Ask Slashdot: Best Laptops For Fans Of Pre-Retina MacBook Pro? 477
stigmato writes "Once upon a time the MacBook Pro line was well-regarded amongst IT professionals for their quality, performance, serviceability & upgradeability. As appealing as the new Retina displays are, I don't want a device I cannot upgrade or repair. Glued in batteries and soldered in RAM with high prices have made me look to other manufacturers again. What are you buying, /. community? System76? Dell? Old article but still rings true with the latest models. I post this from my 2010 MBP 13" with a 256GB SSD, 1TB HDD in the optical bay, 8GB (possibly 16GB soon) and a user replaced battery."
Re:Cost vs. Benefits (Score:2, Insightful)
They are still repairable. He acts like having to remove some screws and glue is anything new.
Displays fused to glass are the normal for tablets and phones, but those seem to get repaired fine. Ungluing a battery might mean some customers would need to get apple to do a replacement, but a self respecting slashdotter should be able to do it himself.
If Your Laptop Needs Upgrades, is it good enough? (Score:3, Insightful)
I will make the argument these devices are mostly tools and professional quality ones should be ordered loaded with CPU & RAM that works on the factory warranty & the hard drives can still be easily changed out. Our time is worth a decent amount of $s per hour, after all, and we do NOT have unlimited time.
A professional laptop recently seems to retain its usefulness for at least 3 years, so these laptops remain functional for a long enough time to justify ordering them loaded with options to make our life and work easier.
Welcome to the disposable world. (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple has realized that making serviceable devices is a dead end when the processor hardware is good enough to be future proof. And their solution is the same solution many sectors of the economy face. Our automobiles are disposable consumer oriented devices, our kitchen appliances are as well, washing machines, you name it all service and repair departments are being down graded to expedite product end life.
Obsolescence is not just planned it has become a manufacturing industry mantra. With essentially slave labour doing the recycling of these goods, either that or illegal at sea dumping operations turning over the used goods we are headed down a technical path to environmental and consumer driven stupidity!
Nature Of the Beast (Score:4, Insightful)
As far as the RAM, meh. It's not windows, there's not a lot of cases when you would upgrade the RAM for OSX.
Battery on the other hand is a real issue. Yeah, the "new batteries" aren't supposed to have recharge issues, but PC makers have been using that line for over a decade.
It's not like Apple spends it time having a Seance to talk to Steve's ghost just to figure out how to piss people off. You want an ultra-thin notebook and you're going to sacrifice serviceability. You look at windows based ultrabooks and the serviceability is better than Apple, but not by that much. It's still a hassle to fit a battery into that space and an even bigger hassle to replace the battery. You start making the laptop more modular and a few things will happen. 1) You'll compromise on size and weight. 2) You start getting flex issues issues in the case (like it or not the glue on apple products has more to do with durability and case flex than it does with repairs). It become even more pronounced with plastic cases. 3) You end up with design compromises that make the overall experience horrid.
So where does that leave the IT professional? Well, if it's for work there's likely a service contract. The glue is the problem for some guy at the referb factory. For home? Either put up with it/get applecare contract, or hackintosh one of the cheaper ultrabooks out there and live with what that entails.
Re:Lenovo. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not in 2013, it is standard tv resolution.
A new macbook pro is 2560x1600 or 2880x1800. A Chrome pixel is 2560x1700.
1920x1080 is not an uncommon android phone resolution. At at 5" just about perfect. For a screen any larger it is simply too low.
Re:Cannot upgrade or repair? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not just about being repairable.
With previous generation Apple laptops, I could put all the money into the machine with the best CPU and pay extra for the hires matte screen, and just get 4gigs of RAM and the cheapest, slowest HDD they had.
Then I could pay an extra $100 to upgrade it to 16gb of RAM on my own (rather than pay Apple an extra $400 or $600 or whatever) and buy and install my own 1tb harddrive or my own SSD or whatever, again, for a fraction of what Apple charge for that. And, to be clear, that'd be my plan no matter what laptop I bought. Always has been. Every laptop manufacturer charges those insane prices for extra RAM or better HDDs.
With the RAM (and harddrive!) soldered on, you can't do that anymore.
It's not just about fixing broken stuff. It's about getting a better deal and potentially saving hundreds of dollars to get a phenomenally better computer.
this is the equation (Score:4, Insightful)
Cheap
Easy to repair
Pick two.
Re:Lenovo. (Score:4, Insightful)
As a Nexus 5 owner, I think 1920x1080 on a 5" screen is gratuitous and unnecessary. IMO, you need at least 7" (or maybe even larger) to "need" it.