14 DAY TRIAL // Apple has been heavily scrutinized for some of the technologies and the parts used to make the new MacBook Pro with Retina display. Most of this scrutiny mounted around the soldered RAM, and the customer’s inability to upgrade this particular feature.
Let alone the fact that Apple’s new Retina MacBook Pro comes with a standard 8 gigs of RAM and the option to buy an even more powerful version with 16GB of memory and insane Flash storage capacities - people want to pop it open, right?
Wrong, according to Michael Pusateri, a techie writing for the Cruftbox blog.
Picked up by the eccentric MacDailyNews whose editors are running a crusade against bad Apple reporting, Pusateri’s reporting revolves around an iFixit teardown-analysis of the machine in question.
The famous repair shop - whose staffers have opened up more gadgets than you ever thought existed - gave the new Pro an all-time low score on their repairability scale. Their tinkering minds thought this was bad.
Pusateri thinks this take is completely wrong (even though he agrees with every other aspect of iFixit’s analysis). Without further ado...:
“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.”
The rest of Pusateri’s post can be found right here, complete with a few more examples of why you shouldn’t start off a rant about Apple’s practices before you realize if you even understand the company’s ultimate goals.
The main idea is you should consider buying something else if you want this type of upgradability and repairability. It's that simple!
Heck, even the comments there are well worth a read.