Everyone loves to hate on Apple and their glue, but it's got to be hard to balance durability with repairability, especially at the volume that Apple ships.
ThinkPads are actually durable and easily repairable and even upgradable and they sell much cheaper and with smaller margin.
You would expect that apple with bigger R&D, bigger product price and much bigger margin would focus more on repairability by itself instead of waiting for EU to force it's hand.
Laptops that keyboards was breaking and to replace it you had to remove the whole top of laptop for like couple of hundreds of dollars. Hard drive soldered with price for 1TB around $1k with even backup port removed in case of failor. Battery glued.
I used to have thinkpad x1 extreme gen 2 which price was $1.5k, 2x nmve slots, 2x removable ram up to 64gb ram. Battery removable with just a screws. Wifi module replaceable and could be upgraded. Display could be replaced and upgraded. Durable case from carbon fiber. Solid keyboard with even track point. And was still very lightweight - because carbon case.
Why would you expect that? If the EU is going to mandate something, it’s in Apple’s best interest to wait for them to mandate it and build it so that it’s compliant. Otherwise, there’s a risk that they could make something “repairable” by the own standard but does not meet EU standards, forcing another redesign to do something they didn’t want to do to begin with.
It’s also much easier to handle any criticisms in the design when they are forced upon you. You can be certain that Apple is thrilled that the EU forced their hand on USB-C. They’re going to get a juicy bump in accessory sales with the format change, with none of the criticism that came with the switch from 30-pin. “The EU made us do it! We would happily have maintained compatibility with all the accessories you’ve bought over the past 12 years but gosh darn it, looks like you’ll need to re-buy.”
Yeah I'm thrilled about EU forcing apple to adopt usb-c. It's ridiculous they selling phones for $1k or even phones with 1TB for $1.5 with still usb 2.0 transfer speed.
And will be nice to use one cable to charge everything else and use cheap off-the-shelf Usb-c pendrive instead of MFI compliant pendrive or not needing to buy some dedicated dongles.
I don’t know why people who care so much about usb-c support also happen to keep making that mixup.
The EU only mandated the port not the data portion. There’s tons of devices that use usb-c (android phones, other devices) that are usb-2 or no data at all.
I haven’t transmitted data over a wire to my phone in 10 years.
I think the usb-c switch is just about consolidating all the different connectors and saving consumers money.
Lightning was created though because there was no good cord standard. MicroUSB really sucked. So it’s not that Apple is a jerk or anything, they just didn’t change when a decent standard emerged.
Which ones? The newer models are not like that. Also, their battery life sucks ass, and they throttle like all hell. (I use one personally, but had one as a company device as well — now I’m actively looking for an M-series mac).
A screw does not need feedback for being torqued to spec, but for glue, you need eyes to see if it sticks properly, and is not beading, and no other defects. And if there are defects, you need fingers for to wipe them.