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Starting with the MacBook Air, Apple has been making it harder and harder for its customers to upgrade their laptops. Things like RAM soldered onto the motherboard and non-standard NAND flash modules make it more difficult for tinkerers to tinker. That trend moved onto the MacBook Pro 15 with Retina Display earlier in the year, as well as the recently released MacBook Pro 13 with Retina Display. Are you unhappy with this trend? Or does it not bother you at all?
Some Apple fans feel that the move is justified. They believe that it’s a reasonable price to pay for Apple’s superbly engineered laptops. Others believe it sucks. Apple charges a premium for RAM and hard drive upgrades. In older MacBooks, you had cheaper options from several third-party vendors. With these newer MacBooks, upgrades are much more difficult.
My current machine is a late 2011 MacBook Pro 15. I swapped out the optical drive and replaced it with a Samsung 830 SSD. This setup allows me to use the SSD as my primary drive and the already installed hard drive as my video editing scratch disc. I swapped out the 4GB of included RAM for 16GB from Ram Experts; this upgrade was a fraction of what Apple would have charged. Setting up a new MacBook Pro with Retina Display in this fashion would be impossible for most users (myself included) due to the upgradability limitations. As a tinkering nerd, I don’t like this trend.
How about you? Do you not care to upgrade your laptop once you have it? Or are you bothered by this trend of laptops that are impossible or extremely difficult to upgrade?
I’m bothered at RAM being soldered to the board of a laptop that will cost nearly 2k. I feel the same about the new iMacs depending on their internal build.
No matter what a machine will break and will need to be fixed. Currently Apple has a very fine line between laptops and tablets. Oddly enough it would be easier to repair my iPad than a new MBP.
Second paragraph. movie=move.
I like the ability to tinker around with stuff. I don’t normally mess around with stuff like that, but I like to have the ability, and just like with my laptop not too long ago I will fix it myself if I can. I keep hearing about retina display on everything, but honestly I don’t even know exactly what it is/does, just that it is apparently making things more difficult for Rpad and Smartguy.
Thanks for the catch!
Well… for what I do, I prefer a desktop anyway for a few reasons. The primary one being that when people say “Just come down to my office and do the website/graphics there” I have an excuse to say “No, I have expensive equipment that I don’t want to ruin by moving it around all the time”. And the second being that I like the bigger screen.
That said, I’m lovin’ the new 27″ iMac w/ Retina Display. That one you CAN upgrade yourself though.
As for the others… I’m kinda let down. I understand the Apple’s view and reason, I just don’t think it’s in the best interest of the consumer. If it made those machines cheaper, I’d understand. Since it doesn’t, I’m on the fence.
Granted, most of the consumer base wouldn’t mess with it anyway. But when you consider Apple’s roots… it’s painfully obvious that a guy who wasn’t there is running the show now.
The iMacs aren’t Retina Display yet. I should have noted in the article that the 21.5-inch iMac has soldered RAM. Not being able to upgrade a laptop is somewhat excusable. Not being able to upgrade desktop RAM seems wrong.
Really? Why did I think the iMacs had Retina Display too? Oh well.
I agree with you, but it’s damn near the same components in both the iMacs and Macbooks anyway considering the iMacs are so damn thin. They are drawing the line finer.
If you want to really customize an Apple desktop, you get the Pro and really trick it out. Expensive… but that’s what you do. I understand that marketing angle quite well.
Retina Display is based on dots-per-inch. So even though iMacs have high resolutions, the dpi is low because the screens are so big. I think the magic number (for phones) Apple made up was 326 dpi. A 27-inch iMac is 109 dpi, but the perception of pixels is different because of the viewing distance.
Okay… I guess I was just under the impression that they just used the same sized dots they use for the iPhones and just used more of them for the bigger screens.
Hmm.
The 27″ resolution is the same as the MBP is maybe why you thought that.
This article has made me look up both a Mac Pro and a Hackintosh. The Hackintosh looks promising.