With Apple’s announcement of the new Mac Book Pro, the interwebs had to find something to fret about and it appears that repair and upgradability is the new hobby horse for pundits to ride.
Kyle Wiens of ifixit wrote a good opinion story on the new Mac Book Pro.
I can’t disagree with what he wrote, it’s completely accurate. But he’s completely wrong that it’s a problem.
ZDNet, MSNBC, and CNET have all jumped on the FUD bandwagon with the story.
Choo, choo, all aboard the Pundit Express to PageHitsVille!
Thanks to a lucky combination of good brain wiring, an electrical engineer father, and an understanding and patient wife, I do a lot of repair and fixing around the home. I’ve repaired everything from our house wiring, dish washers, dryers, ovens, lamps, clocks, to the assorted home electronics of friends and family. I build my desktop computer from scratch. I like fixing things. But it’s a skill set that’s in decline.
The decline is not due to some evil plan by manufacturers, it’s due to the public desire for better products to appear regularly. The desire to buy good, low price, and reliable products that work out of the box is the driver for seeing the lack of ‘fixability’ in the new laptop line. And it’s not a bad thing.
Back in the 70s, there were TV commercials for self repair of your television set. You picked up a set of stickers at the testing unit at the supermarket, went home, opened your TV, pulled out all the tubes using stickers to match sockets and vacuum tubes, took all the tubes to the tester, plugged them in until you found the bad one(s), and bought the replacement. Take everything home, replug all the tubes, and hope the problem went away.
Sounds a little crazy right? Driving around town with vacuum tubes and finding replacement parts at your local supermarket? It sounds quaint and fun, but trust me the whole process sucked. Such a thing is unthinkable these days.
Today’s television experience is undeniably wonderful in comparison. No color drift, no warm up, no fine tuning, no horizontal and vertical lock, no buzzing, or any of the other symptoms commonly found with tube TVs. Today’s TVs are also now nearly impossible for the average person to repair due to modern manufacturing techniques from surface mount soldering to sealed assemblies. Today’s TVs are also better in every, single way than those from 20 years ago.
Most other technologies follow the same trajectories. I’m old enough that my first car had a carburetor and distribution cap, both of which had to be manually calibrated and was a huge pain in the ass. It took experience and skill to set them up properly. Today’s cars have electronic fuel injection and ignition controlled by a computer in the car. It’s exceedingly hard to tweak these things in the average car today. There is a sub-culture of ‘tuner car’ enthusiasts that rip out the standard car computer, replace it, and hack their performance to their heart’s content.
But 99.999% of automobile owners will never consider such a thing. For the vast majority of people, cars have never been more reliable and easier to drive.
In both cases what we have today works better, is cheaper, and is far less of a headache to own than similar items in the past. And this is a VERY GOOD THING.
To meet the demands of today’s consumer, modern manufacturing basically requires the very measures that the punditry is railing against. Fastening optimization, robotic soldering, minimization of variation, exacting tolerances, and made to order componentry are required to delivery great products.
To ask that every piece of modern electronics is designed to allow the tiny fraction of hackers to upgrade is the height of hubris, unreasonable, and a huge imposition on everyone else that has no desire to ever crack the case. All that ‘upgradability’ ends up making the product cost more and be more susceptible to failure. Catering to the fringe is not the way to make good products. Making the best product you can for a low price is the way to make good products, even if it means eliminating upgradability and home repair.
Hackers, hot rodders, and makers will always find a way to do what they want, but it shouldn’t come at the expense of everyone else that simply wants a good, reliable product.
For internet pundits to prattle on about non-upgradability as a serious issue is the height of disinformation. Anyone that NEEDS more than 768 GIGABYTES of storage in a laptop is a huge exception case. Anyone that wants to replace their LCD panel at home is simply a masochist.
So settle down interwebs, relax, and enjoy the amazing time we live in that such products are available.
As an unvarnished Apple fan boy with an uncommonly deep appreciation of the fact that he lives on a steady diet of Cupertino Kool-Aid, I’m always amazed by the amount of press – good or bad – that a simple product launch by Apple generates. In one camp you have the fawning Pogue-ites of the world, and in the other lazy technology journalists who can’t gin up any other meaningful stories to write – and in a third camp are the technology hipsters: “Oh, wait, it’s a handheld computer, phone, MP3 player that only costs $200? But if you hold it the wrong (contorted) way, the signal drops a bar? THEN SURELY IT SUCKS AND MUST BE DESTROYED IN A GREAT WAILING AND GNASHING OF OUR POINTY TEETH.”
Jesus, people. It’s just a phone, or it’s just a computer – gorgeously built, certainly flawed – and deserves no more attention than the latest thing out of Sony.
But I’m ranting. Should we be able to swap our own drives and memory? Hell yes. Buy a different laptop if that’s what you want. If you’re paying Apple’s ridiculous premium for its ridiculously great industrial hard/soft UX design, then you already *know* what you’re in for and moaning about something like this – towards which the company has been trending since introduction of the first iPod – is disingenuous at best and a waste of bandwidth at worst. Your crocodile tears merely water the lawn at One Infinite Loop.
Good points, and I agree with them all, though I think you missed Apple’s main reason for not making them upgradeable, and that’s to save every possible bit of space, to make it as thin as possible, and leave as much room for the batteries as possible.
With all due respect, you didn’t build a computer from scratch.
This guy did:
http://www.homebrewcpu.com/
It’s also inconceivable that anyone would want more than 640K of RAM.
Such unapologetic apple fanboy-ism is ok, I expect, but the arguments in this piece are banal in the extreme.
Actually Dropbear, using a quote from the 80s is banal in the extreme.
If you have an actual rebuttal, I’d love to hear it.
I agree with everything you’ve said, however I still feel like the amount of money they ask for upgrades to the base model is a little nutty. You should be able to buy 16GB of RAM in the number of modules they are soldering for $200, if not less. Asking for that as an *upgrade*? Yeesh!
I dunno, I’ll probably end up buying the new Pro model in a year or two, but I’ll never be happy about picking an upgrade option from Apple.
The Gates quote of 640K of RAM is also missing the mark by a million miles. Gates was referring to the future of the lifetime of home computing as a platform. This is simply the lifetime of the physical laptop. 3/4 of a TB is enough for most people who are going to own a computer for less than four years. When they buy a new one, it will most certainly have a larger HD. If it is insufficient in the interim, there’s lots of space in the cloud as well as a thunderbolt port to connect the RAID of your choice.
Great article and spot on. With the internet there’s always the problem of the vocal minority. The average user is indifferent to DIY fixability of notebooks.
Brings to mind an old saying: If you can afford to buy Cadillac, don’t complain about the price of its tires.
It would take the fun out of having a customized car if you couldn’t open the hood.
To me, the problem is limiting the amount of fun and stifling the imagination or creativity that comes from being able to poke around a piece of equipment you own. Life would be dull if everything looked the same and everyone was forced to take what was made, as is.
Creating products that can’t be repaired, or that use overly specialized parts that are not interchangeable with parts from other like devices is bad design, bad business and bad for the environment as well.
There are two ways to look at computers: is a computer a “part”, an item that exists itself as a component of the things around it, or is a computer a collection of parts, that can be changed, modified and replaced?
Items that can be considered a part in and of themselves need to meet certain requirements.
One of those requirements is that, in case of failure, the item’s replacement will not quickly exhaust the resources of its owner.
The second requirement is that, in case of failure, the items replacement will not exhaust the resources of its producer.
Lastly, the third requirement is that, in case of failure, the items replacement will not exhaust the resources of its environment.
Take the banana. The banana exists in and of itself. It is consumable, replaceable, and when you buy a banana, you don’t specify a banana of a specific type of peel. If your banana is consumed or goes bad, it will not quickly exhaust your resources to replace it. It also is unlikely that bananas going bad can exhaust the trees and farms that produce them. Lastly, a high amount of banana consumption is unlikely to exhaust our environment.
Laptops, televisions, and cars? These items, if they fail often enough, can exhaust the resources of their owner. They are repaired, with one exception, the television. Televisions have (largely) stopped being repaired as their price is unlikely to exhaust the resources of their owners, despite the fact that people buy more televisions more often. However, television consumption can exhaust the resources of the producers of televisions. If televisions were kept for as long as they were previously, LCD panel shortages would be much less likely or common. Beyond this, if our consumption of these kinds of devices is left unchecked, we can quickly exhaust the resources of our environment. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LCD_television#Environmental_effects http://isse.utk.edu/ccp/projects/compdisplayproj.html )
I note with irony the previous post about modding a cycling jersey, which is the clothing equivalent of modding you car, computer,, toaster, etc.
What next the argument that home repair is anti-capitalist as it means you don’t have to go out and buy a new one? 😛
I’m a masochist btw, or will be, as a bought a cheap macbook air with a cracked screen 🙂
Anonymous: You posted that same comment on Reddit. It’s a very nice ideological argument that might work well in academia, but is pointless in real life.
praxis22: I point out in the intro to my posts that I like to hack and repair, things, so there is no irony. If you want to buy a computer with a broken screen, go right ahead, but it has nothing to do with my point.
Everyone seems to be arguing that this is an either/or situation. It isn’t. I want my computer to turn on when I open the screen. I want my car to start when I turn the key. That’s it. My inability to modify or repair either of those tools doesn’t impact the robot I’m building from scratch.
Its an incredible time to be a maker or a hacker. The tools, gadgets, and kits out there provide an endless stream of things one can tinker with and build.
Normally not a big fan of commenting nowadays, but I have to chime in.
As a for hire consultant, I’m not a big fan of soldered RAM and non-replaceable drives on laptops.
Certainly a valid point about fringe hackers/tweakers etc… this kerfuffle has certainly been blown out of proportation.
However, recently I had a client who does a lot of aduio processing. She ran out of HD space for her projects. She’s not on the fringe of BYO computing. A few hundred dollars later and she was back to work with no problems.
She had the option of going with an external HD for her active projects, but that would of radically changed her workflow and portability. So she opted to replace the internal drive on her MBP 17.
Had she not been able to easily replace her drive, the only other option was to buy a new machine? That’s not a reasonable fix IMO.
On a personal note, my MBP i7 15 inch workhorse had 4 gigs of RAM, I opted not to buy Apple’s upgrade(cost) when I bought the machine. After some time I realized that Lion and this hardware was choking on many apps I use. The system was overall much more sluggish than I expected. I’m in the consultant biz, so I tweaked, repaired, reinstalled, configured, etc.. to no avail. Preformance simply wasn’t acceptable. So I doubled the RAM very cheaply and I’m back up to speed.
This would not of been an option if the RAM was soldered to the board. Sure I can de-solder and replace it, and void my apple care, or be without my laptop while Apple upgraded it, neither an option in my case.
So the fringe users you mention aren’t the only ones that benefit from a few user upgradable parts.
As far as Apple squeezing as much space as they can to make the next version of whatever thinner and lighter, it’s enough already. My now previous version MBP is light and thin enough.
Don’t get me started on lack of ports, as someone who fixes multiple platforms on aging hardware, I need those pretty often.
Just my 2 cents.
cheers for the discussion.
As an aside/addition to the television tube tester section …
There was a TV that came out in the later 60’s and early 70’s called a “Quasar” that took the same position that the article on the MacBook Pro Retina display does today. TVs were already switching to solid state parts instead of tubes, but the Quasar “brought back repairability” by incorporating a bunch of daughter cards that were individually replaceable. The idea was to have the benefits of the new technology but still keep the replaceability and self-servicing of parts thingie.
It failed miserably.
> Today’s TVs are also better in every, single way than those from 20 years ago.
I mostly agree with you, though analog artifacts are still far far more preferable to digital artifacts. If I NEVER got digital artifacts, yes, I would prefer the digital signal, since it looks better.. But since we DO get digital artifacts, I’d prefer a little snow rather than blockiness. (Only scratched DVDs cause blockiness nowadays, so of course DVDs are in every way superior to videotapes.)
Also, I’m actually “pro-copy protection”, at least in Slashdot argument situations, but HDCP is a pain, since I can’t keep my Tivo connected to my TV *and* my hard drive/DVD player at the same time (since I mostly view things through the hard drive/DVD player to watch a lot of shows faster than realtime after dubbing).
So I really don’t think TVs are better in every way.
Most of the complainers are computer freaks that make PCs an end in themselves, and not as a serious tool for one’s work. I love my Mac because it *disappears* into the background and allows me to focus on my work. They’re reliable as hell and suffer from little bugginess. A decade ago I had gotten used to having to buy a new Windows laptop every year, then I bought a new Intel MacBook Pro. I had that machine for five years, and I still sold it in ‘excellent’ condition on eBay for $800. There’s little I can tinker with on my MacBook Air, but that doesn’t bother me in the least. As they say, it just works and that’s just fine.
This article is right on the money.
The thing I am most afraid of is buyer’s remorse. There are so many BTO options for the various models that finding the “right” one becomes non-trivial.
Repairability is the least of my concerns here. I am more concerned with the ability to upgrade, which is quite different, imho.
The question is, am I willing to sacrifice the benefits of the Airs (lightness) for the ability to upgrade and future proof performance (MacBook Pro)?
Ironically, this was more easy to answer (personally I’d go with the Air) before the Retina existed. The Retina is so close to the ideal that the fact it doesn’t quite get there (it “only” lacks in the upgradable department) seems to be all the more jarring 🙂
Then again, I really can’t complain about Apple’s products at all – my main working computer is a 2007 MBP with 3GB RAM, and I’m running Windows apps in Parallels on it… I didn’t even put in an SSD yet…
I have a certification in electronics technician, used to work out of high school as someone that used to solder components and assemble motherboards/electronic test equipment. So, I have a background in doing this for a living, so I know what some electronics guys/gals like to do, but in this age where we have small components that are typically soldered onto the motherboard uses robotics and automatic wave soldering equipment. The best advice I can give for the most reliable system is order it maxed out in memory, which is only a $200, buy AppleCare and enjoy your computer. Apple has great tested memory that they use, is far more reliable than most third party memory and Apple covers their own products and can’t really help with third party, so to me, this isn’t a big deal.
The problem is not that Apple has made their new machines tinker proof, it’s the fact that they’ve made them future proof, and not in a good way. Need more RAM? Too bad. Need a new HD? Too bad. Screen broken? Too bad. They’re moving toward disposable computers where the user has NO control over their data. In the future you’ll park all your data in the iCloud and you’ll like it. Don’t like that? Too bad.