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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."
I really like my Lenovo T-series laptop. Sure, it may not live up to the legendary build quality back when it was an IBM, but it is still pretty good. It has all the user replacement options that are standard, a good keyboard and screen. It's not getting an award for its looks, but well, who cares.
I bought a MacBook air a year ago. The first one exploded to blew my hand off. The next one killed my dog. It wouldn't run DR-DOS at all. The wifi screwed up and sterilized my nuts.
Overall I was left with a really bad feeling about all Apple products, which obviously must all have similar defects. Anecdotes by unverifiable semi-anonymous internet posters prove that to be true.
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
I think the point is repairing sealed phones is - for most people, even IT folk - a non-trivial and risk-filled task. Likewise with newer MBPs.
Generic Wintel laptops, while not entirely user-serviceable (though I've replaced several screens and keyboards without incident and of course RAM and hard drive upgrades are trivial), are much, much easier to upgrade than sealed MBPs. Of course it can be done but generally it's done by "professionals" who have done it a hundred+ times and have the right tools for separating plastics, un-glueing (is that a word? De-glueing?) without cracking screens, cases, etc.
Likewise a car engine is "user serviceable" if you know what you're doing but I've tried doing relatively minor repairs on my engine (spark plugs and such) and did some real damage because I am just not that great mechanically and had to take it to a mechanic.
"Do you want to stick with OSX or are fine with a different OS?" If the former you are stuck. If the latter then decide on a feature set must haves and price point and buy what meets those needs. Dell, HP, Leveno all make good machines so it really comes down to what meets your needs.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
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.
You keep saying 'self respecting slashdotter' like this means a single, measurable thing. Some IT people are hardware types and some are software types and a small handful are both. They are called 'silos'. Look it up.
Also, among that few who 'like' to work on hardware, many of those are wise enough not to stretch their comfort zones - due to bad experiences, just like the one you replied to above.
As a 'self respecting slashdotter', you really ought to know this.
You like Apple and feel like the repair issue isn't a thing. Fine. That's your opinion. How's about letting the other folks express theirs without replying to every. single. post?