News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:The Nightmare of Replacing a Battery on a Mac Laptop by kristopolous on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @12:25PM (#10465378)
Out of curiosity, am I alone in not wanting to use apple products because I find such practices as this to be unethical engineered extortion to extract more money from the consumer?

I find such things exploitive and the product's success giving a green light for other manufacturers to re-engineer their products based on less honorable principles.

For instance, on flip phones, batteries would eject if you dropped it in order to absorb impact. They were designed to fly out to minimize the damage to the device and screen. Very clever - solid engineering. However, what if if you want to sell a phone when the battery dies or make a fall break the phone so you can ... sell more phones! And now the industry no longer follows what was a very smart durability focused engineering practice.

Like the laptop in the OPs article. They could have decided to adhere it in a more clever way to make it removable instead of fusing it with glue. Screws, latches ... lots of technology was readily available.

I'm not interested in "debating" whether this is "true", clearly I'm the only one at this time, on this thread, that thinks this. I'm curious as to whether I'm just some minority of one here.

Re:The Nightmare of Replacing a Battery on a Mac Laptop by somewheres on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @12:36PM (#10465507)
You are not alone. It's just that Hacker News suffers from some extremely myopic forum sliding and public relations tactics, as well as groupthink among industry insiders who have rationalized perfectly sensible reasons to never cross the party line on topics regarding the things that make them money.

Partly, they don't want to bite the hand that feeds them. Partly, they know damn well that they're screwing people over. True believers that actually buy the Brooklyn bridge are rare birds.

Re:The Nightmare of Replacing a Battery on a Mac Laptop by waspleg on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @02:49PM (#10466445)
Yes. I also abhor their walled garden business practices. Here's Richard Stallman from 2011 on Job's death, I completely agree with him:

"Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died.

As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, "I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone." Nobody deserves to have to die - not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs' malign influence on people's computing.

Unfortunately, that influence continues despite his absence. We can only hope his successors, as they attempt to carry on his legacy, will be less effective."

Re:The Nightmare of Replacing a Battery on a Mac Laptop by DavidAdams on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @12:37PM (#10465513)
Apple isn't making any attempt to hide the fact that its batteries are non-user-replaceable. And I think it's clear to any reasonable person that the engineering of these devices isn't intended to generate revenue for the service department, but to create an extremely slim but solid laptop. Now, I think it's very reasonable for a consumer to decide that the'd rather have a replaceable battery than a slimmer laptop, and therefore they should avoid Apple laptops. So to answer your question, I think many would agree with you that it's a bad thing, but not too many would agree that it's unethical.
Re:The Nightmare of Replacing a Battery on a Mac Laptop by kristopolous on Sunday November 01, 2015 @07:22PM (#10489185)
Are you honestly saying that latches, screws, and glue each have human-noticeably different form factor consequences?

I'm claiming that replaceability, durability, composability, these things no longer made the cut in the design.

Re:The Nightmare of Replacing a Battery on a Mac Laptop by jpatel3 on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @03:26PM (#10466696)
My knowledge may be limited, but some of the things they do is beyond me.

- they came up with 3 different chargers so far, and may come with more types opposite to industry standard.

- phones goes from 16gb to 64gb, no 32gb

- Their mac charger top pin gets broke in year, and it cost $80+. And they have different chargers for macs in last 3 years (Air and pro). It would be fine in PC world to get away with this kind of things as there are different manufacturers. Here apple is the only one who designs and creates it.

Re:The Nightmare of Replacing a Battery on a Mac Laptop by malgb on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @12:57PM (#10465679)
I'm the same way. I own a MacBook Pro from 2008, it is still my main laptop. The main reason I bought it was because the HD, ram and battery are very easy to replace.

At the moment I don't know what to do. I can't buy a new MacBook Pro because they are all broken in my mind, so am looking to see what Lenovo do with their 'retro' ThinkPad.