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Comment by beamatronic | Hacker News Reader

I was recently upgrading a 2008 MacBook. Upgraded the hard drive and the memory. It was so easy. It is an absolute joy to service this machine. It also has many useful ports and an awesome battery indicator on the side.

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I remember in the old iBooks back when WiFi was a new thing you could order without it and install your own card later in about 15 seconds.

There were little sprung pull tabs between some of the function keys, pull them back, lift the keyboard out, AirPort card slot was right there. RAM slots too.

And the removable keyboard, gosh! Those keyboards didn’t just shit the bed if a piece of dust got in them, but even if they had it was a separate part that you could swap out without replacing half the computer. Good times.

I have a 2016 MBP now. Betting the resale value when the 4-year keyboard warranty runs out is going to be about what the rest of the computer is worth for spare parts.

Yeah but it was half a centimeter thicker, and therefore useless to today's Apple.

half a centimeter thicker? .04 pounds heavier? how did people even use machines that heavy and thick? did they come with medical insurance to help with the back strain?!

/s from an annoyed-with-the-touchbar-mbp-users

to be fair, its like 3 pounds lighter - and doesnt need to be

I think that's about the weight of a typical american soft drink. Surely even the least fit among us can cope with such a hardship.

I carry a 1.1kg Dell XPS in my bag, if I went up to 2 or 2.5kg my wheelchair would be a bit more unbalanced and more difficult to push uphill. The soft drink fits in my cupholder.

I became one of those eBay Thinkpad + Linux guys purely to build bigger arms.

You make it sound like Apple is doing this despite their customers.

But nobody other than a handful of people would rather have a much heavier device in exchange for being able to replace their WiFi card or keyboard.

I suspect it is less of people want lighter appliances and more the case of what can we get away with?

Maybe not, but there's a middle ground somewhere between "keyboard replacement takes 30 seconds" and "keyboard replacement means replacing the entire top case assembly because it's all glued together."

Borrowing some comments from MacRumors forums for price:

> If a repair, the invoices I have from top case replacement due to failed keyboards show a parts cost of $695 and a flat rate labor cost of $100, for a total of $795 plus any applicable tax. At last count, I have six such invoices from failed keyboards.

> That's what it shows on my invoice as well, thank God for AppleCare. I have only had the one, I hope I don't need it again. By chance, did you discuss replacement with that many failures? I would hope that's an option at some point.

(These are from January last year, a few months before Apple admitted they had a problem and extended the keyboard warranty to 4 years)

For a keyboard a higher failure rate than their previous models, that's not a good trade-off. People have other reasons to want a Mac laptop, maybe they don't know what they're getting into, so they're still buying it. But the longer this continues the more lasting damage it does to Apple's laptop reputation.

https://www.wsj.com/graphics/apple-still-hasnt-fixed-its-mac...

Right now people can talk themselves into buying a more expensive laptop from Apple by saying "it's a good computer and it'll last for years." What happens when you can't justify that anymore?

I'm old enough to remember the days of the "cheese grater" Power Mac/Mac Pro, when Apple would explicitly call attention to how expandable and user-serviceable a case they'd designed for it.

How times change!

I still think that the "cheese grater" was the pinnacle of apple desktop design (and I've never owned a mac), I just love it - enough that I damn near bought a broken one to use to build my new PC in the end laziness won and I went corsair but it's still an amazing piece of industrial design.

That machine was a engineering beauty. very well thought out.

It really was, it still looks better than the vast majority of modern PC cases with better build quality, the bigger ones all seem to be some variant of "How many RGB's can we shove in this" with flimsy plastic and sharp edges.

I went with one of these in the end https://www.corsair.com/ca/en/Categories/Products/Cases/Carb... because it's a box to put bits in, no fuss, no muss no RGB.

my last computer i built i went with a fractal design case and couldn't be happier really. they make excellent cases. the drives are not in the main chamber so it is a completely void airflow design for the major components and all the routing is done nicely. really great design. That corsair one looks pretty nice for a standard layout case though.

https://www.fractal-design.com/home/product/cases/define-ser...

edit: also it's laid out to be super silent and if you pair it with the right components it is quite.

If by 'pinnacle of apple design design' you mean actively user hostile, then yeah!

The handles on that thing were rough.

The new Mac Pro doesn't even have handles, so…

It hasn't been that long since the tower-style Mac Pro. The current design only came out in 2013.

And was introduced 2003. 16 years ago.

Funny how those machines came up in the SJ era and now what we get are inconsistencies, products that are too thin for their own good and limited repairability

I feel the same about my 2012 MacBookPro. While it was a _tiny_ bit down the path of "not user serviceable", replacing the battery and trackpad was extremely easy. And one of the first things I did to it was replace/upgrade Apple's RAM and drop an SSD into the optical bay.

It’s important to note that this was the case even despite the fact that the battery and trackpad were not considered “user replaceable”.

The G4 Powerbooks and first-generation Intel laptops were a PAIN to open up and service.

We only have it good for one generation (unibodies)

Yes, it's a joy to be able to switch out RAM, HDDs, and batteries so easily in those white MacBooks. The only serious flaw with them was that the plastic around the keyboard became discolored with use, but that's just cosmetic. I used mine with an external monitor anyway. They only cost about $100 on eBay these days, so if my 2008 MacBook ever dies, I'll definitely try to repair it, but I don't think it ever will. The best thing about the design of the 2008 MacBook is that they were made to last forever.

The late 08 (aluminium) ones are wonderful. Toolless battery replacement. Replaced the keyboard in mine which required a teardown of every single piece of the laptop, but it wasn't difficult.

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