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Buying Apple products is great if you plan to fix them yourself - just look up the difficulty on iFixit and go for an easy-to-fix model. Vote with your wallet!

Buying Apple products is great if you plan to fix them yourself - just look up the difficulty on iFixit and go for an easy-to-fix model. Vote with your wallet! My MacBook Air 13" is trivial to open and actually looks gorgeous from the inside. No matter which iPhone you buy, YouTube is full of video guides and you can buy DIY repair kits on eBay for most tasks. It's unfair, because big brands don't have to do anything for these benefits, but that's the way it is. Buying niche products makes DIY repairs a lot harder.

dmschulman 11y ago
How are they great for fixing yourself? They're specifically engineered to be completely unserviceable by a regular consumer. Yes you can watch a Youtube video and figure out how to take them apart, Apple's devices have to be serviced by someone after all, but a ton of money, thought, time, and effort go into designing methods and hardware for obscuring the typical consumer's ability to dig into an Apple devices. I've taken my Mac Mini apart multiple times, an impossible task without buying an iFixIt kit first. The reason I took the computer apart was to stuff a second hard drive into the machine. I had to remove every single component of the machine in order to access the hard drive. It was a huge pain in the ass just to add a second hard drive. Good luck doing that to a Macbook. My Thinkpad features a single screw that lets me access the hard drive caddy. The product doesn't suffer at all from providing this feature and it gives me the ability to upgrade my machine as I see fit.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  It isn't free to design for serviceability. It can compromise heat transfer, have more assembly steps (more screws), increase the part count (access panels and gaskets). That said, the newer Mac Mini is much better than the old one in this regard. Some steps were made to reorder the layers in the package, so you no longer have to remove ALL the screws (25? 30?)
  - dmschulman 11y ago
    It's definitely a balance that needs to be achieved between function and form. I think Apple tends to lean too much towards the function part of the spectrum but I'm glad to hear the pendulum might be swinging slightly to the other direction. When I read about Apple designing new screw heads (for example) which can only be unscrewed using a special screwdriver that kind of stuff makes me bristle though.
    - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      They've done that since the original Mac. Had to buy a 3rd-party kit with a 6-inch shaft, hex head with center pin. Just to open the case. So they've been dicks for over a decade.
- gurkendoktor 11y ago
  I don't disagree with you on the Mac Mini, and I haven't said that all Macs are serviceable. But given that Apple is a very popular brand, you can look up the repair guides for the Mini on iFixit before you purchase it, and then look for alternatives (maybe just a different model year). Good luck doing that with a random Chinese NUC off eBay - it's surprises all the way down. =/

dmschulman 11y ago

How are they great for fixing yourself? They're specifically engineered to be completely unserviceable by a regular consumer. Yes you can watch a Youtube video and figure out how to take them apart, Apple's devices have to be serviced by someone after all, but a ton of money, thought, time, and effort go into designing methods and hardware for obscuring the typical consumer's ability to dig into an Apple devices. I've taken my Mac Mini apart multiple times, an impossible task without buying an iFixIt kit first. The reason I took the computer apart was to stuff a second hard drive into the machine. I had to remove every single component of the machine in order to access the hard drive. It was a huge pain in the ass just to add a second hard drive. Good luck doing that to a Macbook. My Thinkpad features a single screw that lets me access the hard drive caddy. The product doesn't suffer at all from providing this feature and it gives me the ability to upgrade my machine as I see fit.

JoeAltmaier 11y ago
It isn't free to design for serviceability. It can compromise heat transfer, have more assembly steps (more screws), increase the part count (access panels and gaskets). That said, the newer Mac Mini is much better than the old one in this regard. Some steps were made to reorder the layers in the package, so you no longer have to remove ALL the screws (25? 30?)
- dmschulman 11y ago
  It's definitely a balance that needs to be achieved between function and form. I think Apple tends to lean too much towards the function part of the spectrum but I'm glad to hear the pendulum might be swinging slightly to the other direction. When I read about Apple designing new screw heads (for example) which can only be unscrewed using a special screwdriver that kind of stuff makes me bristle though.
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    They've done that since the original Mac. Had to buy a 3rd-party kit with a 6-inch shaft, hex head with center pin. Just to open the case. So they've been dicks for over a decade.
gurkendoktor 11y ago
I don't disagree with you on the Mac Mini, and I haven't said that all Macs are serviceable. But given that Apple is a very popular brand, you can look up the repair guides for the Mini on iFixit before you purchase it, and then look for alternatives (maybe just a different model year). Good luck doing that with a random Chinese NUC off eBay - it's surprises all the way down. =/