Hacker News Reader

Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

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?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com