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Comment by wlesieutre | Hacker News Reader

It's still a ton of labor to take the whole thing apart, but the new MacBook Air changed to using removable adhesive tabs. I suspect this is why.

2018 MacBook Air Teardown Confirms Improving Repairability With Adhesive Pull-Tabs Under Battery and Speakers

https://www.macrumors.com/2018/11/08/2018-macbook-air-ifixit...

Amusingly, the 13" MacBook Pro non-touchbar where they have defective SSDs are the only ones that have removable SSDs. The touchbar versions are soldered. I wonder if that's a happy coincidence that they're repairable, or if the reason for these defects is that Apple's engineers screwed up the socket since they have basically no experience with those across the rest of the product line anymore.

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Mmm... I wonder if they improved repairability because they expect things to keep breaking...

There's no need to expect that - things keep breaking when they are used. Repairability is becoming a topic, though spreading quite slow, but eventually it will reach the higher ups, and we'll finally get our oldschool thinkpads back. (Hope is a strong emotion.)

My MacBook Air's keyboard never broke (I've had 2, kept them for 2-3 years each.

> 2-3 years each

That's not a very long time. Business laptops' extended warranty is 5, and to be honest, 5-6 years old laptops - actually, nearly anything since modern sleep and aes-ni - are perfectly enough, so instead of buying new, it really should be possible to fix a hinge, a display, a keyboard once in a while, instead of needing to buy a new machine.

2-3 years is a ridiculously short lifespan for a laptop. If one of my laptops failed that quickly I would demand the manufacturer provide me with a replacement under Australian Consumer Law. I've used 8-10 year old ThinkPads that worked fine (battery life was the only issue, but a new battery is not that expensive -- since you can replace those on older ThinkPads).

Still happily using my 2011 Air. The battery was very easy to replace (5 minutes). The only thing that’s failed is the charging cable frayed and I got a replacement DC side cable with MagSafe connector for like $9 on Amazon.

The only thing holding it back is I could not for the life of me get Boot Camp working with Win10 — UEFI nonsense.

The new Air is finally actually tempting me to upgrade. Before that there was nothing I thought was worth considering.

FYI Micro Center has a $200 discount on some new Airs right now if you have one in your area.

> I would demand the manufacturer provide me with a replacement under Australian Consumer Law.

Funny you mention that - my MacBook Pro was repeatedly serviced during my 3 year AppleCare period, and I noticed that instead of my warranty status showing AppleCare on the statements, after the first couple of services that status had changed to "Australian Consumer Law Requirement".

They still didn't provide me with a replacement machine though - they just keep replacing the SATA flex cable every few months. I'm switching to a ThinkPad now.

I don't understand why there was no standardization effort equivalent to ATX for the classic IBM ThinkPad-era designs.

A standardized form-factor allows easy replacement of motherboard, CPUs, screens, keyboards. Desktop PCs still use ATX cases, ATX power supplies, ATX motherboards.

Desktop PCs can be upgraded while keeping the monitor, keyboard and mouse: the entirety of a high-end gaming PC upgrade can consists of a new motherboard, CPU, RAM and GPU.

There's little reason laptops couldn't have went down the standardization path in the late 1990s. The chassis of a 1998 IBM ThinkPad should be able to components from 2019 without much effort. Just like an ATX desktop case.

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