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Yeah, "what about HP expensive offerings". Of course they're overpriced too. HP, Dell and likes demand ridiculous premiums on the front so they can build respec

Yeah, "what about HP expensive offerings". Of course they're overpriced too. HP, Dell and likes demand ridiculous premiums on the front so they can build respect and offer "discounts" later in the back. You can see the real value after 4-5 years when you can find their boxes on ebay for peanuts. Apple on the other hand is a master of price hiking behind smoke and mirrors. The target group of this product seem to be gullible easy spenders. Which is not a small group, and maybe containing some big rich companies that do not care for price, so profit-wise, it makes sense for Apple to price the weakest config for $6000. People or small businesses that care about value/money will go with buying/building their own Xeon machine, or go with the EPYC/Threadripper platform with its tradeoffs, in both cases with much higher performance. For half the price at most.

bitwize 7y ago
Here's what gets me. The other day on youtube I saw a review of a very thin, very crappy laptop that was going on sale at Wal-Mart for less than $100. It was held together with six screws. The guy dismantled it on camera to give the audience a view of its innards. Meanwhile, Apple is selling laptops in the two-kilobuck range and higher that are glued together. This tells me that using glue instead of screws is not about keeping cost, thickness, or weight down. It is strictly about keeping the end user from being able to easily disassemble and then reassemble the equipment they bought. If your MacBook wears out or breaks, Apple expects you to buy new. (Or take it to the Genius Bar, which in principle is the same as buying new.) Apple's great reputation is built, in part, on the top-quality machines of the 90s and early 2000s, which were designed to be able to be kept running for years if not decades. Now, it's like, MacBook is four years old? Why haven't you bought new yet? They are catering to the more-money-than-brains crowd. Maybe the Mac Pro is different, but it wouldn't surprise me if it turns out to be engineered to have a very short service lifetime also.
- hellofunk 7y ago
  I think this is a bit of a distortion. I know many Apple users, myself included, who still have laptops or desktops from 8 - 10 years ago that are still running and useful. They last just as long as Windows machines, if not usually longer.
  - thawaway1837 7y ago
    Apple wasn’t gluing things together 8-10 years ago. My 2008ish MacBook lasted almost a decade because I was able to open it and replace the HDD with an SSD and max out its RAM. Without that even if it was working fine, it would have basically been unusable. This is not true of their current offerings. Also, this doesn’t factor in that when things do go wrong, and they often do, repairing them has become significantly more expensive, because you cannot simply replace an HDD for example.
- 1123581321 7y ago
  Glue has some other advantages you can probably think of. Repairability is nice, but it comes with tradeoffs that buyers for whatever reason are not willing to make right now. Longevity in modern Apple laptops is quite good and it’s partly due to the control Apple has over the internal environment due to how they are built. As for the Mac Pro, there are several videos that show how it opens and which parts are removable.
  - bitwize 7y ago
    The only advantage I can think of is a fluid-tight seal which is irrelevant for MacBooks. I can think of another disadvantage: glue breaks down under heat. Recent-year MacBooks are notorious for their airflow problems, and some have a tendency to simply fall apart after they've run hot for long enough. And you can't put them back together in quite the same way once they do. It seems like you stan for Apple no matter what, so it's not surprising that you defend this sort of thing, but this is straight up shitty build quality, and Apple really has no excuse. As the premier brand, they need to be doing better by their customers.
    - 1123581321 7y ago
      Arguments ad homenim don't have a place here, but I understand remarks like that have a history in Apple discussions. I will say that I am a lead plaintiff in a suit against Apple regarding hardware quality, so I am at least as qualified to criticize or defend them as you are. The seal does matter for notebooks. I've repaired Lenovo and Dell books because they had inexplicable junk inside. Although a laptop can't usually survive total submersion or liquid poured on top, there are situations where keeping the bottom and sides sealed is helpful. This can also be achieved with rubber and some other techniques, but either it's thicker (another tradeoff that buyers don't want to make, for whatever reason) requires more complex manufacturing (which affects quality in other ways, or price--more tradeoffs.) There are definitely thermal issues with MBPs in regards to performance and comfort, but no common ones that affect the glue. I welcome correction here, but if heat improved repairability so readily, we'd see that technique recommended and applied more often. Edit: I saw your comment was flagged dead. I didn't do that. I vouched for it to restore it.

bitwize 7y ago

Here's what gets me. The other day on youtube I saw a review of a very thin, very crappy laptop that was going on sale at Wal-Mart for less than $100. It was held together with six screws. The guy dismantled it on camera to give the audience a view of its innards. Meanwhile, Apple is selling laptops in the two-kilobuck range and higher that are glued together. This tells me that using glue instead of screws is not about keeping cost, thickness, or weight down. It is strictly about keeping the end user from being able to easily disassemble and then reassemble the equipment they bought. If your MacBook wears out or breaks, Apple expects you to buy new. (Or take it to the Genius Bar, which in principle is the same as buying new.) Apple's great reputation is built, in part, on the top-quality machines of the 90s and early 2000s, which were designed to be able to be kept running for years if not decades. Now, it's like, MacBook is four years old? Why haven't you bought new yet? They are catering to the more-money-than-brains crowd. Maybe the Mac Pro is different, but it wouldn't surprise me if it turns out to be engineered to have a very short service lifetime also.

hellofunk 7y ago
I think this is a bit of a distortion. I know many Apple users, myself included, who still have laptops or desktops from 8 - 10 years ago that are still running and useful. They last just as long as Windows machines, if not usually longer.
- thawaway1837 7y ago
  Apple wasn’t gluing things together 8-10 years ago. My 2008ish MacBook lasted almost a decade because I was able to open it and replace the HDD with an SSD and max out its RAM. Without that even if it was working fine, it would have basically been unusable. This is not true of their current offerings. Also, this doesn’t factor in that when things do go wrong, and they often do, repairing them has become significantly more expensive, because you cannot simply replace an HDD for example.
1123581321 7y ago
Glue has some other advantages you can probably think of. Repairability is nice, but it comes with tradeoffs that buyers for whatever reason are not willing to make right now. Longevity in modern Apple laptops is quite good and it’s partly due to the control Apple has over the internal environment due to how they are built. As for the Mac Pro, there are several videos that show how it opens and which parts are removable.
- bitwize 7y ago
  The only advantage I can think of is a fluid-tight seal which is irrelevant for MacBooks. I can think of another disadvantage: glue breaks down under heat. Recent-year MacBooks are notorious for their airflow problems, and some have a tendency to simply fall apart after they've run hot for long enough. And you can't put them back together in quite the same way once they do. It seems like you stan for Apple no matter what, so it's not surprising that you defend this sort of thing, but this is straight up shitty build quality, and Apple really has no excuse. As the premier brand, they need to be doing better by their customers.
  - 1123581321 7y ago
    Arguments ad homenim don't have a place here, but I understand remarks like that have a history in Apple discussions. I will say that I am a lead plaintiff in a suit against Apple regarding hardware quality, so I am at least as qualified to criticize or defend them as you are. The seal does matter for notebooks. I've repaired Lenovo and Dell books because they had inexplicable junk inside. Although a laptop can't usually survive total submersion or liquid poured on top, there are situations where keeping the bottom and sides sealed is helpful. This can also be achieved with rubber and some other techniques, but either it's thicker (another tradeoff that buyers don't want to make, for whatever reason) requires more complex manufacturing (which affects quality in other ways, or price--more tradeoffs.) There are definitely thermal issues with MBPs in regards to performance and comfort, but no common ones that affect the glue. I welcome correction here, but if heat improved repairability so readily, we'd see that technique recommended and applied more often. Edit: I saw your comment was flagged dead. I didn't do that. I vouched for it to restore it.