New Anti-Consumer MacBook Pros – Teardown and Repair Assessment [video] | Hacker News Reader

New Anti-Consumer MacBook Pros – Teardown and Repair Assessment [video]

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18 pointsdns_snek23 comments

I wonder what's it like at an Apple Store when you go in for an in-warranty replacement - does a Genius in the back have to go through this process of removing so many screws and carefully wrestling with the internals or do they have some hardware to assist this process?

Don't they just transfer the data and chuck your old device in the bin?

But they're compensating for that added e-waste and environmental damage by not giving you a charger in the box for, you know, saving the planet and all that. /s

I know it was sarcasm, but all Apple Laptops and iPads come with a charger.

I was referring to the iPhone but you're right.

There were 8 screws to remove the bottom of the laptop. That's about the same maybe even less than most PC laptops I've worked on.

I believe Apple will do simple repairs in the store. Battery replacement, screen replacement, etc.

The logic board failed on my M1 MacBook Air, I brought it to an Apple Store and they did some diagnostics but said they had to mail it to a repair center. It was overnight shipped to some facility in Texas.

The "Pro" stands for "professional". What other types of professional equipment is designed to be maintained by consumers?

Division of labor is the foundation of civilization.

That's a false dichotomy. Laptops should be repairable by any sufficiently skilled and equipped repair technician. Apple is clearly going out of their way to make that impossible with proprietary parts, tools, procedures, exclusivity agreements with their suppliers and more.

In the video you have someone who is clearly skilled enough to perform the repair, with brand new original parts and yet - Apple and their engineers made sure that the repair wouldn't succeed.

Interesting. The flip side of this is that it's probably a good anti-theft measure. You can't steal an Apple laptop for repair parts anymore. As someone who has repaired MBP's in the past, I'm not a big fan of unrepairability, but on the other hand this is sort of... good?

How is this acceptable though?, how big of a problem is theft that users give up repair for?

Compare to framework - transform motherboard and cpu into a home server, replace components yourself if they break, upgrade as you wish.

For apple, if anything breaks you have to buy another one after warranty, if battery swells you do what?, if you drop it and screen cracks? ssd reaches end of life or fails like anything else?

Well, expect some EU regulations around that.

All I was saying was that the reason Apple added these tricks wasn't (only) unrepairability but more anti-theft. I don't want to defend their decision though.

I highly doubt these are anti-theft. Apple simply wants you to give them more money

Can you think of any companies who don't want you to give them more money?

The "Apple wants money" stick is shaken every time, but isn't that true for every company ever that's isn't a literal charity?

What I meant to say was

Apple is run by unscrupulous thieves who design products around the strategy of milking their customers for every last penny they have, while at the same time devising a marketing strategy so that those same customers thank their corporate overlords for the opportunity to get robbed blind

Ask the market and hence the aggregate consumer, which deemed it to be acceptable. MacBook sales outnumber that of the framework by several orders of magnitude. Turns out that people don’t really want a very large, comparatively flimsy Lego piece laptop with a lesser display, trackpad, battery, etc. and also costs about the same amount. are you also surprised the average person does not want a phone with a plastic back and removable battery?

Other laptop sales outnumber macbook by several orders of magnitude.

So if you base your argument on that I would say aggregate consumer doesn't care that much about apple either.

I was arguing on moral grounds, it's immoral to create so much waste and I hope Apple gets forced by EU to change direction as their target customers won't care.

Consumers also didn't care about standardization, yet usb-c now is uniquous and it's great... so perhaps what they care and what's better for all of us aren't the same

By manufacturer, nobody comes close to outsellling Apple by an order of magnitude, let alone several.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_share_of_personal_com...

By laptop, the numbers are likely even less in your favour since Apple only has a few models. So no, the average consumer agrees with me and not you.

It’s immoral for anyone to create waste, so perhaps supposed environmental fines should be directly proportional to damage and not some specific penalty to a specific entity. I find that people that support such policies generally do so in a way so that they themselves are excluded from the laws they apply to others.

> By manufacturer, nobody comes close to outsellling Apple by an order of magnitude, let alone several.

Fine, I was wrong, a single order of magnitude between apple and everyone else, not several, I still thought apple had 2% of the market instead of 10% now.

So average consumer... hell... 90% of the consumers don't buy apple.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/273495/global-shipments-...

"2022, approximately 286 million PCs were shipped around the world"

Where apple had: 26 million Mac and MacBook units were sold in 2022

> It’s immoral for anyone to create waste

I'm happy you share the same view.

> so perhaps supposed environmental fines should be directly proportional to damage

Apple consumers have proven they don't care about money spent on products, so this would not have any effect. (doubt anyone would notice 100-200$ more on price...)

Best to not have the damage in the first place and force them to come up with better products. (so in essence, force them to use the tax you proposed into designing a better product)

"For apple, if anything breaks you have to buy another one after warranty"

That is not remotely true. If you watched the video he even shows you that apple now has a website where you can purchase the replacement parts. This is actually an improvement, because Apple would not sell you replacement parts for the Pre-M1 MacBooks.

No, compared to a PC laptop it is not as easy to get an out of warranty MacBook repaired. But it is possible.

I think all of us would like to see Apple be more repair friendly. They do seem to be moving in that direction. They now will sell you MacBook and iPhone replacement parts. They also made the iPhone 14 battery replacement easier, you no longer have to remove the screen.

Challenge: Replace faulty RAM on an M1/M2 MacBook. Then when you discover you can't, pull the SSD and dump the data for transfer to another machine. Slight problem there too...

Wear parts shouldn't be irreplaceable. That's like having a car you have to throw away when the brake pads or tires are worn out, because they're welded in place, AND have a computer making sure they don't get replaced anyway by someone who knows how to weld.

"That's like having a car you have to throw away when the brake pads or tires are worn out"

No, it is not like that. Brake pads and tires wear out by design. Quality RAM should last the lifetime of the device.

Apple has been soldering the RAM since 2012 and it hasn't been an issue. Most ultralight PC laptops have been doing the same for years now as well.

SSD failures can happen, but again Apple has been doing it for 5+ years and I have not heard of any widespread issues.

I like my MacBook because it just works. And that is what Apple does really well. If you can work within their ecosystem you generally have a great experience.

I have a desktop gaming PC that I built, and yeah upgrading components can be fun, but there is almost always some weird issue with my Gaming PC because certain parts have compatibility issues/driver issues. I don't want that on my MacBook.

Are there any statements from Apple or any other indications these are explicitly designed as "anti-theft"?

Do people frequently steal laptops just for the spare parts?

Parting out stolen devices is the natural next option after discovering they’re firmware locked (as MacBooks can be) and can’t be sold as-is, because the lock can’t be easily cleared like traditional BIOS passwords and the like can. There’s less money in that, but it doesn’t matter since it cost the thief nothing to obtain the device.

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