[keeran]

I'm not sure why this is an issue any more. It was a nice ideal when laptops were just PCs put into smaller boxes, but as manufacturers put the effort and investment into satisfying our demands for smaller, faster, lighter, I don't think the expectation of poking around inside them is reasonable.

We don't see people complaining about the repairability of their R-Pis, Chromecasts, SoC systems etc. That's the way hardware is going - because that's what we've asked for.

[masklinn]

> It was a nice ideal when laptops were just PCs put into smaller boxes, but as manufacturers put the effort and investment into satisfying our demands for smaller, faster, lighter, I don't think the expectation of poking around inside them is reasonable.

A big part of the annoyance with Apple is their tendency to explicitly take steps against repairs: insane amounts of glue, multiple "weird" screws (the macbook here uses pentalobe, torx, philips and tri-wing in a single machine), non-standard formats & connectors (I don't expect them to ever swap their non-soldered SSDs for M.2, even though they've altered the connector and format multiple times).

Having the machine be "hard to repair" because it's highly integrated is one thing, taking decisions which deliberately hinder repairability and have basically no other advantage is quite another.

> We don't see people complaining about the repairability of their R-Pis, Chromecasts, SoC systems etc.

Nobody complains about the repairability of an RPi because no specific step to make it harder to repair for no value were undertaken.

[54mf]

A laptop is meant to be portable, with a significant number of moving parts (keys, hinges, trackpad [until recently],) and ports that see frequent insertions/removals. These factors result in a device that can break down in many, many ways. If one tiny failure results in the entire device being unusable (or requiring replacement of many [working] parts at significant cost,) well, you're going to get complaints. :)

[serve_yay]

I agree, phones have taken the same course too. Replaceable battery used to be a line-item in the feature list, but seems like nobody cares about it anymore. When people need more power they just get one of those battery cases.

This thing is underpowered and overpriced, right now, just as the Macbook Air was when it launched. And it's being ridiculed to some extent for those reasons, just as the Macbook Air was when it launched. I think it will be pretty nice in another couple cycles.