M4 MacBook Pro shows Apple is still glued to the idea of unfixable laptops

Despite improved repairability scores for Apple's latest iPhone and Mac Mini, the iFixit team says it was left underwhelmed after tearing into the new M4 MacBook Pro. The reassuringly expensive brand is hardly alone in building hardware deemed hard to mend, and in the pursurt of slimmer and lighter devices, the company's …

[Anonymous Coward]

Bit disappointing but not surprising given that, for most reviewers and, apparently, the 99% of consumers who don't come here, thin is the most important part of the spec for PCs, just as it is for phones.

I had one of the tall Apple Airport Time Capsules die on me recently and was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to swap the drive, probably cos they don't fall into the set of things that have to be thin. Power and data were on connectors, albeit tiny and a bit fragile looking for my clumsy fingers. The only slight difficulty was cutting the rubber support bungs that hold the corners of the drive in place because the drive was a bit different shaped, but it all went back together and works OK.

[doublelayer]

It isn't a requirement. Lots of thin machines can manage to be repairable with M.2 drives and slim batteries secured only by screws. These aren't design decisions required to make the laptops really thin. There are a few of those, like not having large or standard batteries, which are virtually required to have a thin machine. Soldered storage, parts pairing, or tons of adhesive are not required. Apple is doing those because either it costs less, it generates more revenue from replacements, or they prefer it on a philosophical level (Jobs did, but I doubt many are particularly worried about philosophy nowadays).

[Sampler]

Not a lot of pros for the device on the whole, but my Surface Pro 9 is thinner and has replaceable storage (under a magsealed cover, so only one screw holding the ssd in needs removing).

This is just so Apple can straight up gouge customers on the different prices of drives (same as MS did with the SP9 - I bought the 256gb model and a 2tb sabrent drive for the price of the 512gb model...).

Not that I'm the target audience for Apples consumer electronic devices disguised as computers, but I'd never buy a device without being able to at least be able to replace the storage (as it fails - ideally the battery and RAM too, but given I bought a Surface, clearly not as staunch on that stance).

I also don't see why everything has to be so thin, phones included, we're long past the point where it was useful to be smaller, these days I'd be happy if they gained a few mm and I could have ports and more battery, but especially something like a laptop, it's not like being more svelte is going to help a 17" device fit in my back pocket...

[Timop]

It keeps baffling me that with the state of engineering ability and material science know-how in 2024 hampering repairability would somehow translate into even thinner devices.

They probably use something like $100k+ jigs per assembly station in production to glue the things together that could also be cleverly designed assembly. Which would mean one could replace single part and not the only available module that "coincidentally" has all the expensive parts bundled in it. Like touch screen stuff for smartphones and soldering ram + SSD to laptops...

But on an other hand chasing as high revenues and profits ever possible would require the hampering repairability -part to be done as fully as possible....

[theOtherJT]

I still have no idea...

...why they glue these things down. It's not like there's huge amounts of space in there for the battery to be rattling around in. When it's in, it's in. Once it's in place the back of the machine would hold it in, there's nowhere for it to go! Put some bloody sprung contacts under it and a couple of bits of foam and you wouldn't even need a lead to connect it to. The only reason for this is being deliberately obstructive.

[Chris Gray 1]

Re: I still have no idea...

B-b-b-but, if they did that, would the inside still be as *stylish* as it is? And its all black too!

[whoseyourdaddy]

Re: I still have no idea...

Same problem for why they rivet keyboards to the faceplate.

It saves on labor costs and weight.

They're a publicly-traded company.

Who is a true competitor and is repairable?

Anybody?

So...

[DoctorNine]

Re: I still have no idea...

Who is modular and also high-quality? Framework. I bought my last Apple laptop in the 20 teens. The last three for my group were Framework laptops.

[RAMChYLD]

Re: I still have no idea...

The day Framework starts selling internationally is the day I will stop hating them.

Not only do they not ship to most of Asia, they threaten those who dare to try to use dropshippers or forwarding companies with ban and cancellation.

[Howard Sway]

MacBook Pro

It's the "Pro" part of the name that really irks about this. Computer "pros" have historically been quite comfortable with wielding a screwdriver for simple upgrading and replacing of main parts inside a machine. Any machine aimed at an actual pro would respect this, instead of gluing everything in, assuming that the owner is a complete dumbo.

[CountCadaver]

Re: MacBook Pro

Apples main market has generally been "creatives" aka the coloured pencil dept, who are convinced that macs are the ONLY machines that can run design software (despite virtually ALL of it now being on windows also) and will happily fork over VAST sums of money for anything with an apple logo.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: MacBook Pro

This makes sense - mostly "creatives" using them - as a lot of development software and tools just doesn't run on the Apple Silicon based machines. A colleague got given a new ARM based MacBook a few weeks ago, and lots of the software that worked fine on an Intel based MacBook simply doesn't work. Even open source stuff hasn't been ported or packaged for the Silicon based machines, persumably because there's little demand.

[druck]

Re: MacBook Pro

Maybe he was just holding it wrong.

[Handy Plough]

Re: MacBook Pro

Bullshit - both you and your colleague are clearly just too thick to install software.

[Mitoo Bobsworth]

I only using Apple workstations because...

A) I was trained on Macs, and

B) The OS is moderately less frustrating than the Microsoft environment, and

C) So far, I've had no issue with any purchase I have specced.

Worth the outlay? IMHO, no. Familiarity breeds a level of contempt, I guess.

[BenMyers]

It's in the Apple DNA!

It's in the Apple DNA that devices cannot be repaired or maybe repaired with a great deal of difficulty. What is new here? Same old, same old Apple.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: It's in the Apple DNA!

Shows how young you are. There has been plenty of Apple devices fhat were user serviceable.

Granted, they were more likely to have a colorful logo, be called "Macintosh" and use some sort of Motorola CPU...

[doublelayer]

Re: It's in the Apple DNA!

I have experience with the 2010 MacBook which included, in the little manual sent with the laptop, instructions on upgrading the RAM and hard drive. Battery and screen replacements were not in the manual but easily accomplished with basic tools. Apple hasn't always hated repair.

[Phones Sheridan]

Re: It's in the Apple DNA!

"Apple hasn't always hated repair."

But they have always hated upgrades. They began to take notice around 2010 when you could buy the most expensive Mac Mini. Fill it as full as you liked with SSD and RAM, and it would be faster than the cheapest Mac Pro, and still less than half the price. Then they started to remove the ability to add your own components.

[JT_3K]

Re: It's in the Apple DNA!

The Mac Pro was no picnic. I inherited one when I started at a new role in ~2011. They'd spent £5.5k on it around 9mths ago and the graphics card was so poor I tried a rip & replace which it refused because the new one didn't have the Apple-specific firmware on it (despite being "supported" and able to be purchased). What really upset me was that it was equivalent to a £2k off-the-shelf PC (a £1.75k homebuild) in spec and when "drag-raced" against a £2k PC for it's sole Adobe Suite rendering job was no faster.

I'll have an iPhone because I prefer the "I'm not doing anything technical after 5pm" mindset, but everything else Apple can get in the sea.

[DS999]

As the author says

Apple hasn't done a full redesign of the Macbook Pro in a while. They did a full redesign of the Mac Mini this time around, and it gained some improvements in repairability. I imagine the same will be in store for the Macbook Pro when its turn comes up, but for whatever reason Apple tends to do such a full ground up redesign on only one model per year. Its been a while for MBP so maybe its turn is next fall.

[Chasxith]

Apple, the fashion brand that makes computers

^ That'll likely get me some downvotes.

I won't deny that their computers are rather lovely from an engineering and design perspective. Had and still have a 2011 Macbook Pro (running Ubuntu now). It's a beautifully built machine with a screen, keyboard and touchpad that make it feel impressively modern for its age.

However, it feels that the adage "A fool and his money are soon parted" is something Apple have taken on wholeheartedly in the past decade or more.

M$ get castigated and rightly so for their stupid W11 hardware requirements - but Apple have been doing that for years with forced obsolescence, on occasion with machines barely 5 or 6 years old. My own macbook was obsoleted in 2017 when they removed support for the model in OSX, a laptop that cost over £900.

Beats me how anyone can realistically justify the initial outlay on anything that lasts such a short span of time, especially for the price. I certainly wasn't going to buy another apple product after that.

[John Robson]

Re: Apple, the fashion brand that makes computers

"Apple have been doing that for years with forced obsolescence, on occasion with machines barely 5 or 6 years old. My own macbook was obsoleted in 2017 when they removed support for the model in OSX"

Whilst it couldn't run the latest OS, how long were security upgrades released?

10.13 (High Sierra) was 2017 - and at least according wikipedia "All Macs that supported macOS Sierra support macOS High Sierra" - that's models back to late 2009.

The latest security release for Sierra was over two years later, so even if there had been unsupported hardware, it's only "not on the newest version of the OS"

Maybe you were stuck on Yosemite, which did stop getting updates in 2017, but that goes back to 2007 hardware, so doesn't match your 5 year old comment.

This is one of the things that Apple does pretty well - long term support of their hardware. And one reason is because they don't have to deal with anywhere near as many different configurations as other OS manufacturers.

[Excused Boots]

Re: Apple, the fashion brand that makes computers

Now you just stop with the bringing logical arguments and facts in to what is obviously just the usual anti-Apple rant!

We don’t want your sort around here!

[doublelayer]

Re: Apple, the fashion brand that makes computers

There are two problems with that. The first is that users have a reason to want feature updates in addition to security updates. As soon as a computer can't update the operating system, it also can't update any Apple apps. Third-party ones also tend to drop older Mac OS versions quickly, but with apps like XCode, iMovie, or Pages, those updates require the new version basically the same time that version becomes available. Even though security updates are still being made for that OS, someone who has lost support is going to have that repeatedly pointed out as more and more things refuse to update but reliably tell them that an update is available.

The second problem is that Apple used to release security updates for older versions quickly. They don't do that so much anymore. Some fixes eventually get there, but it is no longer rare to see that a patch released for the latest Mac OS a month ago fixes something that is still a vulnerability in the last one. Maybe they'll patch the older one in a bit, or maybe they'll just ignore it even though that version is still getting security updates at other times. Their record isn't as good as it once was.

Meanwhile, similar to Windows, there is no good technical explanation for this. There is OpenCore Legacy Patcher for installing modern Mac OS versions on machines that Apple doesn't allow to do so which demonstrates how little there is to justify those machines being left off of support. The same complaint that applies to Windows 11's fake hardware requirements that can be bypassed safely applies to Macs. I've made the comparison before between a Mac that can run the latest version of Windows 10 without any need to bypass something but lost its Mac OS updates three years ago according to Apple. I can run modern Mac OS and Windows 11 on it by bypassing both requirements, and my need to do so started much faster for Mac OS than it will for Windows.

[theOtherJT]

Re: Apple, the fashion brand that makes computers

I agree with your headline assumption - that's totally what they are - but I don't think the evidence bears out what you have to say about service life. Most Apple kit seems to last a good long time. They have many faults, but I don't think that's one of them.

[The Central Scrutinizer]

Think Different.... no, actually, just fuck your customers.

[ComicalEngineer]

I have an ancient Acer Aspire 15" laptop. It originally came with Vista, which I updated to Win7. It cost £299 from Tesco and was originally used for the kids to do their school homework on.

Replacements:

250GB HDD replaced with 750GB HDD and lately a SSD. 1 screw on the access panel, 2 screws for the disc holder. 5 minutes.

Keyboard replaced as one of the keys broke off. Cost £12 and took 10 minutes (5min to find my reading glasses and work out where the clips were)

Now on its' 3rd battery. 2 catches on the base, less than 30 seconds total job time. It took longer to unwrap the new battery.

Memory added, removal of one screw from the small cover on the bottom. Took longer to find my screwdriver than fit the memory.

OK, it's not light, in fact it's nicknamed "the slab" as in paving slab, but it's perfectly adequate for internet surfing and writing reports. (I have a 1.5kg HP laptop for travel).

I expect that the slab will outlast me.

[trevorde]

PHB fashion accessory

Worked in one company where the new engineering manager insisted on super thin, bright, shiny Apple laptop. He swanned about it for a month or so before he realised it wasn't connected to our network.