User upgrades don't make much difference to the waste. If anything those types of users are likely to have power heavy desktops using up more energy and precious metals. The average user's waste is reduced because the motherboard is much smaller, as well as Apple's general efforts to stop using some chemicals. My first iMac had a warning about mercury in the screen, the second doesn't.

I'm talking about an ideal, not about the advancements they have made. Maybe it's the Dunning-Kruger effect, but it seems that they could have easily soldered on slots for SSD and RAM and added a little access door with Philips screws even with this smaller board. I could also very well imagine that people would buy upgrades if they were cheap, quick to install and if they knew about them in the first place.

Slots take up space, panels take up space. It wouldn't be the same size as before, I imagine those two things would add depth more so than width or length.

Well, this is getting very technical, which is why this whole discussion was basically moot from the get-go. The reasons why they use glue instead of straps or clamps, why they use Pentalobe instead of Phillips are not entirely transparent, but they smell a lot like planned obsolescence—or at least neglected durability. They might be already the cleanest, but they are certainly on the throw-away bandwagon. Don't get me started on their cheap white rubber cable coating and the fact that the 1st generation iPad is completely unsupported just 4 years after it was discontinued. Quite frankly, the degree of Apple worshipping on HN and that I receive plenty of downvotes for my SSD-upgrade anecdote sicken me.

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 "plug in" components, and just soldering the memory, cpu, flash onboard.

For better or worse, I think the Macbook is the way of the future - and I suspect that in 2-3 years, the vast majority of the laptops being sold will be just a small stick of logic-board+flash+memory in the same way the Macbook is today.

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....

This article from 2012 sheds some light on the issues/tradeoffs related to glued batteries: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/07/recyclers-disagree-on-i...

Thanks - I recall reading that originally when it came out (though I seem to recall one of the Apple recyclers getting in trouble for complaining about Apple's glued-in system - not in this article though.)

You'd wonder if it's really that difficult to add a strap, instead of glue to secure a battery.

Thanks - I watched the videos - it's more about the Unibody Aluminum design. I'm wondering why the memory and flash components are no longer modular, and if that's going to be the trend for everyone.

The reason is the same: space. Not having standard physical interfaces to plug hardware in represents a huge gain in space.

For instance, if the MacBook had a standard SSD, it would need the following:

- A SATA controller chipset on the motherboard

- The physical connector on the motherboard

- The physical connector on the SSD

- A SSD controller designed for SATA

- Maybe even a plastic enclosure on some laptops

Instead, Apple can use a lower-level interface, embed the flash controller and directly put the NAND cells on the motherboard. That's two chips.

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.