This talk expresses many of my concerns with desktop & laptop hardware over the last few years.
Recently however, Apple has changed their hardware design philosophy from a fairly open platform to a more proprietary and disposable one. They’ve eliminated the ability to change or upgrade components. The 3rd generation MacBooks have a battery that is glued in place, the memory is soldered directly to the logic board. Later models would come with the hard drive soldered down as well.
Lyle Wiens of iFixIt, said it best in 2012
> "When Apple dropped the MacBook Air to $999 in 2010 to match the price point of the MacBook, they gave users a clear choice: the thin, light, and un-upgradeable MacBook Air or the heavier, longer lasting, [upgradable], more rugged, and more powerful MacBook. Same price, two very different products. At the time, I wasn’t very happy with the non-upgradeable RAM on the MacBook Air, but I respected that Apple had given their users a choice. It was up to us: Did we want a machine that would be stuck with 2GB of RAM forever? Would we support laptops that required replacement every year or two as applications required more memory and batteries atrophied?"
Consumers overwhelmingly voted yes, and the Air grew to take 40 percent of Apple’s notebook sales by the end of 2010.
This sort of vendor-lock down and planned-obsolecence has bothered me to such an extent that the next laptop I buy won’t be Apple hardware.
Meanwhile, Apple has secured an oligopoly in the market, they have such a dominant position with hardware manufacturers that they seem to be squeezing competitors out of getting access to top-quality components (or their competitors don’t care about quality). These manufacturers seem to be building computers with “Apples’ scraps and leftovers”.
Put simply; I don’t see any manufacturers building laptops at the same level of quality that Apple does, and yet, I can’t buy a product that is so tightly controlled, and designed to be obsolete in two years.