“With Apple’s announcement of the new MacBook Pro, the interwebs had to find something to fret about and it appears that repair and upgradability is the new hobby horse for pundits to ride,” Michael Pusateri writes for Cruftbox. “Kyle Wiens of iFixit wrote a good opinion story on the new MacBook Pro. I can’t disagree with what he wrote, it’s completely accurate. But he’s completely wrong that it’s a problem.”
“ZDNet, MSNBC, and CNET have all jumped on the FUD bandwagon with the story,” Pusateri writes.
MacDailyNews Take: Bastions of fine journalism, all.
Pusateri writes, “Choo, choo, all aboard the Pundit Express to PageHitsVille!”
“Thanks to a lucky combination of good brain wiring, an electrical engineer father, and an understanding and patient wife, I do a lot of repair and fixing around the home. I’ve repaired everything from our house wiring, dish washers, dryers, ovens, lamps, clocks, to the assorted home electronics of friends and family. I build my desktop computer from scratch. I like fixing things,” Pusateri writes. “But it’s a skill set that’s in decline.”
“The decline is not due to some evil plan by manufacturers, it’s due to the public desire for better products to appear regularly. The desire to buy good, low price, and reliable products that work out of the box is the driver for seeing the lack of ‘fixability’ in the new laptop line,” Pusateri writes “And it’s not a bad thing.”
Pusateri writes, “To meet the demands of today’s consumer, modern manufacturing basically requires the very measures that the punditry is railing against. Fastening optimization, robotic soldering, minimization of variation, exacting tolerances, and made to order componentry are required to delivery great products. To ask that every piece of modern electronics is designed to allow the tiny fraction of hackers to upgrade is the height of hubris, unreasonable, and a huge imposition on everyone else that has no desire to ever crack the case. All that ‘upgradability’ ends up making the product cost more and be more susceptible to failure. Catering to the fringe is not the way to make good products.”
Read more, including vacuum tubes and 1970s do-it-yourself TV repair at the supermarket, in the full article – recommended – here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “kevin p.” for the heads up.]
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the govt secret black budget ELF towers and 02 towers are radiating the planet and beaming microwaves into peoples heads (causing deaf people to hear sounds or voices in their heads) its actually sick when you think JAPAN FUKISHIMA tsunami was 100% man-made caused by an underwater nuke, google it and research if you don’t believe me…… don’t expect to hear it on the BBC though 😉
Oh how the fanboys just bend down and take it.
This is a horrible idea. It is not to make building the machines cheaper, it’s to MAKE MORE MONEY. It breaks, you pay for repair or buy new.
They should at least remove the “pro” label. There is nothing professional about a computer that you can’t change a RAM stick or a hard drive on.