| HN Mirror

Building things to a certain price is always going to yield accusations of doing that to make it more breakable. But it's probably one of those cases where you can spend thousands of dollars for only 1% more reliability. Stuff that you bend open, throw in your backpack twice a day, touch for 14 hours a day, eat your meals over, etc. is going to break no matter how expensive the components are. I used to work on embedded systems and was always impressed by the quality of eval boards we got. Name brand components all over -- Coilcraft inductors, Vishay resistors, etc. They still flaked out, had bugs, broke, and required manual rework. The performance of the $10,000 reference board was the same as the $100 production units with decidedly non-name-brand components.

We'll never know for sure if Apple is making the right trade-offs, because you can't buy any other machines that run OS X to compare to, but they probably are. People who just spilled coffee on their keyboard really want a laptop that weighs 3x as much to have a keyboard drainage system. The 99% of users that don't spill coffee on their keyboard but do carry their laptop to and from work twice a day probably appreciate the weight savings. (You can kind of infer whether or not Apple is making the right decisions by looking at the PC market. Not a lot of laptops with roll cages and keyboard drainage anymore. People want specs per dollar, not the ability to run their laptop over with a car. When they do run their laptop over with a car or drop it into a pool, they're sad. But if those parts were standard issue, they wouldn't be able to afford a laptop to begin with. Such is the way of the market, I suppose.)

Apple probably doesn't have any good reason to make repairing their laptops so painful for skilled professionals. As far as I can tell, even their own repair service is garbage. That is probably a conscious decision -- paying someone to write repair guides, train technicians, and maintain a fulfillment network for spare parts cuts into new computer sales, so it's spending money to lose money, which nobody will ever do. Maybe government intervention is the right answer, but it's probably a cost the market can't bear. PC manufacturers compete ruthlessly, and all the laptops are junk too. There is probably a maximum amount of money consumers will pay for a certain amount of specs, and it isn't enough to make a reliable mobile computer. The downside is that you'll never have a computer you can spill coffee on. The upside is that even someone without a lot of money can afford a personal computer. That's the tradeoff.

I use a desktop and keep it where I can't spill my coffee on it. Works well.