iFixit Tears Down The MacBook Pro With Retina Display, Deems It Nearly Impossible To Repair | TechCrunch:
iFixit states “[The MacBook Pro with Retina Display] is, to date, the least repairable laptop we’ve taken apart.” Apparently the new MacBook Pro is built like a MacBook Air and an iPad in that everything is custom and designed for the thinnest possible end product. The batteries are glued into place, the RAM is soldered to the logic board, it uses a custom SSD, and, worse yet, the screen assembly is all one piece, which means owners will need to replace the whole thing if something happens to any part of it. This nonsense sort of signals the end to hometown Mac repair shops.
Allow me to take exception to the phrase “This nonsense sort of signals….”
Why is this nonsense?
But first, a story. amuse me, I’m an old fart.
Back in the day, when I was working for Mama Fruit, we were selling a machine called the Mac IIfx. Like it’s older brother, the Mac II, it had seven (count them, seven!) expansion slots. One was required for the video card. The rest were for users to stick stuff into.
Apple later came out with a newer model, known as the Iici. It only had three slots, including the video card slot. There was a hue and cry, gnashing of teeth, the geeky pundits of the mac world declared this to be the end of the universe as they knew it, etc. etc.
The Mac IIci t4urned out to be one of the best selling, most reliable and highest rated computers of its era.
What Apple knew, which the pundits didn’t (and didn’t CARE to know) was that the average number of slots used in a typical machine was under 2, and only about 3% of the seven slot machines had three things in its slots. There might have been a couple of people stuffing all seven slots, but you could almost count them on two hands.
Sit back and listen to the WWDC crowd on twitter talking about the new Macbook pro (for instance, Jason Snell, but he’s far from alone). What are the biggest complaints? How big and heavy it is, and how they’re so used to their Macbook Air’s and 13″ MacBooks that much as they love the retina display, a large chunk of those power users are going to wait until the Retina slides down the product line to the smaller screens. For that matter, that’s my opinion on the new Retina machine as well — it looks like an awesome machine, but my current laptop is a 2010 model and I’m in no hurry to upgrade, and I really am not looking forward to going back to a 15″ monitor (I have one of those at work, and carry it to meetings, and it’s heavy compared to my home device).
What most users are asking for — power user or not — is smaller, lighter, better battery, faster units.
Lack of repairability is important to iFixit (for obvious reasons), so of course they’re going to complain about this. I don’t blame them. But stop and ask yourself this: what percentage of users repair a device through anyone OTHER than Apple?
5%? unlikely.
What percentage of users upgrade RAM on their device over the life of it?
10%? probably not. It used to be higher when RAM prices in the Apple BTO store were margined like crazy, but now, getting your box built with all the ram isn’t painful, so I expect a much larger percentage of users do it that way now.
Repairability is not free.
Expandability is not free.
Connectors cost money. Connectors cost space. Connectors KILL reliability. They add complexity and support costs. So fi you want your device to be upgradeable, if you want to be able to replace things on it or have someone tear it apart and fix it, you’re going to pay more for that device up front.
By removing those aspects of the product, Apple can make them more reliable (if they don’t break in the first place, who needs them repairable?), increase performance and reduce the cost.
This is a replay of the “oh my god, Apple is dead, I can’t swap my macbook battery” complaint from 2009. And as we’ve seen since then, that big “controversy” turned out to be a huge nothing (as I said it would at the time).
Fact is, unless you’re one of that 3% or 5% that use a company like iFixit, or you’re iFixit’s CEO, nobody cares about this. AppleCare is endemic and is bought by a huge percentage of users; the Apple repair process (via Fedex or Apple stores) is easy and painless and reliable. Apple doesn’t need devices to be repairable, and there’s no reason why consumers need to pay the extra money for a device to have repairability engineered in.
And in fact, if you look at how sales have gone for Apple devices, consumers have voted with their pocketbooks already; iPhone and iPads are non-repairable for the most part, and buyers are increasingly going for the smaller and lighter devices over the bigger ones. How does Apple make these things smaller and lighter? One important and relatively easy way is to remove things like the space and weight and cost associated with connectors and module bays needed to support your ability to swap RAM or replace a battery.
If you were given a choice between two features: “replaceable RAM” or “one more hour of battery life”, which one do you think most buyers would choose?
Yup. they’d configure in the ram at purchase, and go for the battery life.
And with these changes to their new retina macbook pro, Apple is doing exactly that as well.
So unless you’re the CEO of iFixit, this is a good thing.
But if you buy one of these, you should consider Applecare to be a mandatory accessory now. Just in case.