Earlier quoted context omitted.
The other difference is the rate at which the part fails. CPUs basically last forever if you keep them sufficiently cooled. Batteries or screen backlights or keyboards, not so much.
But CPU spring connectors don't last forever. If you want to ensure the CPU stays reliable for a good long time (at today's clock rates), you're going to have to solder it down.
The Jason Bourne Aesthetic
41–50 of 135 posts
Re: The Jason Bourne Aesthetic
#42I'm not sure I buy the contrast between old computers and macbooks. The smallest replaceable part on a MacBook is the entire MacBook (excluding any wired or wireless peripherals), but the smallest in a normal computer might be the CPU. The CPU cannot be repaired except by replacing the entire thing. You can't repair a CPU or a MacBook, so it seems the the only real difference is how much it costs to replace the broke…
> as moores law ends and computers stop being obsolete we may get to a point where a computer could be passed down generations like a solid dining room table I had to smile at this. I just handed down my old iPhone 3GS to my daughter to use as she's started secondary school. I bought it in 2009 and it's now on it's fourth owner - Me, my wife, her father and now our daughter so it's been used by three generations of o…
It was excellent hardware, let down by just becoming obsolete through age.
Re: The Jason Bourne Aesthetic
#43The intention was never for you, the person who bought your computer, to be able to pop a new CPU into your Compaq five years later.
Standardized, modular parts were always all about the OEMs, who were all trying to build an industry by cloning the IBM PC. They could have a variety of manufacturers making various components and as long as everybody followed the standards, they could pick and choose parts to create SKUs for various needs and then sell them to you, the end-user.
The fact that a twenty year-old me could spend a summer saving up for the parts to build a brand-new Pentium II computer and then spend an exciting weekend putting it all together was a side effect of all that.
A side effect many of us enjoy, obviously. And a side effect that developed into a small industry of its own, with various companies (even Intel and AMD at times) targeting the "enthusiast builder" community.
When you understand this, though, things like soldered-on memory and CPUs make sense. The reasons why your 1988 Compaq had standardized IDE drives and memory slots are utterly inapplicable to a 2015 MacBook.
I hate the non-hackable place to which PC hardware is headed, but I don't get angry at it.
Almost no other category of consumer good works in the modular way that we nerds wish that everything would. Aside from the fact that they run on the same gasoline you can't put Chevy stuff into a Ford; you can't even put Ford F-150 stuff into a Ford Fusion. Your toaster oven, your ceiling fan, and your lawn mower are the same way.
Re: The Jason Bourne Aesthetic
#44Understand that PCs were end-user fixable and upgradeable by accident. The intention was never for you, the person who bought your computer, to be able to pop a new CPU into your Compaq five years later. Standardized, modular parts were always all about the OEMs, who were all trying to build an industry by cloning the IBM PC. They could have a variety of manufacturers making various components and as long as everybod…
One exception I can think of are bicycles.
Re: The Jason Bourne Aesthetic
#45Re: The Jason Bourne Aesthetic
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
> as moores law ends and computers stop being obsolete we may get to a point where a computer could be passed down generations like a solid dining room table I had to smile at this. I just handed down my old iPhone 3GS to my daughter to use as she's started secondary school. I bought it in 2009 and it's now on it's fourth owner - Me, my wife, her father and now our daughter so it's been used by three generations of o…
It's a shame this doesn't apply to the original iPad... no OS updates for quite a while, so you can't use the majority of apps (as they don't offer older versions) and the browser regularly crashes. It was excellent hardware, let down by just becoming obsolete through age.
[I still have a couple of original iPads in additional to an Air 2]
Re: The Jason Bourne Aesthetic
#47"The world is seven billion people swimming in a boiling froth of water, oil, guns, steel, race, sex, language, wisdom, secrets, hate, love, pain and TCP/IP." Yep. There's my quote of the week.
Mine: > More to the point, this is why the soi-disant-designer snob ... comes across as such a douchebag. It’s not “minimalist” if you buy a new one every two years; it’s conspicuous consumption with chamfered edges.
Re: The Jason Bourne Aesthetic
#48I'm not sure I buy the contrast between old computers and macbooks. The smallest replaceable part on a MacBook is the entire MacBook (excluding any wired or wireless peripherals), but the smallest in a normal computer might be the CPU. The CPU cannot be repaired except by replacing the entire thing. You can't repair a CPU or a MacBook, so it seems the the only real difference is how much it costs to replace the broke…
this is where the bourne comparison needs to come back into the discussion, because it depends who is doing the replacing.
I, my partner and my uncle had had three recent macbooks experience sudden unintended swamping, two with water one with red wine, charlie fixed them all.
The apple geniuses - james bond company men all - carefully removed the screws from my computer, reverently placing them in actual surgical kidney dishes, then looked at me with the practiced empathy on their young beautiful faces, shook their heads slowly without breaking eye contact and said 'logic board' - the macbook cancer diagnosis.
magic charlie is the bourne in this story. I met charlie at his office, a claustrophobic box on a suburban shopping strip, tobacco fogged, every horizontal surface except for a few stepping stones between charlie and the door fractalling out jagged piles of derelict dismembered macbooks, maybe about a thousand, in pieces, some with surprisingly brutal injuries, a fist sized whole though a 15 inch retina.
I was lucky to meet him, the shop had been open a year, he was planning on closing it down and working out of home. he got few walk in customers, the few that did seemed unsettled by his casual disemboweling of their pristine objects of beauty atop of a mound of incomplete repairs, crowded by ashtrays - most of them overflowing, some for screws.
Those people would leave to take their computers to apple licensed stores, who - in violation of licensing agreements, but in obedience with the imperative of profit - sent the work to charlie. He charged the same price either way.
If a macbook is atomic, charlie is a quarks man, I watched for about ten minutes until he kicked me out, as he scrounged chips from the racks of donor laptops, desoldering and re-soldering tiny components into the open heart of my machine. The only explanations he gave of the undertaking were when he pointed a chip on the logic board and said 'sound', then lifted the board to eye level, held at two diagonal corners in his finger tips, and slowly spun the board through a full rotation, then made eye contact for the one and only time and said 'keyboard'.
When I came back the shop was shut. For about a week no-one answered the phone. Then I got a message from a woman on my phone "your computer's ready". I dropped by charlie's, I wanted to speak with him a moment, to emote my awe and gratitude, he wasn't interested, he didn't look up. the woman, standing in one of the bare-floored stepping stones took my money, don't remember how much, but less than a hundred.
it worked and still does.
Re: The Jason Bourne Aesthetic
#49Understand that PCs were end-user fixable and upgradeable by accident. The intention was never for you, the person who bought your computer, to be able to pop a new CPU into your Compaq five years later. Standardized, modular parts were always all about the OEMs, who were all trying to build an industry by cloning the IBM PC. They could have a variety of manufacturers making various components and as long as everybod…
I think if that were the case, IBM would not have released such complete documentation with the PC, XT, and AT. They could've just as well kept it to themselves, like they started to do with the MCA-based systems (PS/2).
Re: The Jason Bourne Aesthetic
#50Understand that PCs were end-user fixable and upgradeable by accident. The intention was never for you, the person who bought your computer, to be able to pop a new CPU into your Compaq five years later. Standardized, modular parts were always all about the OEMs, who were all trying to build an industry by cloning the IBM PC. They could have a variety of manufacturers making various components and as long as everybod…
>Almost no other category of consumer good works in the modular way that we nerds wish that everything would. One exception I can think of are bicycles.