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I'm not sure I buy the contrast between old computers and macbooks. The smallest replaceable part on a MacBook is the entire MacBook (excluding any wired or wi

I'm not sure I buy the contrast between old computers and macbooks. The smallest replaceable part on a MacBook is the entire MacBook (excluding any wired or wireless peripherals), but the smallest in a normal computer might be the CPU. The CPU cannot be repaired except by replacing the entire thing. You can't repair a CPU or a MacBook, so it seems the the only real difference is how much it costs to replace the broken part. I like to think that as moores law ends and computers stop being obsolete we may get to a point where a computer could be passed down generations like a solid dining room table. In that case maybe it makes more sense to be able to repair it and people build them that way. Or maybe computers cost nothing and it's like bequeathing a pez dispenser.

dijit 11y ago
CPU's have been soldered to the motherboards of most laptops for an age now. Memory is beginning to be soldered to the motherboard too- I'm dubious as to how upgradable or modular the next generation will be.
- jacobolus 11y ago
  The “soldered to the motherboard” memory on a $400 computer today costs 10,000 times less than the same quantity of memory in 1995. What’s the point of making something repairable generations down the line when nobody is going to still want it because you’ll be able to buy 10 new ones that are each 100 times better for the same price. The only computer parts from <2000 that are still worth keeping around today are the keyboards, and maybe the laser printers.
  - miahi 11y ago
    The soldered memory also tends to cost the end-user double than exactly the same memory that is user-replaceable. Just because they can charge more for the "upgrade".
  - mycelium 11y ago
    I think this is basically true of software as well.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    >What’s the point of making something repairable generations down the line when nobody is going to still want it because you’ll be able to buy 10 new ones that are each 100 times better for the same price. If you're buying stuff for your 1995 laptop, yes, you have a point. If I want to double the memory of my 2014 laptop and can't, because it's soldered-on 4GB, OTOH, I'm hosed.
  - technomancy 11y ago
    > What’s the point of making something repairable generations down the line when nobody is going to still want The parent comment said that this would become more relevant as Moore's Law continues to lose effectiveness.
  - morganvachon 11y ago
    > The only computer parts from <2000 that are still worth keeping around today are the keyboards, and maybe the laser printers. And yet I have a Dell Latitude CPx laptop from that era that is perfectly usable, and common parts are readily available via eBay (RAM, hard drives, battery, screen, etc). No, it's not going to play any modern games and no, it's not a good choice for compiling software. But OpenBSD, Slackware, and Debian all run surprisingly well on it given a light weight window manager. It's a good backup device for when my main laptop (also a "relic", a Dell Latitude D400 from 2003) is unavailable.
- robotresearcher 11y ago
  RAM was soldered to the Amiga and ST too, back in the day. Neither they nor Macs were designed to be user-tweakable. PCs and clones were unusual.
adrianN 11y ago
The other difference is the rate at which the part fails. CPUs basically last forever if you keep them sufficiently cooled. Batteries or screen backlights or keyboards, not so much.
- bronson 11y ago
  But CPU spring connectors don't last forever. If you want to ensure the CPU stays reliable for a good long time (at today's clock rates), you're going to have to solder it down.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - detaro 11y ago
    source for that claim? Never heard of that, and outside of laptops or SFF boards it's really unusual to solder CPUs in.
    - jacquesm 11y ago
      Contacts are a source of trouble, especially in devices that are subjected to vibration. That's why they're sometimes soldered down. For stationary devices this is much less of a concern, the long term killer there is contact oxidization. Since CPU contacts are made of gold this is not usually a source of concern. Even circuit boards made in the 70's with regular sockets still function fine today, the 'bad' parts are usually electrolytic capacitors (they dry out) and tantalum ones (they like to change into miniature fireworks).
      - bronson 11y ago
        I got a great score on an exotic DMM from the 80s where the only problem was a weak ROM socket. Machine pin sockets might be OK (if you're always inserting a brand new IC) but dual wipe definitely wears out. Gold plating only works for expensive parts, and only if you have the same plating on both parts. The 10u gold alloys on flashy audio equipment looks great but they aren't likely to be any more reliable than tin. A gold socket can't save a tin balled CPU: http://www.te.com/documentation/whitepapers/pdf/p316-90.pdf http://www.te.com/documentation/whitepapers/pdf/p316-90.pdf
Intermernet 11y ago
Off topic, but: "The most expensive Pez dispenser sold for $13,000. It was a political donkey made in 1961. Only two were ever made."[1] [1]: http://money.cnn.com/2015/05/06/smallbusiness/pez-dispenser/ http://money.cnn.com/2015/05/06/smallbusiness/pez-dispenser/ (Warning, autoplay video)
simonh 11y ago
> as moores law ends and computers stop being obsolete we may get to a point where a computer could be passed down generations like a solid dining room table I had to smile at this. I just handed down my old iPhone 3GS to my daughter to use as she's started secondary school. I bought it in 2009 and it's now on it's fourth owner - Me, my wife, her father and now our daughter so it's been used by three generations of our family. That's only 6 years, but counting. Getting it set up for her reminded me what a great device it is, and it was remarkable to me that it's still very usable even today. It still has a load of photos and videos on it (all backed up into iPhoto already of course) and it was a lot of fun going through them all together on the device they were taken with. I think it's this last point that relates to the Pez dispenser concern. Computers are still currently highly personal devices that capture and provide access to so much of our lives, but as more of that is persisted to cloud services the devices themselves will becomes less central to the experience.
- mobiuscog 11y ago
  It's a shame this doesn't apply to the original iPad... no OS updates for quite a while, so you can't use the majority of apps (as they don't offer older versions) and the browser regularly crashes. It was excellent hardware, let down by just becoming obsolete through age.
  - arethuza 11y ago
    One website that works perfectly on the original iPad is HN - the browser seems to crash on more complex pages so I've been assuming that it's a lack of RAM. [I still have a couple of original iPads in additional to an Air 2]
  - triangleman 11y ago
    iPhone 3GS can't go past iOS 6, and it's better that way :)
    - mavhc 11y ago
      Is there a website documenting the various unpatched security holes in iOS devices that can't get the latest updates?
coldtea 11y ago
>I'm not sure I buy the contrast between old computers and macbooks. The smallest replaceable part on a MacBook is the entire MacBook (excluding any wired or wireless peripherals), but the smallest in a normal computer might be the CPU. The CPU cannot be repaired except by replacing the entire thing. You can't repair a CPU or a MacBook, so it seems the the only real difference is how much it costs to replace the broken part. Only, from my experience at least, the CPU is the LEAST likely part to break. If it was the most common or a usually broken part your argument would have some merit. Besides, he also talks upgrading. An old laptop HD that has 1/4 the space and much less speed than a modern hard disk but can't be replaced, is as good as broken, even when it's not. And then there's also memory that people want to update and can't.
monkeycantype 11y ago
The smallest replaceable part on a MacBook is the entire MacBook this is where the bourne comparison needs to come back into the discussion, because it depends who is doing the replacing. I, my partner and my uncle had had three recent macbooks experience sudden unintended swamping, two with water one with red wine, charlie fixed them all. The apple geniuses - james bond company men all - carefully removed the screws from my computer, reverently placing them in actual surgical kidney dishes, then looked at me with the practiced empathy on their young beautiful faces, shook their heads slowly without breaking eye contact and said 'logic board' - the macbook cancer diagnosis. magic charlie is the bourne in this story. I met charlie at his office, a claustrophobic box on a suburban shopping strip, tobacco fogged, every horizontal surface except for a few stepping stones between charlie and the door fractalling out jagged piles of derelict dismembered macbooks, maybe about a thousand, in pieces, some with surprisingly brutal injuries, a fist sized whole though a 15 inch retina. I was lucky to meet him, the shop had been open a year, he was planning on closing it down and working out of home. he got few walk in customers, the few that did seemed unsettled by his casual disemboweling of their pristine objects of beauty atop of a mound of incomplete repairs, crowded by ashtrays - most of them overflowing, some for screws. Those people would leave to take their computers to apple licensed stores, who - in violation of licensing agreements, but in obedience with the imperative of profit - sent the work to charlie. He charged the same price either way. If a macbook is atomic, charlie is a quarks man, I watched for about ten minutes until he kicked me out, as he scrounged chips from the racks of donor laptops, desoldering and re-soldering tiny components into the open heart of my machine. The only explanations he gave of the undertaking were when he pointed a chip on the logic board and said 'sound', then lifted the board to eye level, held at two diagonal corners in his finger tips, and slowly spun the board through a full rotation, then made eye contact for the one and only time and said 'keyboard'. When I came back the shop was shut. For about a week no-one answered the phone. Then I got a message from a woman on my phone "your computer's ready". I dropped by charlie's, I wanted to speak with him a moment, to emote my awe and gratitude, he wasn't interested, he didn't look up. the woman, standing in one of the bare-floored stepping stones took my money, don't remember how much, but less than a hundred. it worked and still does.
- Vexs 11y ago
mcv 11y ago
> he smallest replaceable part on a MacBook is the entire MacBook It wasn't always like that. In my 2011 Macbook Pro, I can replace memory, harddisk and optical drive (with an SSD, for example), and - revolutionary for Apple - the manual even tells me how. It's sad they moved away from that. I also like how an old car like the Citroen 2CV is so easily hackable, and many car enthusiasts (and even the manufacturer) have hacked that car in numerous ways. It's not being made anymore, and I don't think there's any comparable car available nowadays.

dijit 11y ago

CPU's have been soldered to the motherboards of most laptops for an age now. Memory is beginning to be soldered to the motherboard too- I'm dubious as to how upgradable or modular the next generation will be.

jacobolus 11y ago
The “soldered to the motherboard” memory on a $400 computer today costs 10,000 times less than the same quantity of memory in 1995. What’s the point of making something repairable generations down the line when nobody is going to still want it because you’ll be able to buy 10 new ones that are each 100 times better for the same price. The only computer parts from <2000 that are still worth keeping around today are the keyboards, and maybe the laser printers.
- miahi 11y ago
  The soldered memory also tends to cost the end-user double than exactly the same memory that is user-replaceable. Just because they can charge more for the "upgrade".
- mycelium 11y ago
  I think this is basically true of software as well.
- coldtea 11y ago
  >What’s the point of making something repairable generations down the line when nobody is going to still want it because you’ll be able to buy 10 new ones that are each 100 times better for the same price. If you're buying stuff for your 1995 laptop, yes, you have a point. If I want to double the memory of my 2014 laptop and can't, because it's soldered-on 4GB, OTOH, I'm hosed.
- technomancy 11y ago
  > What’s the point of making something repairable generations down the line when nobody is going to still want The parent comment said that this would become more relevant as Moore's Law continues to lose effectiveness.
- morganvachon 11y ago
  > The only computer parts from <2000 that are still worth keeping around today are the keyboards, and maybe the laser printers. And yet I have a Dell Latitude CPx laptop from that era that is perfectly usable, and common parts are readily available via eBay (RAM, hard drives, battery, screen, etc). No, it's not going to play any modern games and no, it's not a good choice for compiling software. But OpenBSD, Slackware, and Debian all run surprisingly well on it given a light weight window manager. It's a good backup device for when my main laptop (also a "relic", a Dell Latitude D400 from 2003) is unavailable.
robotresearcher 11y ago
RAM was soldered to the Amiga and ST too, back in the day. Neither they nor Macs were designed to be user-tweakable. PCs and clones were unusual.

adrianN 11y ago

The other difference is the rate at which the part fails. CPUs basically last forever if you keep them sufficiently cooled. Batteries or screen backlights or keyboards, not so much.

bronson 11y ago
But CPU spring connectors don't last forever. If you want to ensure the CPU stays reliable for a good long time (at today's clock rates), you're going to have to solder it down.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- detaro 11y ago
  source for that claim? Never heard of that, and outside of laptops or SFF boards it's really unusual to solder CPUs in.
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    Contacts are a source of trouble, especially in devices that are subjected to vibration. That's why they're sometimes soldered down. For stationary devices this is much less of a concern, the long term killer there is contact oxidization. Since CPU contacts are made of gold this is not usually a source of concern. Even circuit boards made in the 70's with regular sockets still function fine today, the 'bad' parts are usually electrolytic capacitors (they dry out) and tantalum ones (they like to change into miniature fireworks).
    - bronson 11y ago
      I got a great score on an exotic DMM from the 80s where the only problem was a weak ROM socket. Machine pin sockets might be OK (if you're always inserting a brand new IC) but dual wipe definitely wears out. Gold plating only works for expensive parts, and only if you have the same plating on both parts. The 10u gold alloys on flashy audio equipment looks great but they aren't likely to be any more reliable than tin. A gold socket can't save a tin balled CPU: http://www.te.com/documentation/whitepapers/pdf/p316-90.pdf http://www.te.com/documentation/whitepapers/pdf/p316-90.pdf

Intermernet 11y ago

Off topic, but: "The most expensive Pez dispenser sold for $13,000. It was a political donkey made in 1961. Only two were ever made."[1] [1]: http://money.cnn.com/2015/05/06/smallbusiness/pez-dispenser/ http://money.cnn.com/2015/05/06/smallbusiness/pez-dispenser/ (Warning, autoplay video)

simonh 11y ago

> as moores law ends and computers stop being obsolete we may get to a point where a computer could be passed down generations like a solid dining room table I had to smile at this. I just handed down my old iPhone 3GS to my daughter to use as she's started secondary school. I bought it in 2009 and it's now on it's fourth owner - Me, my wife, her father and now our daughter so it's been used by three generations of our family. That's only 6 years, but counting. Getting it set up for her reminded me what a great device it is, and it was remarkable to me that it's still very usable even today. It still has a load of photos and videos on it (all backed up into iPhoto already of course) and it was a lot of fun going through them all together on the device they were taken with. I think it's this last point that relates to the Pez dispenser concern. Computers are still currently highly personal devices that capture and provide access to so much of our lives, but as more of that is persisted to cloud services the devices themselves will becomes less central to the experience.

mobiuscog 11y ago
It's a shame this doesn't apply to the original iPad... no OS updates for quite a while, so you can't use the majority of apps (as they don't offer older versions) and the browser regularly crashes. It was excellent hardware, let down by just becoming obsolete through age.
- arethuza 11y ago
  One website that works perfectly on the original iPad is HN - the browser seems to crash on more complex pages so I've been assuming that it's a lack of RAM. [I still have a couple of original iPads in additional to an Air 2]
- triangleman 11y ago
  iPhone 3GS can't go past iOS 6, and it's better that way :)
  - mavhc 11y ago
    Is there a website documenting the various unpatched security holes in iOS devices that can't get the latest updates?

coldtea 11y ago

>I'm not sure I buy the contrast between old computers and macbooks. The smallest replaceable part on a MacBook is the entire MacBook (excluding any wired or wireless peripherals), but the smallest in a normal computer might be the CPU. The CPU cannot be repaired except by replacing the entire thing. You can't repair a CPU or a MacBook, so it seems the the only real difference is how much it costs to replace the broken part. Only, from my experience at least, the CPU is the LEAST likely part to break. If it was the most common or a usually broken part your argument would have some merit. Besides, he also talks upgrading. An old laptop HD that has 1/4 the space and much less speed than a modern hard disk but can't be replaced, is as good as broken, even when it's not. And then there's also memory that people want to update and can't.

monkeycantype 11y ago

The smallest replaceable part on a MacBook is the entire MacBook this is where the bourne comparison needs to come back into the discussion, because it depends who is doing the replacing. I, my partner and my uncle had had three recent macbooks experience sudden unintended swamping, two with water one with red wine, charlie fixed them all. The apple geniuses - james bond company men all - carefully removed the screws from my computer, reverently placing them in actual surgical kidney dishes, then looked at me with the practiced empathy on their young beautiful faces, shook their heads slowly without breaking eye contact and said 'logic board' - the macbook cancer diagnosis. magic charlie is the bourne in this story. I met charlie at his office, a claustrophobic box on a suburban shopping strip, tobacco fogged, every horizontal surface except for a few stepping stones between charlie and the door fractalling out jagged piles of derelict dismembered macbooks, maybe about a thousand, in pieces, some with surprisingly brutal injuries, a fist sized whole though a 15 inch retina. I was lucky to meet him, the shop had been open a year, he was planning on closing it down and working out of home. he got few walk in customers, the few that did seemed unsettled by his casual disemboweling of their pristine objects of beauty atop of a mound of incomplete repairs, crowded by ashtrays - most of them overflowing, some for screws. Those people would leave to take their computers to apple licensed stores, who - in violation of licensing agreements, but in obedience with the imperative of profit - sent the work to charlie. He charged the same price either way. If a macbook is atomic, charlie is a quarks man, I watched for about ten minutes until he kicked me out, as he scrounged chips from the racks of donor laptops, desoldering and re-soldering tiny components into the open heart of my machine. The only explanations he gave of the undertaking were when he pointed a chip on the logic board and said 'sound', then lifted the board to eye level, held at two diagonal corners in his finger tips, and slowly spun the board through a full rotation, then made eye contact for the one and only time and said 'keyboard'. When I came back the shop was shut. For about a week no-one answered the phone. Then I got a message from a woman on my phone "your computer's ready". I dropped by charlie's, I wanted to speak with him a moment, to emote my awe and gratitude, he wasn't interested, he didn't look up. the woman, standing in one of the bare-floored stepping stones took my money, don't remember how much, but less than a hundred. it worked and still does.

Vexs 11y ago

mcv 11y ago

> he smallest replaceable part on a MacBook is the entire MacBook It wasn't always like that. In my 2011 Macbook Pro, I can replace memory, harddisk and optical drive (with an SSD, for example), and - revolutionary for Apple - the manual even tells me how. It's sad they moved away from that. I also like how an old car like the Citroen 2CV is so easily hackable, and many car enthusiasts (and even the manufacturer) have hacked that car in numerous ways. It's not being made anymore, and I don't think there's any comparable car available nowadays.