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Retina Macbook 2015 Teardown

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Re: Retina Macbook 2015 Teardown

#91

Post by [deleted] »

CPLX wrote: post #84
mwcampbell wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then we software developers need to get better at using hardware resources efficiently, so that the amount of RAM that's considered adequate today is still adequate 10 years from now. As I've said before, why isn't a PC with a 366 MHz processor and 64 MB of RAM (the laptop I used in college) good enough any more?

Why should it be? You present this as a normative argument, that things should be a certain way. But do you have a cogent argument for why we should be retarding the growth of memory and speed with our personal computing devices?

[deleted]

Re: Retina Macbook 2015 Teardown

#92

Post by lisper »

dang wrote: post #3
lisper wrote: post #2

The submission to the original iFixit article only has five points: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9384791 Something is badly broken here, and it's not just the fact that you can't repair the new MacBook. :-(

Too many submissions appear on HN for randomness not to be a leading if not dominant factor. That's why a small number of reposts are ok, if the article is good for HN and hasn't had attention yet. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html . We changed the URL on this submission from http://arstechnica.com/apple/2015/04/surprise-ifixit-says-yo... to the article it points to, as we normally do.

But now I am getting the submission credit that rightfully belongs to chaostheory, who originally submitted this link. (And to top off the irony, my comment is being downvoted into oblivion despite the fact that it's my own submission I'm criticizing!)

Here's a constructive suggestion on how to fix the problem:

1. As long as the article is not on the front page, give the Nth upvoter K/N karma points, where K is the number of karma points the article eventually gets.

2. When an article not on the front page gets an upvote, put it back at the top of the New page (i.e. sort the New page based on most recent upvote, not submission time).

This would provide an incentive for people to browse the new page and be early upvoters of quality articles. In order to prevent people from simply upvoting everything, you would need to:

3. Charge one karma point to upvote an article

and in order to start everyone on a level playing field

4. Give everyone 100 free karma points (or allow karma to go down to -100 before users lose their upvoting privileges, at which point they can only redeem themselves by submissions)

and to prevent submission spam:

5. Limit users with low karma to 1 submission per day or something like that

I'll even offer to implement this for you if you think you might make this change.

Re: Retina Macbook 2015 Teardown

#93

Post by Artemis2 »

ghshephard wrote: post #49
rndn wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps they are in the leading position, but shouldn't we strive for ever better products? I just upgraded a couple of old MacBooks and iMacs from HHD to SSD and all of a sudden they are usable again - and will probably continue to be so for the coming 2-3 years. That basically extended their lifetimes by perhaps 30-40% and the saved waste is presumably closely proportional to that. So, ideally, I think, all manufac…

It would be interesting to have the Industry Leaders, such as Apple, and Samsung, come out and explain what their thinking is regarding abandoning modular construction. Even Samsung, with the Galaxy 6, no longer includes a replaceable battery. My guess, is that in order to increase reliability, and reduce cost, companies have come to the realization that it's most straightforward to do that by abandoning multiple "pl…

Apple has already explained this: removing moving parts has allowed them to reduce a lot the space needed for the battery. Machining their hardware from a solid block of aluminium makes it also a lot sturdier.

Here is a video featuring Jony Ive about the unibody design: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJx6cF-H__I

Specific explanation regarding the unremovable battery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PD6sh9purb0

Original page about the unibody design: https://web.archive.org/web/20100414070055/http://www.apple....

Re: Retina Macbook 2015 Teardown

#94

Post by [deleted] »

masklinn wrote: post #47
keeran wrote: post #38

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 hardw…

> 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…

[deleted]

Re: Retina Macbook 2015 Teardown

#96

Post by Silhouette »

pmjordan wrote: post #31
tim333 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> generates more e-waste than necessary I'm not so sure. Apple have free recycling and even the most repairable equipment will end up being chucked eventually.

Leaving aside upgrades and repairs, it makes disassembly for recycling purposes overly difficult, i.e. expensive, when everything is glued. This reduces the profitability and therefore likelihood of recycling each individual component to the maximum of its potential.

It also makes removing the data storage for secure destruction much more difficult. I'm very happy to recycle old devices rather than contributing to landfill or otherwise being wasteful, but if my HDD/SSD can't go for complete destruction separately then the entire unit is going for complete destruction instead. In this day and age, this is a practical minimum for safely retiring old gear as far as I'm concerned. For my businesses, it is also effectively a legal and/or regulatory requirement in many cases.

Re: Retina Macbook 2015 Teardown

#97

Post by Someone1234 »

s_kilk wrote: post #82
hollerith wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you can hit the - key or the ] key without looking at the keyboard as quickly as someone who is looking at the keyboard? You just reach over and press the key and you never press an adjacent key by mistake?

Pretty much. I never look at the keyboard, and rarely mis-type. If I do then I don't need to look at the keyboard to correct myself, as I know the position of every key, I just backspace and hit the key I intended to hit in the first place. And, as another commenter also mentioned, I don't use the layout that's printed on the keys anyway, so looking at the keyboard would not help. None of this is particularly uncommo…

What's actually funny is, a lot of people who look at the keyboard actually can touch-type, they just don't realise it. They continue to look out of habit more than necessity. If you've used a computer for ten years and you still look, you too might fit into this category.

You can fix it, it just takes a few weeks, just cover your hands with a cloth or other barrier so looking down won't help you reposition, and fix any typos using touch rather than looking. If you're in a real rush do the same thing, but now spin up a copy of Typing Of the Dead or similar typing tutor.

PS - Also, yes, your speed will decrease initially. It slowly returns and will eventually overtake your looking speed.

Re: Retina Macbook 2015 Teardown

#98

Post by MengerSponge »

userbinator wrote: post #83
ghshephard wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be interesting to have the Industry Leaders, such as Apple, and Samsung, come out and explain what their thinking is regarding abandoning modular construction. Even Samsung, with the Galaxy 6, no longer includes a replaceable battery. My guess, is that in order to increase reliability, and reduce cost, companies have come to the realization that it's most straightforward to do that by abandoning multiple "pl…

The decision that Samsung took is interesting because they used to actually market the removable battery as a feature. The Galaxy series was one of the few high-end smartphones that had this. It makes me wonder how much of the "we do this because it's what our users want" is what users genuinely want, and how much of it is actually the company using marketing to tell users what they want.

How about a third option? "We do this because it's what our users say they want."

Of course, users lie, and although they say they want a replaceable battery, almost nobody actually replaces the battery. You wind up making a huge design sacrifice to implement a user-swappable battery that nobody swaps.

Re: Retina Macbook 2015 Teardown

#99

Post by joshuapants »

wil421 wrote: post #89
revelation wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if your understanding of "leading companies in ewaste" is that their products tick a bunch of boxes for materials used to be easily recyclable. But that is not the essence of the term. To avoid ewaste, you should avoid creating any in the first place. Creating products that will be useful for 10+ years instead of until the next model cycle .

I've had my MBP since 2011 and it shows no signs of slowing down. It will probably get 6-8 years before I replace it (it will be sold or given to someone after I'm done). The same would be said if I bought the latest no repairable rMBP or the new MacBook. Some old classmates and friends still have the older aluminum MBPs that are still running strong. My iPad is also 3 years old and I will probably not update it unti…

I'm posting from a 2011 MBP right now and I have to say it's getting pretty long in the tooth, particularly because it doesn't work very well at all with Yosemite. I suppose I could install Linux, but my experience with Apple's hardware running other operating systems hasn't been great.

> Which products does apple sell that only last this long?

My own experience with iPhones has been that as new software comes out, they get slower and less stable. My MBP, as mentioned above doesn't give me great hope for its future (for reference I have a Thinkpad from 2008 that's still trucking along nicely with Linux, and when I do boot into Windows it performs nicely). I don't think that Apple is any worse than competitors in the same price range, but that doesn't mean they all shouldn't strive to be better.

Re: Retina Macbook 2015 Teardown

#100

Post by Silhouette »

xienze wrote: post #58
revelation wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if your understanding of "leading companies in ewaste" is that their products tick a bunch of boxes for materials used to be easily recyclable. But that is not the essence of the term. To avoid ewaste, you should avoid creating any in the first place. Creating products that will be useful for 10+ years instead of until the next model cycle .

> Creating products that will be useful for 10+ years Well that's just a matter of opinion, isn't it? Nothing's going to stop you from running this laptop 10 years from now just like nothing's going to stop you from running a PC laptop 10 years from now. The question is _are you going to want to_ continue using a 10 year old laptop? That's an eternity in technological terms. Sure you can upgrade a PC laptop to squeez…

The question is _are you going to want to_ continue using a 10 year old laptop? That's an eternity in technological terms.

That might have been true 10 years ago, when typical speeds and storage capacities were increasing dramatically from one generation to the next and those increases were actually useful.

But even entry-level PCs have been able to run typical home or office applications -- things like reading e-mail, browsing the web, writing a letter or putting together a spreadsheet -- for a very long time. You don't (or at least shouldn't) need an i7 hexacore processor overclocked to 4+GHz and 16GB of RAM to write a letter. The only sharp improvements in recent years have been high-resolution displays (much more important on smaller screens, but generally a noticeable benefit) and SSDs (particularly in much faster boot/load times on otherwise modestly specified machines), and for applications that need them, GPUs.

Even for more demanding applications that really do benefit from greater RAM and processing power, the real world specs for both processors and typical system RAM have barely moved the needle for probably 5 years now, with the emphasis more on low power consumption and more cores within a single CPU. The cost/benefit for upgrading even a high-end workstation from a few years ago to the state of the art today is rarely favourable.

The biggest problems with longevity today, in my experience, are monolithic hardware where components can't be swapped out on failure and, more than anything, software. The reason my third-generation iPad isn't as useful any more has nothing to do with the hardware spec, it's because Apple chose to write more recent versions of iOS in a certain way and then forced the app ecosystem to upgrade because they have absolute control via the App Store. Now we have a choice between not using a lot of newer apps or upgrading to a new version of iOS (which is widely reported not to work reliably on our equipment, and with no way to downgrade again if those reports prove to be accurate in our case). All of this is entirely due to artificial problems caused by a throwaway software culture, and nothing to do with the hardware.

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