An Apple Teardown

[GreyGeek]

RAM soldered in, battery glued in.
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/cra...96?tag=nl.e101

The comments are equally interesting!

[HalationEffect]

The comments are equally interesting!

Especially the comment that includes this nugget:

On the topic of the MB Pro's upgradeablity and adding things are moot points when you honestly ask yourself a few questions.

Do you really need more than 16GB of Ram? No.
Do you really need more than 256GB of HD? No.
Do you really intend to keep the laptop for more than three years? No.

He doesn't seem to care that the answers to the first two questions are entirely dependant on the third question being also answered with a "no". I'm betting that plenty of people would want a brand new laptop to have a usable life of quite a bit more than three years, based on the not unreasonable expectation that you could replace the battery as necessary, and upgrade at least the RAM and HDD / SSD, and possibly even the CPU (which, in these days of GPUs being integrated into the CPU, gets you two upgrades for the price of one).

Seems like Apple's brilliant strategy is to make disposable, "throwaway" products, at definitely not disposable prices. And then they get you again with their high priced proprietary connectors and cables... I'll pass, thanks!

[eggbert]

I've always thought of apple as more of a fashion company than a tech company. As someone who is proudly un-trendy, I could give a rat's arse about apple's crappy overpriced products. I never saw any advantage to their hardware. Is there one?

[buckeyered80]

There isn't really an advantage with their hardware. I kind of like their OS though. But, Linux devs have done such a great job that you could just about do anything on the latest distro of Linux that you can on Mac OS X.

[GreyGeek]

... I never saw any advantage to their hardware. Is there one?

A friend of mine used an old PC running Win95 and used it with Skype to communicate to his son in Beijing, China, who is studying the something to do with languages at the University of Beijing. The study has a technical name but I don't remember what it is. His connection was barely usable 90% of the time but he kept struggling with it. When he wasn't using Skype he was using Word and some study software for which no version was available in Linux. Besides, the hardware was so old that even Puppy 5.1 struggled. It was an old 486SX with 256Mb of RAM.

About six months ago he bought a new Macbook Pro. He runs it like a pro. He thought using computers was hard. Now that he's used a Mac for six months he realized that his problem had two parts, and old machine and Win95. Not really fair comparisons, but he's a mac fan now.

He and his wife flew over to China a week ago to attend his son's graduation. I was browsing the web and on a lark turned on Skype to see if he was on. It was 9:30PM here. His icon was green so I called him. He answered! It was 10:30AM in Beijing and he and his wife were setting in Starbucks a block from his hotel, the only place he could find an open wifi. His Skype picture and sound were perfect. So was mine, of course! We had a nice 20 minute conversation. It was like he was setting across from me, but he was half a world away!

I had been using flight tracker to track his flight from Detroit straight to Beijing. Just as it flew over the shore of the Arctic Ocean live readout showed that it was descending at 3,840 feet per minute! I thought it was going down. What happened was that it flew out of Canadian controlled air space and the flight progress was indicated as being an estimate. When I woke up the next day and took a look at his flight progress the "estimated" location was just inside Russian air space, approaching the Chinese boarder. An hour later it was "estimated" to have landed. Apparently China does not allow live flight tracking of non-Chinese aircraft?