for people willing to invest in the tools, scout out parts suppliers, and learn the procedures, that is actually quite affordable.
These days it's even easier. ifixit.com has parts, tools, and well documented procedures for fixing pretty much anything that can go wrong with an Apple product.
Right, that's one resource of several. But the really cool thing is how hardcore fans will cast off their slightly elderly or only trivially broken devices. It makes for an opportunistic environment.
As long as 24 fps is still available somewhere at current prices, I don't really see the problem. Let people who care pay the extra money for the higher framerate. If there are enough to make it profitable, the technique will continue. If not, it won't. In the meantime, I can decline to participate. It's all good.
Currently, given a 2D or 3D version of a film, we choose the 2D version. I don't begrudge the people who want to pay extra to see a blurry gimmicky image. That is their choice, and welcome to it.
I don't think it's intentional. I attended a legalize rally at UCLA sometime in the early 90s. Some intelligent professorial guy stood up, gave an impassioned speech for legalization, rambled on about hemp and uses for it, how it would save the world. He was met with silence. The next "speaker" was a dreadlocked fellow, stood up and said "I like Pot cuz i can Smooooooke it!", to the howls of appreciation from the audience.
Ok, I may have chosen a bad example... but nevertheless, in general, when someone makes a case for a position that absolutely destroys that position, it doesn't hurt to look into ulterior motives. Like, are the dreadlocks a wig?:-)
What is the point of this kind of trolling in article summaries, really?
Keep waiting. The biggest feature of apple products is the price tag. If they were cheap, they'd be no more desirable than any other notebook. It's the same thing with a prada bag vs a superior but less expensive generic.
You have a point, but, funny you should mention that -- my teenage daughter had a huge score a couple years back in an estate sale. She bought some unusual clothes and footwear for incredibly little -- garage sale prices -- and didn't think much of it (except she really liked the clothes) until she entered a boutique one day and the store owner complimented her on her clothes. When it became apparent daughter didn't know what the woman was talking about, she pointed out various details of daughter's clothing, revealing that these were originals from a well-known designer. Daughter was amazed -- to her they were just clothes.
The point being, genuine, although perhaps obsolete, boutique products can be had for reasonable prices if you know where to look. Let someone else pay the list price, and snag the object when they get tired of it. For a somewhat similar reason, my last three cars have been lease returns. 15 - 17 K miles, well maintained, and a substantial discount over showroom price. Let someone else pay for that new car smell.
What is the point of this kind of trolling in article summaries, really?
Really, you have a point. But the pedantic in me points out that $50 macbooks are a reality, free macbooks even. The disposable Apple culture, where significant numbers of people absolutely must have the next incremental improvement, coupled with common consumable parts that are not user replaceable, has created a brisk used market, for people willing to invest in the tools, scout out parts suppliers, and learn the procedures, that is actually quite affordable. It has kept me busy, replacing screens, audio jacks and batteries in discarded Apple devices and putting them back in service, resources for people who do not feel the need for the latest shiny object. Where did you think all those old devices went, landfill? Well, I suppose many do, but I try to recover as many as I have time for.
I don't happen to have a macbook in stock, but I have two towers and an 8g touch, and a nano waiting on parts.
About 25 or 30 years ago in Toronto they had a "town forum" on one of the local super stations. The subject was about legalizing pot. Some stoner had the floor and when he got to the mic his speech went something like: "Ya heh heh heh.... Like I smoke pot you know... And like....... uhhh......... heh heh... I fogot what I was gonna say......" then he turned around and sat down. The station this was on broadcast to all of southern Ontario, and transmitters close to the border meant a good chunk of the U.S. across Lakes Ontario and Erie. Potential audience of many millions (actual audience probably a few million since it was during the news hour... pre-internet days). A better spokesman for making weed illegal could not have been found. The panel were speechless for a minute.
Agreed, and when I hear something like this, I wonder if it wasn't intentional. It's a well known political tactic to find a subject to pretend to be on the other side in order to make a very bad case for the other side's position.
Well, firstly, the T30 is not junk, and going along with the general theme of the discussion here, you can still do useful things with it, so there's no real reason to swap it out. This is a concept that seems alien to Apple fans -- the concept of Good Enough. The processor, although single core, runs at the same speed as my workstation (which is admittedly four core). The T30 is still useful as a web client, and has acceptable response running M$ Office for homework.
Secondly, this is not the only computer she owns. She also has a tablet (unfortunately running Windows 7 Pro, a necessary evil at least for now) and a desktop machine. When we got the tablet the T30 went into retirement, but she recently asked that I revive it because she was getting annoyed with trying to work Win7 on a tablet. (Windows doesn't handle the touch interface very well.)
Folks, it's become clear from the discussions here that there is a basic misunderstanding between the Mac and non-Mac people. (The people who are straddling the issue have a more realistic perspective, I think.)
In the Mac world, the battery is considered part of the device, and the rationalization is that you will want to buy the next new shiny device when it comes out anyway, which will surely be before the practical lifetime of the battery in your current device, so the fact that a consumable is not user replaceable is not an issue. Apple marketing tends to promote this mindset and Mac fans who have bought into it will sometimes go to amusing lengths (from the perspective of non-Mac users) to rationalize it.
In the non-Mac world, batteries tend more to be considered a consumable resource not directly bound to the device itself. The battery is something you expect to replace at some future time when it no longer holds an acceptable charge. There are exceptions, but this is generally the case.
Apple marketing operates on a "pull" mentality, where the company decides when fans will upgrade, by promoting a culture where the next incremental improvement is a "must have". This takes a special kind of mindshare and Apple has cultivated it brilliantly over the years. You don't see former Samsung customers lining up for the next model Galaxy... well, you do, a little. Perhaps that wasn't the best example. But in general, outside the Apple world, people tend to operate on a "push" mentality, where they replace a device when the current device no longer meets their needs. To people with this mindset, a battery powered device with a non-replaceable battery doesn't make any more sense than a car with the wheels welded on.
And so, with one side calling a battery replacement an "upgrade" or "repair", it's no wonder that the other side, who considers this action part of regular maintenance, doesn't get it.
> I think if they could make the battery user-replaceable, and exactly as large as it is now, without affecting the size of the device then they would do so.
Um, no, they really wouldn't. The whole purpose (speaking as one who has spent years in marketing for a large company) is to promote a disposable mindset. It's genius, really -- how the next incremental increase is timed to be comfortably within the lifespan of consumable, but non-replaceable parts in the previous model, and how Apple consumers help the company promote this mindset by rationalizing design decisions.
That's funny, but this really happened. I have to wear a med alert bracelet now and I have a scar that would frighten children. The case of the droidx is scarred and the screen was not entirely protected by the screen protector, but the phone (somewhat surprisingly) still works. Which is disappointing in a way, as work is now issuing the X2.
I'm not cheering, I'm furious. There was no reason for this to happen. Some group of suits decided or were coerced into choosing to bet the company on a platform obviously unlikely (in today's economy) to acquire significant market share, and people not involved in the decision suffer for it. It's inexcusable.
This is not about Windows Phone 7 failing, it's about people being out of work through bad decisions made by upper management. And as you pointed out, even if the company somehow manages to survive, those jobs are probably lost forever.
The battery bay must be out of tolerance. I will grant you that the original Bold, although it had some nice features (a big screen for a Blackberry, and one of the nicest keyboards they ever produced) had some inexcusably bad design decisions and build issues. After returning my second Bold to IT, I requested a Tour, which was not quite as nice feature-wise but a much better structural design. The problem at the time was that the Bold was AT&T and the Tour was Verizon only. I don't know what the situation is now, as I've moved on to Android. [1]
[1] The story there is that the company outsourced all IT functions on a Friday, and on Saturday at 10:31 AM the BES server went down hard and remained down for a week and a half. By the time the offshore admins had it up again, my fellow employees had switched en-masse to other platforms. Sucks to be Blackberry.
I used the example of the 4 specifically because I know of two 4 owners who stood in the rain to get a 4s. I will never understand that. But more to the point: Buggy whips are only useful if you're into a little light S/M or actually still riding a buggy. (I shoot horse shows, and people really still ride horse buggies for sport, and consider buggy whips definitely worth repairing, but never mind.) Steam engines are only useful if you have some reason to own a steam engine. For instance, if you had water and firewood but no access to petrol, repairing a steam engine might be considered a good idea.
But an original ipod touch still runs ipod touch apps and still plays music, and if it meets one's needs, it is still useful. I have one in the lab right now with a broken screen and bad headphone jack, and I have the parts to fix it when I get the time. (I first have to replace the battery in a friend's mini.)
I have an ancient 3rd generation ipod in my truck (my only personal Apple device in use at this time). It connects directly to the radio (a feature of the radio) which allows me to control the ipod, so it only has to come out of the glove box when I add music to it. Works fine, no reason to change. I may replace the battery some day. Simply because a newer model exists, doesn't make the device I own any less useful. (One caveat; it is Firewire, so won't work with any of Apple's newer laptops, but that's ok because putting Firewire on a Windows box is trivial.)
Being from South America, original poster probably doesn't speak English as a first language. Tell you what -- you post something in his native language (babelfish is cheating) and we'll compare. It could be amusing.
you should try having to use a blackberry (thanks, work). Fucking battery falls out all the fucking time. very fucking irritating.
I had an original Bold as a work phone, and the back would fall off all the time. (Bad clasp design.) I don't recall the battery falling out, though. The clasp was redesigned in the Tour and the new Bold, and the problem did not resurface.
Didn't this question come up in slashdot 2-3 years ago? I believe the answer is still: supply and demand. The same reason technical manuals are more expensive than Harlequin Romance novels.
Buggy whips are perfectly repairable, as are steam engines. The problem? Running them is infinitely more expensive than upgrading to modern equivalents.
False premise. That the 4s has been released doesn't make the 4 a buggy whip. It's still a phone, and it still makes calls. (Unless you hold it wrong.)
If user replaceable parts weren't popular, then why do the majority of computer and phone manufacturers make products with easily replaceable parts? These companies aren't stupid, so surely they'd cut corners to make a non-modular, sealed box to save money if only an insignificant numbers of users wanted to be able to replace parts. I don't think your excuse fits with reality.
My old iPod was more expensive to repair than a brand new iPod with 4x the storage capacity. I wasn't offended and just bought a new one instead. In fact, I was quite stoked.
(nod) That is by design. It's part of the Apple business model, even the "stoked" part.
Perhaps you both have good sticky fingers and never drop your phone? I've seen the battery pop out of a Druid X just 2 days ago.
My Droid X has been dropped lots of times. Last June it went down with me on east i84, at speed, motorcycle accident, ripped out of the holster, case scarred up from the impact and skittering across the asphalt, recovered by the EMT who got it back to me after I regained consciousness in ICU. The phone still worked and the battery had not popped out. So no, I don't know what you're talking about. "The battery popping out" sounds like a made-up thing from Apple fanbois.
Good point about the "system restore" disc -- I hate it when online support suggests that to a hapless consumer as a solution for a driver problem. They should be ashamed.
But in this case, the hard drive was dying, and she wanted a bigger one anyway. We did back up her data first.
> So how often do you "repair" your daughter's T30? Is half an hour off the "repair" time, once every couple of years, REALLY worth carrying around the extra fittings to give you easily accessible components?
Well, lessee, it's 15 years old, and I've "repaired" it (replaced hard drive and battery) three times, and the screen one time. That's four times I did not have to buy a new laptop. Yes, it really is worth carrying around the extra fittings, and this is a selling point for me when buying a new device. Even were I a non-geek who always had someone else open the battery door, the ability of a reasonably handy person to repair the device would still be a factor.
Slashdot Mirror
for people willing to invest in the tools, scout out parts suppliers, and learn the procedures, that is actually quite affordable.
These days it's even easier. ifixit.com has parts, tools, and well documented procedures for fixing pretty much anything that can go wrong with an Apple product.
Right, that's one resource of several. But the really cool thing is how hardcore fans will cast off their slightly elderly or only trivially broken devices. It makes for an opportunistic environment.
As long as 24 fps is still available somewhere at current prices, I don't really see the problem. Let people who care pay the extra money for the higher framerate. If there are enough to make it profitable, the technique will continue. If not, it won't. In the meantime, I can decline to participate. It's all good.
Currently, given a 2D or 3D version of a film, we choose the 2D version. I don't begrudge the people who want to pay extra to see a blurry gimmicky image. That is their choice, and welcome to it.
I don't think it's intentional. I attended a legalize rally at UCLA sometime in the early 90s. Some intelligent professorial guy stood up, gave an impassioned speech for legalization, rambled on about hemp and uses for it, how it would save the world. He was met with silence. The next "speaker" was a dreadlocked fellow, stood up and said "I like Pot cuz i can Smooooooke it!", to the howls of appreciation from the audience.
Ok, I may have chosen a bad example... but nevertheless, in general, when someone makes a case for a position that absolutely destroys that position, it doesn't hurt to look into ulterior motives. Like, are the dreadlocks a wig? :-)
"I'm still waiting for my under $50 Macbook."
What is the point of this kind of trolling in article summaries, really?
Keep waiting. The biggest feature of apple products is the price tag. If they were cheap, they'd be no more desirable than any other notebook. It's the same thing with a prada bag vs a superior but less expensive generic.
You have a point, but, funny you should mention that -- my teenage daughter had a huge score a couple years back in an estate sale. She bought some unusual clothes and footwear for incredibly little -- garage sale prices -- and didn't think much of it (except she really liked the clothes) until she entered a boutique one day and the store owner complimented her on her clothes. When it became apparent daughter didn't know what the woman was talking about, she pointed out various details of daughter's clothing, revealing that these were originals from a well-known designer. Daughter was amazed -- to her they were just clothes.
The point being, genuine, although perhaps obsolete, boutique products can be had for reasonable prices if you know where to look. Let someone else pay the list price, and snag the object when they get tired of it. For a somewhat similar reason, my last three cars have been lease returns. 15 - 17 K miles, well maintained, and a substantial discount over showroom price. Let someone else pay for that new car smell.
"I'm still waiting for my under $50 Macbook."
What is the point of this kind of trolling in article summaries, really?
Really, you have a point. But the pedantic in me points out that $50 macbooks are a reality, free macbooks even. The disposable Apple culture, where significant numbers of people absolutely must have the next incremental improvement, coupled with common consumable parts that are not user replaceable, has created a brisk used market, for people willing to invest in the tools, scout out parts suppliers, and learn the procedures, that is actually quite affordable. It has kept me busy, replacing screens, audio jacks and batteries in discarded Apple devices and putting them back in service, resources for people who do not feel the need for the latest shiny object. Where did you think all those old devices went, landfill? Well, I suppose many do, but I try to recover as many as I have time for.
I don't happen to have a macbook in stock, but I have two towers and an 8g touch, and a nano waiting on parts.
About 25 or 30 years ago in Toronto they had a "town forum" on one of the local super stations. The subject was about legalizing pot. Some stoner had the floor and when he got to the mic his speech went something like: "Ya heh heh heh.... Like I smoke pot you know... And like.... ... uhhh ... ... ... heh heh ... I fogot what I was gonna say... ..." then he turned around and sat down. The station this was on broadcast to all of southern Ontario, and transmitters close to the border meant a good chunk of the U.S. across Lakes Ontario and Erie. Potential audience of many millions (actual audience probably a few million since it was during the news hour... pre-internet days). A better spokesman for making weed illegal could not have been found. The panel were speechless for a minute.
Agreed, and when I hear something like this, I wonder if it wasn't intentional. It's a well known political tactic to find a subject to pretend to be on the other side in order to make a very bad case for the other side's position.
Mac fanboi hyperbole. Thanks for playing.
Well, firstly, the T30 is not junk, and going along with the general theme of the discussion here, you can still do useful things with it, so there's no real reason to swap it out. This is a concept that seems alien to Apple fans -- the concept of Good Enough. The processor, although single core, runs at the same speed as my workstation (which is admittedly four core). The T30 is still useful as a web client, and has acceptable response running M$ Office for homework.
Secondly, this is not the only computer she owns. She also has a tablet (unfortunately running Windows 7 Pro, a necessary evil at least for now) and a desktop machine. When we got the tablet the T30 went into retirement, but she recently asked that I revive it because she was getting annoyed with trying to work Win7 on a tablet. (Windows doesn't handle the touch interface very well.)
Folks, it's become clear from the discussions here that there is a basic misunderstanding between the Mac and non-Mac people. (The people who are straddling the issue have a more realistic perspective, I think.)
In the Mac world, the battery is considered part of the device, and the rationalization is that you will want to buy the next new shiny device when it comes out anyway, which will surely be before the practical lifetime of the battery in your current device, so the fact that a consumable is not user replaceable is not an issue. Apple marketing tends to promote this mindset and Mac fans who have bought into it will sometimes go to amusing lengths (from the perspective of non-Mac users) to rationalize it.
In the non-Mac world, batteries tend more to be considered a consumable resource not directly bound to the device itself. The battery is something you expect to replace at some future time when it no longer holds an acceptable charge. There are exceptions, but this is generally the case.
Apple marketing operates on a "pull" mentality, where the company decides when fans will upgrade, by promoting a culture where the next incremental improvement is a "must have". This takes a special kind of mindshare and Apple has cultivated it brilliantly over the years. You don't see former Samsung customers lining up for the next model Galaxy... well, you do, a little. Perhaps that wasn't the best example. But in general, outside the Apple world, people tend to operate on a "push" mentality, where they replace a device when the current device no longer meets their needs. To people with this mindset, a battery powered device with a non-replaceable battery doesn't make any more sense than a car with the wheels welded on.
And so, with one side calling a battery replacement an "upgrade" or "repair", it's no wonder that the other side, who considers this action part of regular maintenance, doesn't get it.
> I think if they could make the battery user-replaceable, and exactly as large as it is now, without affecting the size of the device then they would do so.
Um, no, they really wouldn't. The whole purpose (speaking as one who has spent years in marketing for a large company) is to promote a disposable mindset. It's genius, really -- how the next incremental increase is timed to be comfortably within the lifespan of consumable, but non-replaceable parts in the previous model, and how Apple consumers help the company promote this mindset by rationalizing design decisions.
That's funny, but this really happened. I have to wear a med alert bracelet now and I have a scar that would frighten children. The case of the droidx is scarred and the screen was not entirely protected by the screen protector, but the phone (somewhat surprisingly) still works. Which is disappointing in a way, as work is now issuing the X2.
This might be a question to the old-timers in the audience, but don't the screen shots look kinda like... Windows 3.1?
I should add that it's also entirely obvious that this would happen since the MS deal.
That's what makes me so angry. Nokia was a great company once, that made some great products. Excuse me while I go take my blood pressure medicine.
I'm not cheering, I'm furious. There was no reason for this to happen. Some group of suits decided or were coerced into choosing to bet the company on a platform obviously unlikely (in today's economy) to acquire significant market share, and people not involved in the decision suffer for it. It's inexcusable.
This is not about Windows Phone 7 failing, it's about people being out of work through bad decisions made by upper management. And as you pointed out, even if the company somehow manages to survive, those jobs are probably lost forever.
The battery bay must be out of tolerance. I will grant you that the original Bold, although it had some nice features (a big screen for a Blackberry, and one of the nicest keyboards they ever produced) had some inexcusably bad design decisions and build issues. After returning my second Bold to IT, I requested a Tour, which was not quite as nice feature-wise but a much better structural design. The problem at the time was that the Bold was AT&T and the Tour was Verizon only. I don't know what the situation is now, as I've moved on to Android. [1]
[1] The story there is that the company outsourced all IT functions on a Friday, and on Saturday at 10:31 AM the BES server went down hard and remained down for a week and a half. By the time the offshore admins had it up again, my fellow employees had switched en-masse to other platforms. Sucks to be Blackberry.
I used the example of the 4 specifically because I know of two 4 owners who stood in the rain to get a 4s. I will never understand that. But more to the point: Buggy whips are only useful if you're into a little light S/M or actually still riding a buggy. (I shoot horse shows, and people really still ride horse buggies for sport, and consider buggy whips definitely worth repairing, but never mind.) Steam engines are only useful if you have some reason to own a steam engine. For instance, if you had water and firewood but no access to petrol, repairing a steam engine might be considered a good idea.
But an original ipod touch still runs ipod touch apps and still plays music, and if it meets one's needs, it is still useful. I have one in the lab right now with a broken screen and bad headphone jack, and I have the parts to fix it when I get the time. (I first have to replace the battery in a friend's mini.)
I have an ancient 3rd generation ipod in my truck (my only personal Apple device in use at this time). It connects directly to the radio (a feature of the radio) which allows me to control the ipod, so it only has to come out of the glove box when I add music to it. Works fine, no reason to change. I may replace the battery some day. Simply because a newer model exists, doesn't make the device I own any less useful. (One caveat; it is Firewire, so won't work with any of Apple's newer laptops, but that's ok because putting Firewire on a Windows box is trivial.)
Being from South America, original poster probably doesn't speak English as a first language. Tell you what -- you post something in his native language (babelfish is cheating) and we'll compare. It could be amusing.
you should try having to use a blackberry (thanks, work). Fucking battery falls out all the fucking time. very fucking irritating.
I had an original Bold as a work phone, and the back would fall off all the time. (Bad clasp design.) I don't recall the battery falling out, though. The clasp was redesigned in the Tour and the new Bold, and the problem did not resurface.
Didn't this question come up in slashdot 2-3 years ago? I believe the answer is still: supply and demand. The same reason technical manuals are more expensive than Harlequin Romance novels.
Buggy whips are perfectly repairable, as are steam engines. The problem? Running them is infinitely more expensive than upgrading to modern equivalents.
False premise. That the 4s has been released doesn't make the 4 a buggy whip. It's still a phone, and it still makes calls. (Unless you hold it wrong.)
If user replaceable parts weren't popular, then why do the majority of computer and phone manufacturers make products with easily replaceable parts? These companies aren't stupid, so surely they'd cut corners to make a non-modular, sealed box to save money if only an insignificant numbers of users wanted to be able to replace parts. I don't think your excuse fits with reality.
Apple users live in a different reality.
My old iPod was more expensive to repair than a brand new iPod with 4x the storage capacity. I wasn't offended and just bought a new one instead. In fact, I was quite stoked.
(nod) That is by design. It's part of the Apple business model, even the "stoked" part.
Perhaps you both have good sticky fingers and never drop your phone? I've seen the battery pop out of a Druid X just 2 days ago.
My Droid X has been dropped lots of times. Last June it went down with me on east i84, at speed, motorcycle accident, ripped out of the holster, case scarred up from the impact and skittering across the asphalt, recovered by the EMT who got it back to me after I regained consciousness in ICU. The phone still worked and the battery had not popped out. So no, I don't know what you're talking about. "The battery popping out" sounds like a made-up thing from Apple fanbois.
Good point about the "system restore" disc -- I hate it when online support suggests that to a hapless consumer as a solution for a driver problem. They should be ashamed.
But in this case, the hard drive was dying, and she wanted a bigger one anyway. We did back up her data first.
> So how often do you "repair" your daughter's T30? Is half an hour off the "repair" time, once every couple of years, REALLY worth carrying around the extra fittings to give you easily accessible components?
Well, lessee, it's 15 years old, and I've "repaired" it (replaced hard drive and battery) three times, and the screen one time. That's four times I did not have to buy a new laptop. Yes, it really is worth carrying around the extra fittings, and this is a selling point for me when buying a new device. Even were I a non-geek who always had someone else open the battery door, the ability of a reasonably handy person to repair the device would still be a factor.