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by redidas 3885 days ago
Personally, I'd rather have a few extra mm of thickness and batteries that are not glued to a keyboard. Efforts could be made to keep this tech more repairable.
4 comments

Speak for yourself. I want a thin laptop that feels almost like a slab of mysteriously lightweight solid aluminum, and Apple is delivering that.

It's not like this was a cost-saving measure for them; they're not pulling one over on you. They went nuts trying to make these things solid, lightweight, and skinny, and this was a tradeoff they made --- at significant expense.

" --- at significant expense."

Which is being directly passed on to the client along with an extra slice of profit making. Brilliant but not so nice if you're the client.

It reminds me of printer sales or high-fee consumer credits.. they benefit from consumer myopia about the future. There's even a lot of literature about that:

https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/4554333/Laibson_...

In this case, I'm guessing many people that are not that well-off still buy macs but don't really realize the future repair costs..

Does it remind you of buying nearly everything? Do you think the average consumer decides to buy a home appliance or a television based on the possibility of providing user service at reduced rates?
"Efforts could be made"? Which passive-voice efforts do you mean, specifically? Apple has designed their battery to be made up of several curved units that take up all available airspace in the case, and those have to be secured in place somehow, so that they don't rattle around like cheap PCs. Screws are not a realistic solution here because of obvious strictures from the design. A simple one-piece replaceable battery design is simply no longer feasible in this form factor.

So if you think it'd be trivial to make this more repairable, you need to say precisely how.

good for you, HP and DELL are ready to take orders.
Great, you can buy a chunky ass hp laptop and enjoy that big ol paperweight all you want.