Yet mechanics continue to make excellent livings changing oil, repairing transmissions, and replacing brakes. Not because car companies conspire with mechanics' unions (are those a thing?), but because consumers don't want to or don't know how to do those things themselves.

For a massive percentage of Apple's customers (and customers of other computer makers as well, I'm sure), the same applies. The wailings of a handful of nerds, despite their volume, will never change that.

Mechanics are only able to make a living because cars don't come with the hood welded shut.

You're twisting the analogy in a way that clouds its real meaning.

The point is that authorized service shops are provided with the training to perform repairs on these things, so whether the display/glass is glued to the body or not, people are going to be able to take their machines to a shop, have it repaired, and receive it back in working condition. The iMac, if we're following the analogy in an honest way, doesn't have its hood welded shut. (Because iMac mechanics can, in fact, repair them, even if it is more difficult.)

Further, as far as the user is concerned, breaking out a heat gun is just as inaccessible as buying a Torx screwdriver (they don't own one, I promise) and suction cups to pull the glass and display off the old model. They're going to a repair shop or an Apple store 99% of the time.

That's the problem, "authorized shop". The only reason you need to be "authorized" is to give Apple money for upgrading something that you own. It's a lock-in scheme.

Imagine having to go to a Toyota or Honda dealer just to get a battery upgraded, and that it cost 10x more than replacing the battery in a Ford or Chevy at a 3rd party dealer. The battery is no different, just the manufacturer.

Also, what if you don't live in an area with an authorized Apple store? I think there's only 2 Apple Stores in my state, and if I drive south, the next authorized Apple reseller is 4 hours away (I don't think they even do repairs). On the flip side, there are PC repair stores peppered in nearly every town.

That's like saying that the only place you can get your car repaired is 2 hours away, even though there are 3 car repair stores that repair literally every other kind of car in your home town. That's a BIG deal!

In most of my old laptops you could replace the memory with a standard philips screwdriver, a 5 minute job even for someone technologically unsavvy.

By requiring a ton of tools and time you are pointlessly making it more difficult (and therefor expensive), regardless of whether the end user repairs it themselves, gets the nerdy kid down the street to fix it or takes it to an Apple store.

You are mistaken. Have a look under the hood of a Boxster. Oops, no engine there. Check the trunk? Nope, not there either.

You can't get to the engine without pulling it out from underneath, and yet Porsche owners and mechanics are both perfectly happy with the situation.

A Porsche is probably a weird example. I'm assuming the put the engine there for some specific reason like increasing traction on the rear wheels that only really makes sense in a sports car. The performance gain justifies making maintenance more difficult.

The majority of cars are FWD and stick the engine in the under the hood where it's easy to get at because practicality is more important.

Right, and Macs are optimized for performance and physical aesthetics, not practical servicability. Sound familiar?

I really don't buy that argument. The "optimized for performance" statement is pretty much a marketing ploy to downplay Microsoft (who doesn't make hardware, but that's changing).

The only argument here is for the GPU. Apple has put in a lot of work to maximize usability by targeting a specific GPU/CPU combo. RAM is a constant that doesn't really play into the design of the OS, since all RAM manufacturers make the same thing, but with different guarantees.

RAM is about the easiest thing to upgrade, second maybe to a hard-drive. This used to be trivial to upgrade, but now they're making it unnecessarily difficult to lock in customers to paying out the nose for something that should be a simple and cheap upgrade. They're operating on insane margins in the RAM arena (and CPU arena, but that's a different story).

Not sure what the performance or aesthetic improvement would be in this case?

Why the superior weight distribution greatly improves handling of course. How else could Macs feel so snappy?

"Welding the hood shut" is just an imprecise way of saying "rendering the vehicle unserviceable by 3rd parties." The actual location of the engine is a pointless tangent.

In fact there are attempts to limit the serviceability of cars, and these attempts are harmful to independent mechanics.

I'm not quite sure what you mean. Auto mechanics can make a living precisely because they can open the hood of a car and repair/change stuff inside.

You access the hood of your car to fix it, not to upgrade it.

Solid state technology is much more reliable than the mechanical components of a car; especially over it's lifetime (cars are expected to last > 10 years, computers < 5). Those constraints lead to vastly different optimizations made in the design.

Where the analogy fails is that being able to upgrade a computer can well increase it's lifespan more than it would a car. People don't generally need faster and faster cars each year to keep using the roads in the same way they might with a computer.

When I was a teenager I made reasonable pocket money upgrading peoples computers from 16 to 32/64MB of RAM because it saved quite a bit vs the cost of buying a whole new computer and made a significant difference when running Windows 98.

> You access the hood of your car to fix it, not to upgrade it.

Your perspective on auto-mobiles is bizarrely limited. Of course people upgrade their cars... There is an entire industry built around doing just that.

Sure, that industry exists but it is dwarfed by the automobile and maintenance industry. I'd bet 99% of modifications to cars are to increase it's reliability or to fix an existing issue.

The performance part industry caters to very specific niche of users analogously to gamers in the PC industry. This niche should avoid iMacs.

Upgrading cars is about a lot more than just performance...

That new stereo the neighbour kid has? Upgrade. Those new Xeon headlamps that jackass coming the other way on the country road has? Upgrade. Those new windshield wipers you got last year that don't totally suck? Upgrade. Those big rims you see on cars at the local 7-11 once in a while? Upgrade. Just about every single jeep wrangler you have ever seen? Five thousand upgrades. There is a whole class of car for which it is more rare to see a stock specimen than modified. Check out a used car magazine sometime. The number of companies just making aftermarket suspension kits alone for specific models of Jeeps is absurd.

The aftermarket industry for automobiles is massive, and the automotive industry for the most part accommodates it very nicely. This is because, presumably, they are not comfortable with marginalizing what you seem to describe as an insignificant minority. Car enthusiasts.

I can see why the automotive industry may be unfamiliar to a lot of HNers (Lots of us live in cities (hell, these days my car is lucky if I use it once a month), spend our time avoiding grease, and have large salaries so our cars represent a relatively small or otherwise inconsequential investment). But just because it is fairly invisible to you does not mean it does not exist.

You've never put an aftermarket air filter or platinum spark plugs in a car? There is a whole mess of people who like to tinker with and upgrade their cars without having to fix anything.

A RAM upgrade isn't about a RAM replacement because of failure. It's because as computing progresses, you need more RAM to remain performant. A RAM upgrade is the single most effective way to revitalize older hardware - that 8GB that is more than enough today may be not nearly enough tomorrow.

I am responding to your post on a 5+ year-old Mac with upgraded RAM and a replaced battery. The upgrade/refreshability is a key factor in this machine being worth the premium price it cost.

And, a hood inaccessible to me wouldn't materially impact my purchase decision of a particular car, since my ability to service my own car is pretty much zero.

For example, I don't even know how one accesses the "engine" of the Teslas but it doesn't bother me one bit that I can't access it.

I don't know how to service my own car either, but I'm pretty glad the hood isn't welded shut as I do like that I can get it serviced cheaply by a professional (whether a third-party or the original dealer): even if you don't want to take something apart yourself, the fact that simple repairs or upgrades will take hours of risky (as in, possibility of destruction of the device) labor or require replacing large expensive parts unrelated to your goal is not magically irrelevant.

I don't know much about cars, but I still:

- check my oil

- replace my windshield washer fluid

- check my coolant

- jumpstart my engine

- (rarely) jumpstart someone else's engine

I know most people on HN have already sold a company for seven or eight figures, but for the rest of us, it's nice to have some flexibility :)

Upgrading RAM in an iMac is honestly probably more like replacing the carb with a Holley 4-barrell (in an older car), or swapping in a larger turbo, or something similar, than any of the examples you listed above. Although we may be waist deep in the silly analogy weeds at this point... The number of people who will be impacted by this limitation is probably a rounding error versus the number of iMacs sold.

I'd say its considerably more common than a carb conversion. At the end of a Mac's life I typically keep bunging RAM in to keep it as powerful as possible. I know several people who do the same.

Those things are hard to do, which screws up the analogy. RAM in laptops I've had is behind a single screw and pops in in seconds.

I don't buy that argument for all devices, maybe for you it's OK.

A clogged PCV valve, a small one-way valve for engine gasses, is a common problem the part is about $5.00 and you remove/install with a socket wrench. Or the air filter which in wintery climates will fluff up from salt when it gets wet, a simple fix. Or corroded points on a distributor, or a loose battery cable, dead battery, bad spark plug wires etc..

A computer with dusty CPU heat sync, maybe a RAM stick needs to be reseated or has failed, graphics card needs to be reseated, graphics card heat sync needs dusting, hard drives replaced with larger capacity, more RAM etc..

As much as engineers or designers like to think they are perfect there isn't any device made by a human which will work perfectly without some some of updating, adjustment, maintenance or tinkering.

But that's because you know what a socket wrench is.

Take it to an industry you don't know anything about, and see if that interest holds up, because that's what it's like for the majority of customers in any particular industry.

Do you care if your AC unit has a user accessible panel rather than something that requires special tools? Do you care that your Microwave doesn't have any user serviceable parts? I don't care about either. It's not on my radar at all when I buy those things.

The way AC dumps out moisture and can build up dust, I definitely want to be able to get in there. With a microwave, well, overall it's not that important but if it's actually possible to buy single parts at a suitable price then I'd certainly like the ability to pop it open and replace a bulb in less time than it takes to drag a new microwave in.

Microwave parts do seem readily available, yet it's not been something that has been on your radar. Are you suddenly going to become proficient in microwave repair, or will you simply acknowledge that it's not in the realm of your interest to pursue such things. Similarly, there are many people who don't have the time or care about the user-accessibility of their computer (or their car).

I would guess mainly because a Microwave starts at ~$30 whereas an iMac starts at about $1000 and obviously cars are even more.

This stuff becomes important when you have an item that is expensive enough to bother repairing.

I guess most people would be pissed if they spent $20,000 on a new car and when the clutch failed were told they needed to replace the entire car or spend many thousands of $ having the entire transmission rebuilt rather than being able to take it down to the local repair shop and have them do it within a day for a few hundred $.

You're mixing your analogies. The correct analogy would be (roughly)

"I guess most people would be pissed they spent $20,000 on a new car and were unable to easily service it themselves".

And my answer to that is no, most people wouldn't be pissed. They would take it into a repair shop that can handle it.

That was not the analogy. You can consider "servicing it yourself" and "taking it to a repair shop of your choosing" to be basically equivalent.

If the car has been designed in such a way that a relatively common maintenance task (changing spark plugs, upgrading RAM or whatever) is now much more difficult (thus expensive because the mechanic will charge you for more hours of labour) than it otherwise would have been (or impossible) and reduces your choices of service providers then this is definitely not a good thing to the customer.

Of course sometimes such design changes are inevitable trade-offs against something else. For example a laptop is less maintainable than a desktop but you gain vastly increased portability. In this case (the iMac) it's not obvious what the gain to the customer is.

I don't have to be 'proficient' to pop out a slotted part and put in a new one. If something can be made easy-to-service with next to no trade-off, like RAM, it should be. I haven't had the motivation to look at microwave accessibility, because microwaves are cheap and all do the same thing. But if I was looking at the upgrade option that could make it cook twice as fast as easily as replacing a light bulb, and it was $400 to have the factory install a $50 part, I think I would 'have the time'.

Yes I care very much!

Proprietary equipment and exclusive repair rights is terrible for consumers we need choices and alternatives.

At least now, staying with the car example, even if I can't fix it or don't know how at least I can take it to any garage instead of only Ford or only GM.

If I could only take it to Ford they could charge whatever they wanted for service and parts.

Microwave ovens even printers have become so cheap they are practically disposable they have no parts, or unserviceable parts (surface mount components) or cost so little repairing it is a waste of time. If they could be repaired it would be better for the consumer to spend say 10% of its value instead of buying a new unit.

If it doesn't matter to you that a hood is inaccessible, it also shouldn't matter to you that a hood is accessible. For other people it does matter. So the question is: who wants the hood to be inaccessible, and why? Clearly none of the customers want it inaccessible, they either want it accessible (and I don't think they care all that strongly if they're already set on an Apple product), or in the majority case are indifferent. So Apple must know their bottom line is better this way (there are some obvious ways why it can be) and is perfectly happy telling people "put up or don't do business with us." Unless Apple's shown to be wrong, I wouldn't expect a change.

I'm not saying it's better that the hood is inaccessible. I'm saying it doesn't move the needle for me.

Sure, if all things were equal, then yes, I'd prefer an accessible hood. But all things aren't equal. There are design tradeoffs. What if there were a seamless car with no breaks for the hood to open/close? And that really looked nice to you?

Or like buying the few cars which needed the engine to be removed to replace the spark plugs. It's simply a bad design choice.

A woman in Halifax bought a SMART car she was the second owner, the engine failed and she was told it was unserviceable since the engine had to be replaced entirely it was a single unit.

The replacement engine was $14,000 for a $5,000 car!

http://thechronicleherald.ca/business/74442-smart-car-not-so...

Wow, thanks! I very nearly bought one of those.

God, those SMART cars, I used to think they were neat. Then I learned that the ONE THING you would think they could do well - fuel economy - isn't even that impressive. Something like 40mpg for the base model?

They get as good MPG as my 13 year old Sentra.

SMART car is $12-$25K now, so that problem is solved.

"It's like buying a Jaguar" is probably more accurate.