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Ask Slashdot: Best Laptops For Fans Of Pre-Retina MacBook Pro?
stigmato writes "Once upon a time the MacBook Pro line was well-regarded amongst IT professionals for their quality, performance, serviceability & upgradeability. As appealing as the new Retina displays are, I don't want a device I cannot upgrade or repair. Glued in batteries and soldered in RAM with high prices have made me look to other manufacturers again. What are you buying, /. community? System76? Dell? Old article but still rings true with the latest models. I post this from my 2010 MBP 13" with a 256GB SSD, 1TB HDD in the optical bay, 8GB (possibly 16GB soon) and a user replaced battery."
Apple has realized that making serviceable devices is a dead end when the processor hardware is good enough to be future proof. And their solution is the same solution many sectors of the economy face. Our automobiles are disposable consumer oriented devices, our kitchen appliances are as well, washing machines, you name it all service and repair departments are being down graded to expedite product end life.
Obsolescence is not just planned it has become a manufacturing industry mantra. With essentially slave labour doing the recycling of these goods, either that or illegal at sea dumping operations turning over the used goods we are headed down a technical path to environmental and consumer driven stupidity!
This message was not sent from an iPhone because Peter Sellers really was a deviated prevert without a dime for the call
Not in 2013, it is standard tv resolution.
A new macbook pro is 2560x1600 or 2880x1800. A Chrome pixel is 2560x1700.
1920x1080 is not an uncommon android phone resolution. At at 5" just about perfect. For a screen any larger it is simply too low.
It's not just about being repairable.
With previous generation Apple laptops, I could put all the money into the machine with the best CPU and pay extra for the hires matte screen, and just get 4gigs of RAM and the cheapest, slowest HDD they had.
Then I could pay an extra $100 to upgrade it to 16gb of RAM on my own (rather than pay Apple an extra $400 or $600 or whatever) and buy and install my own 1tb harddrive or my own SSD or whatever, again, for a fraction of what Apple charge for that. And, to be clear, that'd be my plan no matter what laptop I bought. Always has been. Every laptop manufacturer charges those insane prices for extra RAM or better HDDs.
With the RAM (and harddrive!) soldered on, you can't do that anymore.
It's not just about fixing broken stuff. It's about getting a better deal and potentially saving hundreds of dollars to get a phenomenally better computer.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.