Re: [Fsuk-manchester] Re: [Fsfe-uk] Mac OS X refund

[Andy Halsall]

Dave Crossland wrote:
> Apple's hardware is increasingly less upgradable, and the Air laptop -
> no battery replacement, hermetically sealed - is the latest and most
> extreme example of this.

The Air laptop is probably the one place where I would let Apple get 
away with being upgrade and self service unfriendly, primarily because 
given the form factor it is going to be non standard and probably 
engineered to fairly tight tolerances (adding removable parts would 
likely increase size the device would need to be - it may not be true 
but its believable).

What does annoy me is that laptop manufacturers in general seem 
unwilling to standardise whatsoever, even within their own product 
ranges to a large degree, I have a drawer full of Toshiba laptop 
batteries, all of them Li-ions all of them 14.8V, all of them different 
shapes, same with modular CD drives (although HP seem happy for these to 
be interchangeable).  About the only user serviceable parts are the HDD 
and RAM (Although I do have an old (I think) Dell where you can add a 
second stick of PC100 RAM, but only after removing the keyboard..)

Its been a while since I last bought a laptop (about 2005 I think) so 
things may have changed since, but I have always hated the fact that if 
anything broke, you couldn't just strip the laptop down and replace the 
defunct part, the solution was either to find a whole other laptop of 
the same model with some other defect and use it as a donor, or pay 
exorbitant fees to the manufacturer to have the thing fixed.

To be fair though, this does come down to customer expectation to a 
large degree, most people see PC's as upgradable and laptops as some 
sort of magical *tiny* boxes, there is a disconnect that the contents of 
both are pretty much the same.