Apple gives a new meaning to solid state.

On 2013-10-26 20:01:06 +0000, Tony Cooper said:

On Sun, 27 Oct 2013 08:42:18 +1300, Eric Stevens
wrote:

What are my options when the battery goes?
must I get a new machine, or can the battery be easily replaced?

it's very easily replaced. take it to an apple store and it's replaced
while you wait. not a big deal, especially since it only needs to be
done once every 5 years or so.

How do you reconcile that claim with the following quote from the
article which started this thread?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10...013_teardowns/

"Most vexing thing about the new MacBook Pros is that Cupertino has
once again chosen to fix the battery in place using not screws but
glue, a practice that began with the MacBook Air and now seems de
rigueur for all of Apple's laptops. This time around, iFixit's
repair gurus spent half an hour trying to pry the 15-inch MacBook
Pro's battery away from the case and weren't pleased with the
results. Complicating the process was the fact that the battery now
covers the trackpad cable, meaning not only is the trackpad
difficult to replace, but any attempt to remove the battery is
likely to shear the cable in half."

The author will be branded an "Apple basher" by nospam.

Tough to do since the tear-down was done by iFixit, a business which is
centered around Apple products, not "The Register". They were just
reporting on what iFixit found.
iFixit is an interesting source for information and tools to fix many
Apple products, and quite a few non-Apple products. A very helpful
bunch of guys who are local for me. They helped me out back in 2009,
when my father had a Logic board failure on his G4 PowerBook Pro. They
got me a new logic board and the replacement procedure. It is still
working just fine.

It is worth looking at the actual tear-down to see what all the fuss is about.

http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBo...ardown/18695/1



--
Regards,

Savageduck

On 2013.10.26, 15:30 , Alfred Molon wrote:
In article , Alan Browne says...
I was
helping someone fix their 2006 laptop the other day - it ran great and
it's 7 years old and has a lot left in it).

It may be running fine, but is totally outdated in terms of processor power.
Why keep it when you can buy a machine which is five times as fast? Nowadays
notebook computers cost very little.

For the person in question (teenage girl) it is more than adequate for
school work, browsing, all the social crap, and so on. If she installs
Mavericks on it, it will improve the memory by about 20% at no charge.
(judging by my SO's MBA with only 2 GB in it).

For that matter my 2007 iMac runs great too and can handle anything
anyone could want to do in terms of photography, light video editing and
so on. The only thing that is "slow" (all things being relative) is
converting raw to DNG or opening a lot of raw files at the same time.

On the new iMac such is about 4 or 5X faster. And of course it has USB
3.0 so when I get a USB 3.0 external drive dock backups, etc. will be
much quicker.

All these higher end processors that a lot of people have at home these
days spend a lot of time at idle and don't work very hard even on more
demanding jobs. This iMac (2012, i7) only gets a serious workout for a
an hour or 3 every couple weeks after I upload photos.

--
"Quotation, n: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another."
-Ambrose Bierce

On 2013.10.26, 15:34 , Alfred Molon wrote:
In article , Alan Browne says...
OTOH it could all backfire on Apple - it is _very_ easy to install OS X
in a wide number of non-Apple laptops and desktops.

For sure I wouldn't buy a notebook computer in which the battery is glued to
the machine and where you can't upgrade the RAM or the HDD. So, yes, Apple are
shooting themselves into the foot.

As to switching to OS X, I fail to see the benefit. It's just another windows
based OS like Win 7 or 8.

OS X is a much simpler system for the user than Windows. S/W
installation is much more straightforward. There is no cruft like
anti-virus needed. MS started at around $140 - per machine). Removing
software from a Mac is (in almost all cases) as simple as dropping the
app in the trash.

There is none of the Microsoft ransom to upgrade the OS every few years
(Apple was $20 and that was good for all the Macs in your house - I have
3 here. Now it is zero. And with my new iMac they threw in iWork for
free too (eg: Apple's "Office" - not as complete as MS Office but quite
good)).

MS PC's have the advantage of a wider selection of software available,
much more in terms of games, cheaper commodity hardware and so on.

Having said that I'll not go back to Windows as long as there is OS X.

Just not worth the pain. (Vista and Win 8 being two very good reasons
to stay the hell away from Windows - WinXP was very decent and Win 7
(from the little use I've made of it)).

--
"Quotation, n: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another."
-Ambrose Bierce

On 2013.10.26, 16:38 , Savageduck wrote:
On 2013-10-26 19:34:56 +0000, Alfred Molon said:

In article , Alan
Browne says...
OTOH it could all backfire on Apple - it is _very_ easy to install OS X
in a wide number of non-Apple laptops and desktops.

For sure I wouldn't buy a notebook computer in which the battery is
glued to
the machine and where you can't upgrade the RAM or the HDD. So, yes,
Apple are
shooting themselves into the foot.

Agreed.

As to switching to OS X, I fail to see the benefit. It's just another
windows
based OS like Win 7 or 8.

Windows based???
Where did you come up with that?

OSX is what Linux would like to be when it grows up.

Whoah dude! That's my line.


--
"Quotation, n: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another."
-Ambrose Bierce

On 2013.10.26, 16:51 , Eric Stevens wrote:

Well the Apple store "Genius" guys have the proprietary 'iCrowbar',
'iHammer', 'iChisel' to use for the removal of new Macbook batteries,
HDDs, & SSDs. The replacement items are fixed back in place with
'iEpoxy'. No big deal.

iWondered.

There's a company called iFixIt that sell all sorts of tools to take
apart and rebuild Apple computers (and others). They also sell whatever
you might need to glue back whatever needs to be glued.


--
"Quotation, n: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another."
-Ambrose Bierce

On 2013-10-26 21:37:43 +0000, Alan Browne
said:

On 2013.10.26, 16:51 , Eric Stevens wrote:

Well the Apple store "Genius" guys have the proprietary 'iCrowbar',
'iHammer', 'iChisel' to use for the removal of new Macbook batteries,
HDDs, & SSDs. The replacement items are fixed back in place with
'iEpoxy'. No big deal.

iWondered.

There's a company called iFixIt that sell all sorts of tools to take
apart and rebuild Apple computers (and others). They also sell
whatever you might need to glue back whatever needs to be glued.

Yup!
The iFixit boys are local lads here in San Luis Obispo County, and they
have been helpful for me in the past. In getting me an almost
impossible to find G4 Logic board for my father's PowerBook Pro and the
information for the fix.
Their site has changed from when they first started up, but that's what
happens when you move from a kitchen counter repair shop to having a
global reputation.

--
Regards,

Savageduck

In article ,
says...

In article , Alan Browne says...
I was
helping someone fix their 2006 laptop the other day - it ran great and
it's 7 years old and has a lot left in it).

It may be running fine, but is totally outdated in terms of processor power.
Why keep it when you can buy a machine which is five times as fast? Nowadays
notebook computers cost very little.

Alfred, you're living in the past. Between 2000 and 2006 clock speeds
increased by a factor of 5. Between 2006 and now they have remained
steady or even gone down a little bit. Multicore processors and the
like have not made up for it for single-user machines--a machine you buy
today may be somewhat faster than one you bought in 2006, but it's not 5
times faster.

This is one reason that PC sales have slowed--there just isn't much
benefit to buying new hardware unless the old hardware dies beyond
economical repair.

In article ,
says...

In article , Alan Browne says...
OTOH it could all backfire on Apple - it is _very_ easy to install OS X
in a wide number of non-Apple laptops and desktops.

For sure I wouldn't buy a notebook computer in which the battery is glued to
the machine and where you can't upgrade the RAM or the HDD. So, yes, Apple are
shooting themselves into the foot.
As to switching to OS X, I fail to see the benefit. It's just another windows
based OS like Win 7 or 8.

OS/X is Unix, Windows is Windows. While there are superficial
similarities they are not related except to the extent that Unix has
influenced just about everything in computing.

In article 2013102613381046043-savageduck1@REMOVESPAMmecom, Savageduck
says...
As to switching to OS X, I fail to see the benefit. It's just another windows
based OS like Win 7 or 8.

Windows based???
Where did you come up with that?

With "windows" (note the small letters I used) I don't mean Microsoft Windows,
I mean a graphic user interface OS with with Windows. That's what both the
Apple and Microsoft OSes are.

OSX is what Linux would like to be when it grows up.

I remember X Windows was an environment on a Lisp machine years ago. Possibly
it was also available on a Unix machine.
--

Alfred Molon
------------------------------
Olympus E-series DSLRs and micro 4/3 forum at
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/MyOlympus/
http://myolympus.org/ photo sharing site

In article , Sandman says...
Much like a Bugatti Veyron is another "steering wheel-based car" like Ford
Focus and VW Beetle.

But MS Windows 8, 7 and even Vista are not bad OSes. They are good enough and
easy to use. I don't think a Mac OS is that much better.
--

Alfred Molon
------------------------------
Olympus E-series DSLRs and micro 4/3 forum at
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/MyOlympus/
http://myolympus.org/ photo sharing site