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Comment by jventura | Hacker News Reader

HP is also a well-behaved player regarding repairments. For instance, here's the service manual for my HP DV5 laptop: http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c02666786.pdf. You can find the replacement procedures for almost all components after page 48..

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Here's one for a similar vintage MacBook Pro, which is similar:

http://manuals-apple.9manuals.com/a38175/686191APL.pdf

(Hope the link works for anyone interested)

Then there's the service manual for the first edition ipad:

http://manuals-apple.9manuals.com/a38175/380639APL.pdf

Where they describe the sim tray as the only user serviceable part.

FWIW, I have both of these devices and they both work still work fine...

I also have a first gen ipad, but I wouldn't say it works fine. Everything that involves a network connection is broken in some way. Browsing popular websites is impossible, the app store is so broken as to be unnavigable, and almost no apps still support it anyway. At this point it's used for (an old version of) netflix and a few old games because it can't do anything else.

Because of the way apple has locked it down, the software on it can't be replaced with something less broken, even though hardware-wise it is basically a raspberry pi with a touchscreen.

Note how Apple hosts neither of those manuals? Apple doesn't care if their products are user serviceable at all, and has repeatedly shown malice towards the repair industry or long lived products at all.

Louis Rossmann talking about how Apple devices are designed to fail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfrYOWlKJ_g

Also, my iPad 2 broke down after a year and a half. Not buying Apple again!

Of course this is anecdotal, but I know people who, even up to one or two years ago, were still using the white plastic MacBook and a lot of people who still use the MacBook with the internal disk drive. I also know many people who have old iPhone 5/5s that still function very well, besides being slow.

I think it would be great if Apple designed their products to be user serviceable so if something like a screen breaks all you have to do is buy the screen and repair it yourself instead of sending to a repair store, but I definitely don't agree that Apple designs their products to fail.

I've got one of the variants of an HP Envy. There's a long rubber foot on the underside of the computer, which covers up a few of the screws to open the bottom. The problem is that you're going to tear up the strip when removing it (beneath the rubber is a separate, padded adhesive strip that tears easily). Mounting a SATA drive required purchase of some model-specific adapters and a rubber drive caddy. Either the caddy or the adapter came with an extra rubber foot, but I think that each of those parts came out to about $30.

Pluses: Individual parts are available to order directly from HP. Once you've identified your machine's exact variant, you can get the service manual and replacement part numbers. The actual disassembly+reassembly was (in my case, at least), really easy, with just a few screws.

Minuses: The parts are expensive, model-specific, the correct model number is sometimes confusing to find. Opening the machine can be a destructive operation, for some models. Internal connections don't always use standard interfaces. Close to every model seems to have customized parts, and there are a lot of model variations, so finding second-hand replacement parts is difficult.

As seems to be the usual trend, I'm sure that the business models would be a better experience and the consumer models would be worse.

Years ago, my mother's old HP pavillion was overheating, so I decided to open it up and clean the dust from the cpu cooler and re-apply thermal paste. After that I vowed to never buy anything HP again.

It took me more than 5 hours to perform a simple cleanup task.

It's not much use giving us step by step instructions on how to service each part when it involves removing more than 60 different screws.

Those things were definitely not build to be serviceable.

HP's consumer line isn't/wasn't great (I've had scant experience with it over the years), but their business products are generally great to take apart and repair. The EliteBook series in particular, e.g. the 8460s are built like tanks and are great to pick up off-lease.

Dell is the same, consumer level stuff is difficult or impossible to repair, but the business laptops are well thought out and designed to be repaired.

My new Dell XPS 15 is easy to service. 12 screws on the bottom gives easy access to the ram, battery, drive slots, and wifi. The heat sinks and pipes for the CPU and GPU has what, 8 screws? The screws don't need to be removed to clean out the fans with compressed air.

I replaced the SSD, wifi card, and repasted the CPU/GPU cooler. The operation took me 30 minutes.

Their consumer hardware is insane to repair, on some models its over 20 screws and a full disassembly to change the hard drive. If you send it to HP for repair, expect half your screw mounts to be sheared off by HP's repair team!

The problem is that skimping quality on one line (particularly with a high market penetration and presence) erodes brand equity of others.

I've sworn of many manufacturers / vendors for crap lines.

If you want to have a quality brand, you're going to have to apply it uniformly.

> HP's consumer line isn't/wasn't great

I have a hunch that can be said for most laptop vendors. There is reason "business notebooks" cost so much more. I'm not saying it's a good reason, but it's there.

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