‘Unfixable’

Christina Bonnington at Wired:

Those who throw down more than two grand for a new MacBook Pro with Retina Display will have a hell of a time trying to fix their notebook should anything go amiss. iFixit’s latest teardown reveals the newest member of the MacBook Pro line is the “least-repairable laptop” the team has ever had to tear apart.

[…]

So, if indeed you do splurge, you’ll want to consider your future computing needs. And maybe store it in a museum-quality vault when it’s not being used.

I have several issues with Bonnington’s post.

Very few people repair their own laptops. With Apple’s well-loved Genius Bars and numerous official third-party support providers, there’s not much need to.

Bonnington — I think — is trying to imply that Apple built the new MacBook Pro with Retina display purposefully so it was difficult to repair. While I do think Apple doesn’t like people tinkering inside their machines, the company made specific tradeoffs to get this machine as thin and as light as it could. There’s nothing nefarious about that.

I don’t think regular consumers are going to care that much that they can’t replace the RAM in their machines, and the pros users are knowledgable enough when ordering that this is the case.

In short, I think this is a non-issue. But hey, everyone has page views to make.

Wait, what?