Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve learned more about commercial real estate from Louis than I would have from other sources. There are disincentives for commercial real estate owners to lower their leasing rates, as it can drive a re-evaluation of loan criteria by the banks, forcing the owner to immediately increase equity. Banks don’t want this to happen, as it makes their books look bad. Watching his business struggle through Covid fills me wi…
I've had three 12" Macbook main boards, two screens, and two keyboards replaced free under Australian Consumer Law because of broken components. Connectors that should have been replaceable onsite in seconds instead requiring depot maintenance and hundreds of dollars in couriers and staff interactions. 10c LVDS cables soldered on instead of replaceable, unrepairable even to Apple, have sent two high quality display p…
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.