Hacker News Reader

Comment by mmastrac | Hacker News Reader

It's not just software. While I'm still a fan of Macbooks, I'm getting close to abandoning ship thanks to the increasingly un-repairability of these things. I have a Macbook from ~2008 that's still functional as a media PC thanks to memory/SSD upgrades and battery replacements over the years.

My current Macbook Pro has memory soldered on to the motherboard and a battery glued to the case. The SSD is technically replaceable, but the specs that this laptop shipped with are going to be the specs that it dies with.

When the battery goes, I'll have to either risk destroying the machine or pay way too much to Apple to do the job for me. At that point I'll probably just switch to a brand with a more reasonable user-servicing model, assuming those still exist.

View on HN

Comparable laptops aren't really any better. The rMBP is a lot more repairable than say the Surface Book (which won't let you even open the case without possibly cracking the display). At least Apple has a battery replacement service at an advertised price--what'll Dell charge you to replace the non-servicable battery in the XPS13 or XPS15? And no other PC laptop hits that right sweet spot of power/battery/display quality. ThinkPads have great power and good battery, but shitty screens.[1] Dells and HPs with gorgeous 4k screens can barely get 4-5 hours out of them.

I almost jumped ship recently because the Surface Book hits a great mix of screen quality/power/battery life, but judging by the forums, it's buggy as hell. So what to do? I'd love a swap-able battery in my rMBP like I have in my T450s, but at the end of the day, I never reach for my ThinkPad when I've got my Mac handy. I'll just go ahead and pay the $200 bucks Apple charges to replace the sealed battery.

[1] My non-technical wife, who has a Mac, recently needed to use my work laptop. Her first reaction on seeing the screen was "wow, your firm cheaped out, huh?" I've got a totally maxed out ThinkPad T450s with i7, 20GB of RAM, and FHD IPS display.

It's a bit of an overstatement to say that the batteries are unreplaceable. They have some tape on them and they require patience to remove, but that's not anything new as far as laptop part upgrades go.

https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Dell+XPS+13+Teardown/36157

> Surface Book

Man, I love the idea of this thing.

But I recently tried moving to Surface Book. Spent nearly $3k on a real nicely specc'd one. It BSOD'd daily, sleep modes are really confusing, battery drained terribly overnight, it was overall a bit of a nightmare. Granted probably half of my complaints are about Win10 rather than the SB itself, but still. I returned it.

It's SO CLOSE and if it was $1,000 cheaper I may have just dealt with it. Just not quite there.

I have a Surface Book and am sticking through the problems, I've experienced everything you've mentioned. Bought it on launch, things have gotten significantly better with firmware and driver updates, but it still has a little ways to go. Seemingly the majority of the problems have to do with Skylake. At the rate things have been going, I estimate a couple more months before they have the big bugs all ironed out.

S and X Thinkpad lines have considerably improved screens nowadays. Nowhere near Retina, but they get the job done. Also, most of the parts inside are field serviceable, you don't really need more than a screwdriver to fix it.

The P Thinkpad has a 4K IPS screen: http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/p-series/p70/#...

I'm not sure about the battery, as it's brand new, and I don't have a need to replace it yet, but the RAM and SSD are both user replaceable on the XPS15. The battery looks like it would be a fairly easy swap as well, as long as you could source the new one.

> "as long as you could source the new one"

Thats the most difficult part. Original battery costs a fortune (some of them cost almost half of the new basic laptop). And if you decide to get a third party alternative - its basically a russian roulette, you never know what you gonna get, most of them are just terrible and barely last couple months

The big difference being a lot of the competition's options are at a 30-50% lower price.

>[1] My non-technical wife, who has a Mac, recently needed to use my work laptop. Her first reaction on seeing the screen was "wow, your firm cheaped out, huh?" I've got a totally maxed out ThinkPad T450s with i7, 20GB of RAM, and FHD IPS display.

Oxymoron: tech reasons of how great your computer is; and an argument on why a non technical people don't like it.

I've concluded that spec sheets in advertising are at best excuses, and at worst lies. Most users don't care what the exact pixel count is, they just want enough pixels that everything looks great. They don't care exactly how much RAM or storage there is, so long as they don't run out of it (either "brick wall effect" or discernible slowdowns). They don't care exactly how fast the processor is, so long as it's perceived as "fast enough". If specifications are presented, it's done so precisely to convince the user "this is good enough" ... but if it was good enough, customers wouldn't be looking at those numbers to see if it's at least above some criteria indicating "well, I guess I can put up with it since you put it that way".

That's precisely why Apple doesn't give specifications for as many products as they can get away with. RAM specs are limited to regular computers. Devices with "retina" displays don't list pixel counts any more (or at least overtly so). Given how they're pushing to make storage size irrelevant on mobile devices (iCloud, dynamic app deletion/installation, Photos cloud storage, etc), I expect they'll eventually drop exact local storage specs in most ads (opting for "small/medium/large").

My point wasn't that a non-technical person would appreciate the specs. It's that the screen is so bad that it makes a non-technical person think it's a cheap-o laptop instead of one that costs almost $2,000.

And my point is that the lousy screen is sold as satisfactory because the customer is told & convinced that the specifications say it's satisfactory.

Many business class laptops are modular enough to replace the hard drives.

I swapped the DVD player out on an elitebook for a second 500 GB SSD.

ThinkPad screens have been getting better. I'm actually pretty happy with contrast/brightness of the FHD IPS on my X250 (color gamut definitely could be better, but at least it doesn't do dynamic contrast like recent Dells), but the new screens, like the X1 Yoga's new OLED screen looks fantastic (I believe that'll be a 100% Adobe RGB screen).

Whenever I switch back and forth, I'm always shocked by how many PC laptops do trackpads so terribly when the Macbooks have been out there for years now.

Not sure about the patents that apply to Apple's trackpads, which is probably the biggest reason... the closest I've seen have been on some of the chromebook models, which aren't near as good, but still better than most... then again, it's entirely possible google is paying for the ip licensing.

It may be a pain in the butt to do so, my 2014 Dell XPS 13 it is serviceable - the RAM is still soldered onto the mainboard unfortunately, but aside from that every other component can be replaced. I fail to understand why I can't even replace the battery safely in a modern MacBook without a headache.

Where do a I buy a first-party replacement battery for the XPS 13?

Deleted comment

All of those look like "compatible" knock-offs, not genuine OEM parts. Looks like Dell doesn't sell any official replacement batteries for that machine.

You can install OS X on a surface tablet. it's definitely been done.

@[1] that says more about your wife then about the ThinkPad.

There are plenty of serviceable laptops out there.

The parent to you comment also said this:

> And no other PC laptop hits that right sweet spot of power/battery/display quality.

... so I'm going to venture a guess that "the laptop is serviceable" isn't the only criteria being weighed here.

Apple is optimizing for the mainstream of the market, which mostly never repairs things (except using licensed repair outlets or the original store) and values slimness and lightness and appearance above repairability.

They're also locking down the platform more and more. I don't think this is some conspiracy to take away user freedom. I think it's because anything that makes a platform 'hackable' also makes it 'pwnable' by malware. Again they are optimizing for the mainstream of the market, which is mostly users with absolutely zero clue about malware or security. They want to field an OS that apps can't easily trojan/backdoor and conscript into a botnet or crytolocker your files, etc. Unfortunately hacker types are casualties here.

It's very, very hard to remain appealing to the hacker crowd while also targeting the mainstream. You're targeting two very different local maxima and a lot of what these two camps want is in absolute conflict -- e.g. UX vs. "power" and packability. I actually think Apple is doing a decent job all things considered. Macs are still great for development and are hackable enough, and if I want more hackability I can spring for a $30 Raspberry Pi or run anything I want inside Parallels with the bonus of not borking my main host machine if I mess it up. I am worried about the future though. If they overly "iOS-ify" the Mac they will lose me.

This.

Had to buy a new laptop to replace a 2009 MBP recently.

Chose the mid 2012 non-retina display. Took out the disk drive and put in my own SSD and RAM. Does everything I want it to do without the slightest complaint. All told I probably paid ~$700 less for a comparably powerful machine with 10x the internal storage of a late model MBP retina, albeit heavier and with a slightly inferior display.

Next time I need to upgrade I'm with you - it's just too painful to knowingly buy into an ecosystem where upgrades and repairs feel like unabashed extortion.

Obviously there's a very large target market of folks that just want their tech to work and will happily drop a few hundred bucks each time they need to upgrade or repair. But it's hard to go back once you've opened up your computer and seen how cheap/easy it is to replace some of these extremely modular components. I imagine my mindset will change as I get older and have less time/more disposable income.

> Obviously there's a very large target market of folks that just want their tech to work and will happily drop a few hundred bucks each time they need to upgrade or repair. But it's hard to go back once you've opened up your computer and seen how cheap/easy it is to replace some of these extremely modular components. I imagine my mindset will change as I get older and have less time/more disposable income.

There is. I'm 33, and do devops/infrastructure. I just want my rig to work. Macbook Air maxed out on ram and disk. To me, its disposable every three years (comes out to be ~$60/month).

Apple is going to have to get pretty bad before I throw away the experience of walking into an Apple store, buying a new laptop, restoring from TimeMachine, and being up and running almost immediately.

As you mention, disposable income and a lack of time changes the equation.

Full stack developer here on Windows, not everything maxed out.

Payed 550€ for my laptop ( 8 gb, ..) 2 years ago, everything is still working fine and it's still enough ( Visual Studio is supposed to be a "heavy" program). = 23 € / month till now and still dropping... And it's hardly game over with my laptop. When i'm at 3 years, it will cost me about 15,2 € / month.

I'll probably use it for longer. But let's say i don't have any costs and sell the laptop for 150 €, that makes it 11,2 € / month.

PS. No repairs required untill date

Edit: You can install Linux on it too or dualboot it ( i did this a long time, but didn't feel the need for it now)

That's great if you're a Windows developer. If you aren't then congratulations your performance is cripped as you have to run everything inside a Linux VM. There are just too many open source projects that stupidly hard core path seperators or rely on UNIX binaries.

Microsoft would really do well supporting a truly great UNIX layer.

> There are just too many open source projects that stupidly hard core path seperators or rely on UNIX binaries.

I wouldn't say stupidly. Open source projects just don't prioritize Windows development.

I recently bought a Thinkpad to try if another platform would work. I first ran Windows 10 and found it unworkable and then installed Ubuntu, did some battery tweaking. It is great; have not touched my Mac since. Especially long battery life, swappable batteries and, for my taste, a better keyboard next to more ports is just better over all for my (full stack) dev.

How did you get great battery life from Ubuntu? I've never been able to get anything close to the runtime I get on OSX. In my experience, OSX gives me the longest batter life, second is Windows and any flavor of Linux is terrible (maybe 3-4 hours on a machine that Windows gives 5-6 hours).

I get 16 hours under my Lenovo with ubuntu with tlp default settings. I have to be careful a bit with browsers (they use most in my workflow) but usually I just use lynx for programming searches. OS X on my MBP is ghastly: Apple replaced the battery and I use the same software as under Ubuntu but I struggle to get 3 hrs. On my Air it was wonderful. Windows I have not used for anything serious in 20 years.

True you need a VM but performance doesn't have to be crippled. My out of office/at home machine is a Dell Inspiron 5558 (Core i7, 16GB RAM). I stuck an intel 256GB SSD in it, took the free upgrade to Windows 10 and do all my dev work in a few Virtualbox VMs (leaning heavily on mRemoteNG for lots of tabbed PuTTy instances!).

Total cost (including the Intel SSD) was £726 or $1049 at today's rate (exc. VAT). So didn't cost a bomb and gives me a lightening fast machine, windows for desktop duties, debian for dev, a 1920x1080 display, easily replaceable battery/ram/disk and no issue driving multiple monitors.

I also think Windows + Putty is better than Desktop Linux. I'm actually going to sell the Mac (can't get used to shortcuts, don't have money to an upgrade here in Brazil) and buy a Windows PC + Intel NUC for HTPC + Linux box.

> projects that stupidly hard core path seperators

It's also stupid to assume that your application will work seamlessly between Windows and Unix-like systems just by making sure that the path separators are OS-agnostic.

Most of the windows APIs support unix-style path separators, I actually get annoyed when I see separator injection needlessly... the bigger differences are default system paths and environment variables as such. (Also, windows-style "drive" letters" of course).

You have some point there, but a lot seems to work fine. The hardest problem i had was with a x64 binary for SQLLite ( Ruby On Rails), which i couldn't fix. Cygwin would be a recommender for anyone using Windows and programming languages other then .Net.

And once you know how the C++ compilation works with VC++, the problems are minimized. ( i mostly come this accross with Python)

It isn't a hassle free road though

This is why most of my *nix work is done on my server at home (since I work from home). PyCharm pretty handily supports remote Python installations, so I can just use my work-supplied Windows laptop to type the code and have it run on a VM in the other room (or across the country if they insisted I use one in the datacenter).

Can you run Docker on Windows yet? We're a Docker/Python/Go stack.

About as well as on Mac OS X.

I can on my Raspberry Pi 2, but Docker should run: https://docs.docker.com/engine/installation/windows/

Edit:. The Pi is just for experimenting, no GUI required ;)

You can run it in a virtual box VM and ssh in. Works fine, at least as long as you have lots of RAM & a fast HDD. It does suck battery though.

Docker is Linux-only :)

There are tools like docker-machine facilitate running Docker under Linux VMs non-Linux platforms though.

I'm 27 and just want my rig to work. That's why I build my own PC, demand mobile phones with replaceable batteries, and have a great 6 year old Lenovo laptop that, besides a slow-ish CPU, is spec'ed pretty well for 2016.

Different strokes. I've got better things to do with my time. I'd rather walk into the Apple store and replace my MBA or my iPhone when I've got a problem. That saves me time for my wife or my hobbies.

Trade money for things that save you time, to spend that time on what's important to you (if you've got the money).

Using non-apple hardware and software does not take more time, nor does it incur more frustration. It generally does cost less money for the same level of performance. It often lasts longer than the apple-branded alternative as well due to the relative ease of repair and upgrade where the apple-branded alternative would have to be replaced.

This saves me time for my wife, my children and my hobbies. It also saves me money. Time, and money, to spend on what's important to me. It also sends a signal to companies: there is a market for upgradable, repairable hardware.

Unfortunately, upgradability is the niche use-case. Most everyone that I have ever known after a couple years of owning a computer, when faced with upgrading or replacing, they almost always choose replacement.

Because of the depreciation curve, a $500 computer is almost worthless after several years while a $1000 computer might be worth a hundred or two hundred dollars. Do you spend $200-300 on your $500 computer for say memory + SSD or put that $200-300 towards a new $1000 computer?

As far as time is considered, engineered solutions are generally read-to-go, Apple or Windows, but the Windows world still seems to be rife with bloat. Navigating the hundreds of models & manufacturers is overwhelming for the non-technical user. For many technical folks, it's much simpler to just say, 'Get a mac' or 'Get a Dell', nut the Dell option will be a small pain with navigating the choices.

Non-engineered solutions (building your own) do cost a little bit of a time investment in research, assembly and tweaking. For the technical folk here, it's merely a couple of extra hours. For the uninitiated, it's a lot of hours for knowledge that may not be readily applicable to them on a day-to-day basis.

> It also sends a signal to companies: there is a market for upgradable, repairable hardware.

I absolutely guarantee you that there simply are not enough of you to make hardware manufacturers cater to the upgradable/repairable market.

The only way upgradability/reparability will continue is if people like yourself form a non-profit or B Corp that makes open hardware that allows for it. The vast majority of people don't care.

> I've got better things to do with my time. I'd rather walk into the Apple store and replace my MBA or my iPhone when I've got a problem.

I don't get the comparison.

It's like apple users think the only options are buy apple (expensive, but "allegedly" rarely needs fixing, works 99% of the time, lasts a long time, etc) and a PC ("allegedly" breaks all the time, requires more maintenance, requires more time to keep up with, "cheap", etc...)

Those are not the options -- it's a false premise. There are laptop PCs which have the exact same performance & reliability as apple, but for a fraction of the price. I've gone through 4 PC laptops since 1996. My first 2 laptops, I admit, I spent a lot of time repairing but that was due to my own youthful tinkering, experimenting and the general instability of earlier OSs (DOS, Win95, Win98/ME, etc).

But my last 2 have lasted me 7+ years a piece. And I only decided to upgrade because they were beginning to show their age (slower compared to newer stuff). You can buy PC laptops with the same "just works" fidelity as apple. More options open up, and you can save yourself a fortune, if people would just eschew their brand loyalty.

> You can buy PC laptops with the same "just works" fidelity as apple. More options open up, and you can save yourself a fortune, if people would just eschew their brand loyalty.

What do you consider a fortune? $1000? $1400? That's about two days of my time consulting. I'm fine paying the premium for what I consider a better experience. It's not brand loyalty, that's for sure. I've had a terrible, terrible time trying to get work done on Windows 7, Windows 10 looks like a train wreck, and there are no Lenovo stores I can walk into same day and get a replacement like I can with an Apple store (which is in every major metro I visit).

Build a better experience, and I will gladly pay for it. Until then, Apple (grudgingly) gets my dollars.

I've had a lot of PC and Mac laptops, my first one being a Powerbook around 1994. But the --only one-- that ever died catastrophically was an Early 2011 Macbook Pro. Its problems are legion on the Apple support boards, and Apple wouldn't admit that the problems existed.

It wasn't until after I bought a new replacement laptop that Apple finally acknowledged the issues and started a repair program. I wasn't able to just walk into my Apple store to get it fixed (I live in a major metro), so I ended up going to a local authorized dealer instead.

It was basically the last straw for me. I'm happily on Windows. I don't miss the OSX Terminal because I've got CMDer, and just about everything else I was using on Mac for work is either available for Windows or has a decent equivalent. Windows is not the wasteland it was when I switched back to Mac a decade ago.

> $1000? $1400? That's about two days of my time consulting.

On my home country people get paid 1000 euros a month!

> (comes out to be ~$60/month)

Even phased like that that is a lot of money.

Not for a tool contributing towards six figures of income for me annually. That's an insane ROI.

EDIT: I know people who spend more than that on Starbucks each month.

That's not a realistic comparison... My acculated sum of every webapplication i use is (outside of my business ofc):

- 9 € / month ( Google Play Music)

- 3 € / month ( Netflix shared with 3 other people)

- 3€ / month for Google Apps ( actually, this is business... But i also use the mail for private use..)

= 15 € / month.

If i'm not mistaking, you're OS X device costs you 4 times more every month then the sum of every online webservice i use.

( this is another comparison than yours.. Some people just throw out money, others don't :) . Earning a lot of money doesn't automaticly mean you have to waste all of it )

>If i'm not mistaking, you're OS X device costs you 4 times more every month then the sum of every online webservice i use.

Well.. you need something to run those things on

Well, my laptop costs 11,5 €/ month on the end of life ( cfr. other post) and i pay my ISP 25 € / month. So i still have less to pay with the sum of my webservices / laptop and ISP together then his 'power horse' :)

Is that any better? ;)

No. Your last line completely invalidated any point you might have had.

Just about everything starts to look cheap when you stack it up next to a daily Starbucks habit...

Actually, it makes me realize how little money it is. I pay about that much for home internet access, and about that much for a cell phone plan.

It turns out I spend far more on internet access than I do on hardware, and I wouldn't have thought that to be the case.

And I don't even get that much value out of my home internet access, since I'm at work the majority of the day and anything I absolutely need >50mbps for is already on my local network (Steam streaming, for example). Still, I'd feel even more ripped off paying for 50% of the speed at 80% of the price. Or 10% of the speed at 60% of the price.

Is it? As a software engineer, I leverage those $60/month into $8000+/month.

I think that's more than worth it. Why the hell haven't I bought a backup machine yet just in case this one breaks?

> I think that's more than worth it. Why the hell haven't I bought a backup machine yet just in case this one breaks?

Because you're leveraging credit in the event of a failure! No need to let equipment languish when you can simply pop into the store!

Hehe, that's why I don't have a replacement machine yet.

Also because it has so far only died about once every two years. Every time due to human error (spilled things). I can afford a two day outage every two years :)

Christ, you earn 3x / month what I do. What have I done wrong?

Specialize in something (pick 2/3) new, hot, or rare. Be willing to move. Apply to lots of jobs. Ask for quadruple whatever you think you're worth. Chances are, something will pan out.

Don't worry, I spend half of it on rent.

And mind you that just two years ago, I had the same kind of reaction to that sort of comment. It's not that hard to step up a few pay grades as an engineer these days.

And you couldn't possibly do that on a Linux / Windows laptop?

It's irrelevant. A top of the line laptop that's reliable costs about $3k regardless of manufacturer. At least last time I checked.

And no, not on Windows because in my experience it's the most terrible system for developers. Might've improved in the last 15 years.

And no, not on linux. In my experience it requires constant tinkering with the system. According to my friends still on linux, this hasn't changed in the last 3 years.

So yeah, I guess only mac is left. Which often still requires too much tinkering, but feels like less than linux. And I honestly haven't used windows in earnest in 15 years so hard to say.

Rubbish. It make take a little more tweaking to get set up, but once its done it Linux distros don't require constant tinkering these days.

I would try to save some of that 8k+/month. I hope things stay good.

It's unlikely that you'd have to buy a new laptop every month though.

Then again, it's cheaper than a month of rent for a 1-bedroom in this damn city (San Francisco).

Yep. That was the last Macbook that I would consider to be "adequately repairable". I handed one of those down to my kid after replacing the optical drive with an SSD (creating a fusion drive) and loading it up with RAM. It's still very usable as a desktop/gaming Mac. I've even replaced the battery in it once (IIRC it was glued in, but in a way that was reasonably simple to extract).

There was an article about how that MBP model is still very popular: https://marco.org/2016/01/04/md101ll-a

HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10840227

I've just bought the computer you have and have maxed it out as well. It does what I need, and it will last me for a few more years, but I don't know what I'll do when I need a new computer. I've always chosen Mac, and I have no idea where to look for a good, high-performance Windows laptop.

I run OS X on a ThinkPad T420, and this unholy combo is an experience I am honestly enjoying a lot.

I like having a 9 cell battery, I like having >1TB of storage, the ThinkPad keyboard and TrackPoint, and I like being able to take the thing apart.

At the same time, I also like OS X. I get UNIX underlyings, yet can continue to use software like Photoshop. And there's just a big bunch of subjective things that IMO OS X just does better, like scrolling and font rendering.

Still, the device is growing older, and I honestly have no idea what to replace it with once the time finally comes. The strange combo I have doesn't really have a modern equivalent. Do I sacrifice modularity to stay with OS X? Do I go to Windows or Linux to keep modularity with a modern ThinkPad (which are getting too close to the way modern MacBooks are, sadly).

I thought the licence terms disallowed running OSX running on anything other than Mac. Of course, I always clicked 'Agree' without reading the licence terms.

I have been thinking of something opposite: run ubuntu on Mac.

Single button trackpads are a pain in the arse, if you like middle click to paste.

I had the unfortunate experience of owning an early 2011 MacBook Pro. The graphics card broke down multiple times (three, iirc) requiring a 500€ logic board replacement. This was a widespread issue, and we, the affected users, repeatedly asked Apple to recognize it and run a repair program.

By the time (two years?) they decided to roll one out I had already bought an Asus laptop, which was comparable in most ways and costs about half of what I paid for the MBPro.

I don't think I'll be buying Apple hardware for a while. Their increasing push towards planned obsolescence troubles me deeply.

Don't forget about the regular Mac Pro - I recently purchased 3 of them for my design team thinking a desktop should be better than a laptop - 2 of them have had a failure, 1 requiring a replacement graphics card the other needed a system reinstall - both took a couple days to get sorted out. I doubt our next round of funding will go towards Mac products - we can buy a Dell just as powerful with same day business support for WAY less - but to tell the truth none of the Dell Precisions we have bought in the last 3 years have had any issues.

There is an Apple repair program for that issue http://www.macrumors.com/2016/02/06/late-2013-mac-pro-video-...

Good luck!

Yep, agreed, it's a bit of a worry. But as another commenter pointed out, these $2000-ish laptops are costing us around $2 a day over about 3 years, so I use my MacBook as my primary machine and replace it around the 3 to 4 year mark, and have a couple of Core2Duo laptops (one running Windows and one running Linux) in the house also. It's less than the price of a cup of coffee, here in Australia you can't get a coffee for less than $3.50.

I put a 128GB USB3.0 SanDisk Ultra Fit[1] in my MacBook (these things are tiny), to supplement the SSD. Currently on sale for AU$74. Plenty fast enough for storing media, and I'm wearing my SSD less now too.

Not to sure what to do when the SSD wears out, probably boot of the USB stick, but that's a while away and I'll sell the laptop before then anyway.

1. https://www.sandisk.com.au/home/usb-flash/ultra-fit-usb

Unfortunately Apple values looks over functionality. Apple just keeps making changes for thinness, almost at any cost. And soldering wasn't the first example, I'd argue that removal of the ethernet jack on the MBP was a sign of things to come. Essentially everything started going downhill with the 3rd generation MBPs way back in 2012 (the original "Retina").

The 3rd gen removed: Ethernet, Firewire 800, Superdrive, Kensington lock, and nothing is user replaceable eventually... All for what? To save 0.93 pounds in weight and 0.2 cm in thickness (13" model).

I don't care if the "Macbook" and the MBA want to go this route of maximum thinness/lightness; but what irks me is that they ruined their supposed power user machine for these cuts. Give me the functionality back. It wasn't like the MBP was heavy or large even before 2012.

For me, and for nearly everyone I know, thinness is far more functional than an ethernet port. As is weight, a pound is actually a lot!

Ethernet ports are easy to add as a dongle, you can't do the same with thinness. I really only need ethernet in fixed locations, and where there I already have power, and that's the case for most people.

It's totally cool that you have different needs, but it's not cool to misascribe that to "looks."

For me, the lack of an ethernet port is a dealbreaker, because most of the on-site work I do at clients requires it. The last thing I need is to forget a dongle.

I myself gave up on Apple after my 2011 MBP bricked itself last year.

That was too bad, because I really liked the discontinued unibody form factor. If I was spending money on a new laptop, it wasn't going to be a two year old 2012 unibody or one one of the newer thinner, less user-serviceable models.

So buy an adapter.

Let me reiterate: "The last thing I need is to forget a dongle."

I could be wrong, but my impression is that Tim Cook is trying to position Apple as a lifestyle/fashion brand that happens to do consumer electronics and maybe a bit of software, and not as a consumer technology company that happens to be so cool it became a lifestyle/fashion brand by default.

His idea of better seems to be all about size and superficial design, not user satisfaction. Which would be good if size was all about the user experience - but it's not.

Jobs fucked up regularly (who remembers OS X 1.0?) but he still had a laser-like focus on the overall experience and he could rely on that to keep Apple on track.

Cook doesn't have that, and it's not clear that anyone else at Apple does. He's had five years of significant product launches now, and most of them have been okay-I-guess sidesteps - smaller, thinner, bigger, a different colour - or outright duds.

Also, U2.

Opportunities have been missed. Apple could have opened and owned whole new markets - user generated music and video, health devices, home automation, the power user high-end. Instead we got a watch and a a TV hardly anyone cares about, the promise of a car that will probably be late to the party, a music streaming service that streams music just like all the music streaming services do, and AI something something something maybe one day.

The money may still be flowing in, but the stock is going to get hammered if nothing changes soon.

Ha, I love the 2012 models and still have my 2012 15" rMBP. Save for the bullshit ghosting issue (three screens later I finally got my non-ghosting Samsung screen – oh, first gen woes) that was handled awfully by Apple at the time I love this device. Oh, and rubber feet falling off after four years suck, but, eh.

All the things they removed are things I never ever used. Or used rarely but didn’t really need. Exactly all the things you mention. All the rest (the performance over the Airs, the gorgeous screen over the Airs and previous Pros, the lightness, compactness, extremely solid feeling stability of the thing), it’s all just there.

Just accpet that not all people have the same needs as you. I think the 2012 models are a pitch-perfect demonstration of striking exactly the right balance (for most people). I love ’em to death. And things got only better from there, albeit incrementally.

While I agree with you, when your current Mac is older and relegated to media PC duty, are you going to need more than the 8 or 16GB of RAM it shipped with? As for batteries, it's almost the exact same price to buy a battery a replace it yourself as it is to have Apple do it, and you don't have to deal with proper recycling (hopefully you would.) I'm hoping we see a reverse trend but who knows.

If and only if you live near an Apple store. Otherwise you might be without your machine for a week or two during that period: that is a serious cost for many people in our profession.

That's certainly a valid concern; I have never been in that situation so yeah that could be trouble. Aren't there typically local repair centers that do authorized repairs? If not that's a huge oversight even if they only allowed battery swaps. That said, I have a 2006 MBP that is ancient and still works when wired to power even though I can replace the battery it works fine as an email/web browsing headless with a monitor.

That doesn't apply if you're relegating the previous system to media-center duty though.

If you live in the US. In most countries in the EU last I checked it is far more expensive and harder to come by.

Who would ever need more than 512kb of RAM…

I guess you've hurt feelings with sarcasm? But I agree. Virtualization is a bad joke with 8GB of RAM today, so I decided to assume 16GB max isn't enough lifetime for a new system and wont be consuming in the current market.

Yeah, I feel the same way. I just upgraded a 2011MBP's HDD to and SSD and replaced the battery myself, and from start to finishing up the OSX install was about an hour. My 2013 MBP is nearly unrepairable. Which is too bad because I really like the hardware. Luckily other manufactorers are closing the quality gap quickly and functionally to me linux and OSX are nearly interchangeable.

As much as I liked Mac OS X, I recently jumped ship from my early 2015 retina macbook pro to a dell xps 13 and i am super happy. Windows 10 is definitely not the same but it is much much better than how windows 8 used to be. The biggest factor that got me to switch was how locked down the hardware was and i couldnt even replace the battery if i wanted to. And i got the 128gig version thinking there would be aftermarket storage upgrade option down the line but it doesnt seem like that is happening.

> couldnt even replace the battery if i wanted to

Just take it into an Apple Store and pay the $129 to replace it. I've replaced a battery once on my 2012 MacBook Pro so would not consider this to be a reason to pick one platform over another.

> aftermarket storage upgrade option

I agree this sucks. But personally I am happy for Apple to focus on I/O performance at any cost even if it means no aftermarket upgrades. I just find that with so much being in the cloud and the size of USB drives increasing there hasn't been a need for a large internal storage drive.

>> I've replaced a battery once on my 2012 MacBook Pro

If you've got the unibody (2012 was the last year), it's got an end-user replaceable battery. You can buy a third party battery from Amazon, MacSales etc and swap it pretty easily.

The experience is not quite so convenient with newer models.

Yeah saw that you could do it at the apple store, but it is $200 to replace. And if your computer has other damage like a bit of dent or if you replaced the display etc with aftermarket one, or if there are even tiny signs of liquid damage, they straight up refuse service.

The retina ones are $199 in the USA: https://support.apple.com/kb/index?page=servicefaq&geo=Unite...

Non-user-serviceability buys smaller and lighter form factors. I would expect the story to be similar for hardware with similar size, weight, and battery life characteristics.

EDIT: and most importantly, more battery chemistry per weight. Safety requires that serviceable batteries are enclosed in rather substantial cases whose internals are non-user-serviceable. Apple "cheats" by making this case the entire laptop, rather than a specific battery module.

Anyone who wouldn't care about having the battery glued to the chassis also would not care about the 1mm difference between making it removable or not.

I also think on at least the Android front Samsung has consistently demonstrated the ability to make phones with both SD cards and removable batteries for years without compromising form factor. The S3 / S$ / S5 and Notes 2 - 4 were all extremely thin profile despite supporting removable batteries.

This is just misdirection to try to persuade people its a good thing to remove choice. It is not, it costs basically nothing in manufacturing or size to make the battery / ram / hard drive removable, and the only reason Apple / Dell / Samsung (now) / every other Android phone manufacturer does it is either to rip you off on overpriced battery replacement or drive planned obsolescence to make you buy more shit you really wouldn't need if you could just replace your damn battery two years later.

So, it's probably wise for Apple or any other company to keep a model or two that are modular to satisfy the geekier crowd. It would be expensive, because with larger-numbers, the razor thin laptops will be cheaper due to scale.

Apple does have such a model, at least for now:

https://marco.org/2016/01/04/md101ll-a

I can't upvote this enough.

A year ago, I wasn't sure how much longer my ancient (but still functioning!) 2008 MBP would be going on. So I went shopping. Found the same tradeoffs Marco mentions here: I didn't like the sealed nature of the newer offerings (and also, AFAICT no screen density can make up for the inexplicably missing matte displays).

I ended up buying a used 2.6Ghz i7 8GB 15" matte MBP instead of anything new from Apple, though.

About the only complaint I have is that Mavericks seems neither as stable or as well-performing as Snow Leopard, which seems to be the last time Apple released an OS that was a strict improvement over previous releases. Too bad it's no longer safe to run given the state of updates.

I still have my late 2008 MacBook Pro--the first 15" unibody design with a Core 2 Duo. I just spent about $250 for 8 GB RAM upgrade and a 500 GB SSD and did a clean install of El Cap.

It actually runs faster now than it did with the stock HD and Mountain Lion! Granted, I'm not doing a lot of heavy computing with it. For web surfing and the basics it still works great.

geek satisfaction probably isn't valuable enough to go against their entire design history

Which is why they lost me, and other posters in this thread as customers. Functionality >> design.

Which is a shame because OS X is a nice operating system. I would like to use it.

And much faster performance.

The drives in the new MacBook Pro are blisteringly quick compared to just a stock standard SSD.

They probably just use NVME over m.2.

I feel as though this is comparing two different orders of magnitude. Apple users are, in general, getting upset about software user experience. A subset of users have always been upset about repairability of apple hardware, though admittedly it's gotten worse with its laptops in the past years. The subset that wants to do what we want to do with our hardware here is much smaller and thus not who Apple is trying to sell to. In the end, the users buying macbooks want lighter, thinner machines and are willing to sacrifice basically anything to get it. Personally I've given up laptops because I'm not willing to make this tradeoff, even with "pc" hardware.

Edit: There are even some people in this thread, who I assume are "power users," that are willing to sacrifice previously sacrosanct things like ethernet ports for mobility. Personally I'm not willing to do so but I also don't have a pressing need for a laptop.

I have to agree... When I got my current rMBP(late 2014), I actually had to return my first purchase when I found out I couldn't upgrade the ram or ssd myself. Even though you can technically replace the SSD, the interface Apple is using doesn't seem to be common at all, so you're stuck with mostly costly options in a sea of cheaper SSD components.

The display isn't the best, but close... the touchpad is bar none the best in any laptop, but I might be willing to sacrifice that when I need another laptop... I haven't been doing iOS native, and my work issued laptop is an rMBP as well, but may just create a build server for cordova out of a used mac mini if/when the need arises.

I never bought into iOS devices, mainly because of early ties to Apple, and I'm somewhat entrenched in Android's ecosystem. The poor software updates, broken SMB/CIFS support and a host of other issues has me more than concerned.

I agree. I've had three different top of the line MBPs and they don't feel as solid as my 2007 macbook. The solid states are unreliable, the battery life never comes close to what's promised and that damn fan won't turn off. Sure, I'm a power user but isn't that why I'm paying 3500 for this?

It does suck the repairability is next to none but they have the best looking hardware out there. I have yet to see any other manufacture come close to what Apple can do hardware wise. A metal laptop enclosure is basically unheard of outside of Apple sadly. I would like to see someone step up.

I am typing on a $500 Asus flip that is all aluminum with a glass touchscreen. It is very nice, but I regret the OS (Windows 8.1,locked in place using the hosts file to avoid MS upgrades).

The issue I see is that the other side of the fence is not so sweet either. You cannot release a buggy OS that leads to my laptop bricking itself 3 times, and then jump right into another one with a hyper-aggresive update cycle, and expect me to follow along. Never. I risk losing massive amounts of work and significantly impacting my revenue at the same time.

I still have not decided if I will accept the sunk cost of Apple or a user experience downgrade to Linux, but hopefully I can put the decision off for a number of years like I did migrating away from Windows XP.

The entire modern tech ecosystem is rotten:

My drivers don't work. My OS doesn't work. The official development software for my target OS stinks. The official emulator to run it is dastardly. The api and functionality of the OS itself is pathetically broken, and less productive than battling bugs in php ten years ago. It all looks pretty from top to bottom if you squint, but the emperor definitely wears no clothes. 2016 is massively frustrating, and I long for the time when the basic premise of a computer being a tool that needs to function effectively was the norm.

I feel you. This is why I stick with Apple, however.

They may be declining, but they still have an overall "least frustrating" experience, especially when I have to help my family members with Windows 8 or 10, or need to Futz with my nephew's Linux setup.

My Dell M3800 has everything a MBP has, including the aluminum enclosure and Thunderbolt port, and more, such as 15.6 4K touchscreen and multiple USB ports. Oh, and it's also repairable.

It looks very nice! How's the battery life? This review seems to indicate it sits at under two thirds of the MBPs:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2458699,00.asp

Also, just for clarification, do you mean self-repairable? The review said it, like the MBP, has non-standard screw heads making repair difficult. Thoughts?

I don't know about self-repairable...yet. Mine's still under warranty, but that's almost up and I haven't had to use it.

I do use it plugged in most of the time, but I suspect that the review is spot on with the battery life. I maybe get a little more since I don't do much in the way of video, and I have my screen dimmed and my CPU in passive cooling mode.

You can buy whatever screwdriver you need for a few dollars. It's an annoyance, but not a real obstacle to repair.

Maybe not important for you but crucial for me; the M3800 has dismal battery life. And probably with Linux that is even worse.

I'm running an M3800 with Mint Linux 17.3. I can squeeze 2 hours out of the battery if I really need to; suspend/hibernate is currently completely broken, requiring that I cold boot the machine each time I open the lid; bluetooth has never worked properly, even after extracting the proprietary firmware from the Windows drivers.

And this is on a machine that shipped from Dell with Ubuntu 14.04 installed, so supposedly all the hardware is open-source friendly.

I could never accept ~2 hours on a $2000-ish machine.

I get 5-6 hours with Windows 8.1. I have a dimmed screen and passive CPU cooling when on battery, and I don't do much video.

Do you buy hardware based on what it looks?

Actually, yes. Given my computer is always on display on a desk or table in my home, I consider it to be a piece of furniture. Therefore aesthetics are as much a consideration as they are for anything else I buy for for my home.

People are entitled to do that.

Just like people buy cars/homes/clothes/cellphones just because of how they look.

I'd argue they should look at the overall "package" when purchasing, but if looks are important to someone that's absolutely fine, and there is nothing wrong with valuing looks.

It's certainly a factor. I also like that it's way more rugged than 99% of the other PCs out there that use cheap plastic.

Kind of. I'm willing to put up with some non-repairability for an ultra thin metal laptop with tight tolerances. ymmv.

That case could do double duty as an axe in a pinch. It's incredibly solid. I really wished the hardware was more standard there is no way I'm going to be using OS/X.

Metal doesn't flex. Plastic does. It's not just about how it looks although they do look great.

I was still using a MacBook Pro 17 from 2011 up until a few months ago. It is still rock solid with no creaks or wear/tear.

And let me ask you do you buy a car based on how it looks ? How about clothes ?

> Metal doesn't flex. Plastic does.

That's the benefit of plastic for portable, droppable, devices.

No, it's not. Plastic cracks and breaks when you drop it. Trying to sell this as a benefit ain't flyin.

Try installing ubuntu on a 7.1 macbook air and feel some pain. You're right though, nice enclosure. Of course I really should have known better but the places that I shopped at did not have anything at all that came close in stock.

I would say that some of the recent Dell, Microsoft, Asus and Razer designs are pretty nice, and there are plenty of metal laptop enclosures out there if you look.

The extra annoying part is that Apple's total lack of reputability is starting to spread to competing products - a lot of Android phones have dropped user-replaceable batteries, for instance, and a sizable amount of good Windows ultrabooks are about as repairable as MacBooks.

> extra annoying part is that Apple's total lack of reputability is starting to spread to competing products

Oh, please. Apple has nothing to do with that problem. The problem is we're a throw away society hell bent on buying the latest greatest thing. If it's anyone's fault, it's our own.

Spot on. There are sufficient players operating at comparable scale to Apple in these markets that we must conclude that trends like this are significantly driven by the demand side.

That's not to say that this trend isn't convenient for the supply side, and that this doesn't play in, it's just to say that it's self-evident that you are correct - the average consumer does, in the end, prefer hard-to-repair and therefore shorter-lived devices, with the advantages they bring, to the alternatives.

If this wasn't the case, there's a HUGE amount of money on the table, and one of the other players would certainly have grabbed it from Apple, instead of mimicking their approach.

The fact that Apple has been able to get away with it certainly has encouraged others (Samsung).

Well, I didn't mean "this is Apple's fault" as much as "serviceability problems traditionally associated with Apple devices are now common industry wide" - and are now hard to avoid even if you look at other brands, as the person I was replying to said they would. I do understand that, ultimately, companies are just delivering what most consumers want.

Apple is part of the karma, is sorta what you're saying! :)

I have one of the last MBP from that era that still has replaceable memory, hard drive and optical drive. My machine is maxed out on memory, SSD and swapped the optical for a backup HDD.

I love the thing and had the fried graphics card issue fixed some time ago instead of opting to replace the MBP with a newer model.

This old thing is struggling to keep up with El Capitan these days though and I'm now mulling a Thinkpad with OpenBSD as a replacement. I kind of wish I could get this same body with updated hardware and OSX 10.6 but that's not in the cards.

I worry that the higher end ultrabooks are going to end up as repairable as the MBP.

Regret is a strong word, but I'm definitely beginning to miss the ability to switch out the battery in my Asus Zenbook (which is soldered in).

It's probably a transition. Apple doubled down on engineering and integration feats due the the mobile ecosystem and marketing lever (mind you MS is taking that road too if you look at Surface tech talks and ads). So things were standardless (non-disk-form-factor SSD), some things were soldered. Unless it never profitable again to have pluggable boards (let's say if simpler to just tape a new SoC and access cloud data) it will come back. Modular cell phones projects exist, tiny usb3 sockets that can be used for almost any device, etc etc I'd bet we will have gumstix like modules in laptops. Might also help durability since you don't have to avoid breaking a big motherboard full of surface mounted components.

This lack of repairability is actually not a recent thing at all. For example, I worked a support job in the late 90s where a high proportion of Applecare complaints were resolved with "replace the motherboard." With PCs we just replaced the offending part, which was rarely the motherboard.

The worst part of this is that Apple's success has dragged the rest of the market toward things like non-replaceable batteries.

The real problem is that lithium-ion batteries suck in every dimension except energy density. They're fragile, can blow up, don't allow many charge/discharge cycles, and charge slowly.

There are other battery technologies, such as lithium iron phosphate, which have much better lifetimes, but you give up some energy density. Sealed units should use one of those technologies.

> The worst part of this is that Apple's success has dragged the rest of the market toward things like non-replaceable batteries

I think that statement is only half right. Apple may have pioneered the move towards non-replaceable batteries, but I think it's only a symptom of increasingly integrated and small devices. If an inch thick device is thicker by 1mm because the battery is easily detachable, that's much less of an issue than on a 10mm laptop.

They may have done it in an egregious way first (gluing/soldering in components), but we probably would have gotten there before long anyway.

I've used Apple products since the early 90s. Replacing the MB is the only option since almost all components are on the MB (sound, GPU, modem, network). In contrast PCs had everything highly compartmentalised according to the PC/AT spec. Sound was ISA/PCI, video was AGP/PCI, modems were ISA, 10/100baseT PCI.

While I agree I know very few people that actually replaced their battery. Usually, when the battery died is about the time they replace that laptop anyway.

This is more of a business decision than technical. The industry should avoid going into this trap. Co should give users a choice and keep the ports open.

I bought a T550 minimal configuration, for $600 upgraded the RAM to 16G & 500G SSD for $200, after using MBP for 7 years.

Though the MBP is still kicking ass with an upgraded 8G RAM & 500G SSD.

I upgrade every 2 years. It costs me about $1-2K for the "next" model's difference (after selling the old one on Craiglist/Ebay), however averaging the usage out over those 2 years I'm still getting really good bang for buck without hardware fault issues.

> When the battery goes,

... it may be too late: https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&sa=1&q=macbook+air+ba...

Yep same issue with 2013 MBA. The 4GB RAM is becoming a bottleneck but it's soldered in so I'll be forced to upgrade within a year.

The EPEAT fiasco is my favorite here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com