, on tablets.
I just bought a Blackberry Playbook, a platform for which you expect somewhat less applications than on iOS.
The first one I loaded, free, was a planetarium that uses all sensors at the same time (gravity, magnetic and GPS) so as to show you exactly the right portion of the sky you see when you raise the tablet at arm's length and point it to the sky.
I think on this example we can consider *any* developments on software planetariums will happen on tablets from now --not on laptops.
And I didn't select more obvious domains like mapping for instance.
My view of the computing evolution is definitely towards walled, closed, central-application-market appliances. And within this, the mechanical enclosure is but the most minor feature.
This, is my gratest fear.
I hope I'm wrong.
Herve S.
Once upon a time I used to by the minimum RAM with my MBP and upgrade using Crucial. However, for my first unibody MBP, this turned out to be a problem because the RAM was so new it couldn't be bought at Crucial and Apple's pricing was actually competitive with the only other place I could find it - Dell. It was more than a year before I could find the RAM I needed at anything less than a very high price.
So I've just bought an MBP Retina and the alleged dilemma of not being able to upgrade the RAM just made my decision easy. I simply bought one with 16Gb. I usually work on a two year cycle for refreshing laptops and I can't imagine 16Gb being too small two years hence.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
the last time I checked. That isn't nearly enough repairable time to be responsible either in the consumer sense or ecological sense.
And I do urge people to look on eBay for Apple parts... there is a thriving market of mostly used parts that techs use to repair Apple equipment, and it won't last long with Apple's new direction.
I like this sentence.
But does this mean we're moving irresistibly into an era of 'sealed-unit computing,' even for power users?
A power user wouldn't be using a Mac, they'd be using something good.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
Stop volunteering for spoiled rich kids.
I need around 20GB RAM just for linking one of the programs I compile.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
If you're running your development environment on the target hardware, how do you deploy? How do you run your game?
How do you develop and test a PC game? How did one develop and test an Amiga game when the Amiga was popular?
And if you do both (i.e. a limited-resource run for debugging and a separate deploy) how on earth is that better than having a dedicated development machine that can debug the game at full power beside the console that you have to deploy to anyway?
Because smaller developers can afford it, unlike the dedicated development machines that the console makers sold only to very select developers.
As far as interchangable parts for laptops go, get a thinkpad. Most models of the thinkpad (especially the "R" and "T" series) kept on using similar interchangeable parts and form factors. Not only are these easier to upgrade, but to keep on going if something fails.
when something goes wrong, I can take it to a human, point out exactly what's wrong, and say, "Fix it" rather than play phone and shipping tag with some contracted-out support company. ... (1 hour of my time, vs. 2-3 months getting the run-around with Toshiba for my wife's previous laptop; there's a brand I'll never touch again).
Well there's your problem -- Toshiba. When the motherboard on my last Dell died a couple years back, I called their phone support and was off the phone in less than 20 minutes, and from the time I called them to the time they mailed me a box, I mailed back my laptop, they replaced the motherboard, and mailed it right back to me...that all took one week. And shit I could have bought TWO of those laptops for the price of a mac and had a spare to use for that week...as it was I had a spare anyway, because I snagged my brother's old Dell and slapped the hard drive into that.
You made your trade off decision. There is no fault in choosing Apple. But if you felt your Laptop needed to be more configurable then you should have gone with someone else.
I had Macs for the past 10 years. When they went uni-body I switch to a Think Pad. (for many reasons) but one of the reason was the problem I had with all my previous macs was after a few years the battery would die, (some of them actually had bent my case a bit). But I could always replace the battery. The new ones say that it isn't an issue and that I should Trust Apple... But I don't so I went with a system where I could replace the battery if needed.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Right, but, you don't have to have it replaced by Apple. http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Installing-MacBook-Air-Models-A1237-and-A1304-Battery/848/1 and a bunch of other sites have the procedure for swapping out the battery. No, it's not a "slide a clip and you're done" job, there's a screwdriver involved, but it's hardly difficult for anyone with any skill whatsoever. Not sure why subby thinks this makes it impossible, maybe they don't have a screwdriver and the skills to google.
Yeah, you can change the memory or hard drive, but that's about all. Apple is supposedly (I could be wrong, I don't own one) speced out as high end as possible (they're expensive enough!) so you probably shouldn't need upgrades.
Have you ever disassembled a notebook? I have an old IBM Thinkpad someone gave me, and I've been trying to get past a CMOS password, which involves completely disassembling it, powering it up, and shorting two pins on a chip. It's been sitting on a bench, half disassembled, for months. PITA.
So in my view, closed box notebooks are OK (if you can't change the battery that's certainlu NOT ok). OTOH, with a desktop computer, it would be insane to have it sealed up without possibility of upgrading. That would fly in the face of 30 years of how it's been done.
Free Martian Whores!
I think all of you are posers. I only use Workstation class laptops. i7 3.5ghz and workstation Nvidia graphics card. My dell precision is 900X better than your toy asus will ever be in it's life
The Dell Precision M6600 weighs almost eight US pounds. That makes is 3.5 times the PC that an ASUS EEE is, and only 90 times the PC that a Raspberry Pi is.
Fortunately, many of us use computers for something other that weight training,
Let me guess, you think your Chevy Aveo is as good as that BMW 325 you see pass you going to work every day.... how cute.
And I'm guessing that you think being stuck in traffic in a BMW would make you better than the people who zip past you on bicycles. There's the car analogy, are we done yet?
people buy those by the truck load and you can't upgrade a damn thing.
Third party batteries can be found in a few seconds of googling, as can the procedures for a user to swap them out themselves with basic tools. It's only "non user serviceable" in the same way that an oil change for your car isn't.
For those of us who wanted a real computer, the kind you can get into and tinker with, we built one from parts.
Ahhh..... a real computer is defined by being able to tinker with it.
And silly me thought a computer is a tool to get work done.
Apple fanboys are the target market for these products, they're "trendsetters", they represent how people are now.
When i was 13 years old I was building radios, repairing TV's, taking apart and repairing appliances.
I has an oscilloscope, there wasn't ANY piece of electronics I couldn't repair; there wasn't ANY device I didn't have a decent functional grasp of.
Fast forward 35 years. American culture is disposable, more corporate than ever. The people I work with have no idea how anything works, they have no clue how anything is interrelated. They live their lives, for the most part, oblivious, inept, and arrogant with a degree of over-specialization that is truly obnoxious. They sit around immersed in technology that they THINK they understand, but don't grasp the most basic aspects of - the hardware itself.
Web sites where people play with crude tech that I would have thought childish at 13 abound. The level of self delusion in American culture is palpable.
And don't get me started on the lack of a decent chemistry set. My Chemistry set from the 70's could get me imprisoned for 20+ years now.
Welcome to AppleWorld, a world of rampant ignorance, arrogance, and corporate greed and PR machines.
And people just eat that shit up.
I remember for most of my childhood hearing my grandfather complain about the cost of greater integration in virtually every area. From cars to the kitchen stove, integrated circuits were popping up all over the place, hindering repairability and it really pissed a lot of people off.
Every time we move towards greater integration, you always hear the conservative crowd crawling out of the woodwork. Lately it's just comical when you put it in the context of the last fifty years of electronics development. I mean you've already got 99% of your key components and circuits sealed inside a small number of integrated circuit housings, and have been for the last 30 years or more. To an extent it's ridiculous that anybody would be surprised that electronics are moving in this direction.
By the way, has anybody bothered to check the claimed lifespan on the new MacBook Pro retina's battery? If it lasts even 3/4 of the time they claim it will, you'll never need to worry about replacing it anyway. With new advancements in batteries, I fully expect the replaceable battery to go the way of the replaceable vacuum tube where computers are concerned. The only likely casualty will be the sense of accomplishment some folks get from resurrecting their old notebook. For the rest of us, we'll just be satisfied that the three year battery replacement cycle is now a thing of the past with batteries that outlive the device.
That *is* what a buyer of a pig in a poke is called.
Used to be, every laptop manufacturer had a proprietary interface, so you couldn't upgrade memory (except that bought from them) or hard drives (ditto). Now the drives are all SATA, and memory...
But Apple's so *k3wl*, y'know, and you've got more money than sense....
mark
The key point, of course, is that if you want to pack a lot of features and computing power into a tiny space, there's no room for anything that is not absolutely essential. Thus the iPhone, iPad, and Mac laptops. It would be great, I suppose, if users could replace the batteries in these machines. But it should not be a make-or-break feature.
If you want an upgradeable machine, then buy a desktop machine. There's no absolute need to squeeze components into every cubic millimeter of space. Surely the author of that Computer Age article understood this when he discussed his ancient PowerMac 8500 -- the reason it was so upgradeable was because there was available space inside that box.
I have an iPhone, and will use it until it breaks or until it becomes unusable due to total obsolescence. I also have two desktop Macs that I use constantly (and two or three older ones that are sitting in a closet). I've upgraded the RAM in the Power Mac G5, but won't add more RAM to the newer Mini until I have to. (When I do, it'll be easy.)
BAZINGA!
You're trying to be sarcastically funny, but there's a big difference between your ironic point and today.
TVs became "unrepairable" long after they stopped using tubes. There were TV repairmen well into the 90s (I work with someone who's family did it as a business). So while they eventually became commodity disposable items, there's a crucial difference: that was quite some time after the individual components within the TVs were not prone to frequent failure.
Now, please tell me which components within this $3,000 computer are not still prone to such failures, capable of 5+ years of operation. The ones off the top of my head are:
* storage
* memory
* power supply
* charge inverter
* battery
* keyboard
Ironically, the monitors, which are prone to cables breaking/fraying due to Apple designs, seem to be some of the longest lasting components on a modern laptop (especially the LED displays).
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I've already decided. I'll build my own laptop.
This idea was tried at one point. It never really took off. At best, laptops have an interchangeable optical drives, HDD, RAM, and a MiniPCI card. Anything else is going to require donor parts from other similar laptops. Some brands have laptops with interchangeable parts spanning several generations, others don't.
The moral of that story friend is ask around and find which units give the best customer service, or if you want to deal face to face? Then fuck the OEMs entirely and go to your local mom & pop shop. Personally I like Asus and Samsung units, never had a problem with support from either company, you ship it to them fast and they'll get it back to you fast. I usually go Asus on the smaller units and Samsung for the larger simply because I like the design on the larger Samsung units, but the larger Asus units are fine, just not quite as slick looking.
But ask around, there are plenty of geeks hanging out at sites like Tiger, Amazon, and Newegg that will be happy to give you the skinny. Another good place to check is the Newegg feedback, when you see someone posting bad reviews and the OEM doesn't respond? BAD sign. A good OEM should be trying to minimize bad feedback by working out those problems, not just letting them sit. I've seen both Asus and Samsung reps get on less than an hour after a bad posting saying "Please call us at xxxx, ext xxx and we'll fix the problem" which is frankly what ALL OEMs should be doing.
And on desktops? wouldn't go back to OEM if you paid me. I have to work on OEMs every damned day and it never ceases to amaze me at how bad they'll nickel and dime the customer trying to save a few cents. Shitty fans, not enough RAM for the OS, hell Dell has some units with no PS/2 ports which are what? 4c each? And worse off the damned things have LOUSY legacy USB support which makes them hell if you try to reinstall the OS because half the time the keyboard and/or mouse won't detect!
So you can get laptops that do what you want and still give you options, you just gotta ask around.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
It all depends on what you need the tool for. If I need to do heavy lifting I have an AMD 6 core with an HD4850 that does my heavy lifting just fine, but when I'm mobile? Im not doing heavy calculations, I'm downloading parts, going to OEMs to price replacements, I'm actually...oh what's the word...oh yeah WORKING. So what I need then is a unit that is easy to carry, gets great battery life, easy to plug into a customer's screen if they want to check out what I'm doing, etc. That's why I sold my full size for the EEE, it weighs only 2.5 pounds, gets between 5-7 hours depending on what I'm doing, and is small enough I can simply slide it under the seat of the truck when I need to pop into a store.
Frankly I never understood the whole "monster laptop" thing, because how many actually need to do heavy lifting AND are gonna need to do that lifting on the road? What, is someone asking that guy to design new engineering samples in solidworks from his hotel room? Over the years I've met maybe a half a dozen guys that actually NEED monster laptops while for the rest? It was an ePeen thing which is what the other poster sounds like. Its a laptop dude, not your dick.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
computing in which you have no control over what they do with your data
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
I can't imagine refreshing a $2000+ laptop after just two years. Seriously?
Under two conditions I would't mind a "closed box" computer.
1) A SIGNIFICANT price drop compared to other, 'unsealed' computers.
2) That the whole thing is recycleable. With the above two conditions, I would embrace the "closed box" concept because I have found that in my 30 years of building, fixing and supporting computers that I almost never upgrade a computer beyond memory and drives. Occasionly video cards, rarely other cards. Most other upgrades can be handeled via USB.
WITHOUT the above caveats I will vehemently reject "closed boxes".
THINK! It's patriotic
Frankly I never understood the whole "monster laptop" thing, because how many actually need to do heavy lifting AND are gonna need to do that lifting on the road?
Think Desktop Replacement
My desktop, about four years old, isn't a desktop, but a tower. It can handle four drives (they weren't that big at an affordable price four years ago), has a Core2 four-core processor (yeah, that sounds wrong, but it's right), 2.33 GHz, 4655.01 bogomips per core), and 4GB of memory. It's got onboard GeForce video, a DVD RW drive, and even an unused floppy. It takes up[ a lot of space, and when the power fails it'll run up to a half hour on my almost-as-big $150 UPS). Home-built, from parts bought at a Frys day-after-Thanksgiving sale, the MB/processor bought together at one of their special price deals trying to get rid of year-old inventory. But it's a good system and has served me well, currently with one of those 750 GB hybrid drives (SSD front end).
I still get good use out of my ASUS EEE-PC netbook, one of the early ones with 40 GB SSD and 10" screen; I recently updated the latest UBUNTU OS, which runs well on its relatively small screen. The original battery still gives me enough life to work between places where I can plug it in.
I recently needed a Windows box (because Citrix Xen management software, needed for work, requires it), and decided to buy a Toshiba Sattelite laptop; i7 4-core processor (only 2.20 GHz (4389.83 bogomips per core); it came with 650 GB HD and 6GB of memory, both upgradable. Technically it's slower than the desktop but tests show it seems to run faster, and I'm likely going to use it to replace my desktop, and take it with me if needed (probably hardly ever). Uses a lot less power, will last up to four hours on battery, (allowing me to use the UPS to power only my network (including VoIP phones), will run the new 1920x1600 monitor I've just ordered (hdmi). I've currently got the 650GB included drive split in half, 325 GB ea, Windows and Linux, but I'll probably switch to that 750GB hybrid drive, and go to 425 GB Linux.
Plus some (rather inconvenient because of it's weight) portability if I really need it.