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It would be interesting to have the Industry Leaders, such as Apple, and Samsung, come out and explain what their thinking is regarding abandoning modular const
by ghshephard 12y ago
It would be interesting to have the Industry Leaders, such as Apple, and Samsung, come out and explain what their thinking is regarding abandoning modular construction.
Even Samsung, with the Galaxy 6, no longer includes a replaceable battery.
My guess, is that in order to increase reliability, and reduce cost, companies have come to the realization that it's most straightforward to do that by abandoning multiple "plug in" components, and just soldering the memory, cpu, flash onboard.
For better or worse, I think the Macbook is the way of the future - and I suspect that in 2-3 years, the vast majority of the laptops being sold will be just a small stick of logic-board+flash+memory in the same way the Macbook is today.
- userbinator 12y agoThe decision that Samsung took is interesting because they used to actually market the removable battery as a feature. The Galaxy series was one of the few high-end smartphones that had this. It makes me wonder how much of the "we do this because it's what our users want" is what users genuinely want, and how much of it is actually the company using marketing to tell users what they want.
- MengerSponge 12y agoHow about a third option? "We do this because it's what our users say they want." Of course, users lie, and although they say they want a replaceable battery, almost nobody actually replaces the battery. You wind up making a huge design sacrifice to implement a user-swappable battery that nobody swaps.
- Artemis2 12y agoApple has already explained this: removing moving parts has allowed them to reduce a lot the space needed for the battery. Machining their hardware from a solid block of aluminium makes it also a lot sturdier. Here is a video featuring Jony Ive about the unibody design: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJx6cF-H__I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJx6cF-H__I Specific explanation regarding the unremovable battery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PD6sh9purb0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PD6sh9purb0 Original page about the unibody design: https://web.archive.org/web/20100414070055/http://www.apple.com/macbook/design.html https://web.archive.org/web/20100414070055/http://www.apple....
- rndn 12y agoThis article from 2012 sheds some light on the issues/tradeoffs related to glued batteries: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/07/recyclers-disagree-on-impact-of-glued-in-retina-macbook-pro-batteries/ http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/07/recyclers-disagree-on-i...
- ghshephard 12y agoThanks - I recall reading that originally when it came out (though I seem to recall one of the Apple recyclers getting in trouble for complaining about Apple's glued-in system - not in this article though.) You'd wonder if it's really that difficult to add a strap, instead of glue to secure a battery.
- ghshephard 12y agoThanks - I watched the videos - it's more about the Unibody Aluminum design. I'm wondering why the memory and flash components are no longer modular, and if that's going to be the trend for everyone.
- Artemis2 12y agoThe reason is the same: space. Not having standard physical interfaces to plug hardware in represents a huge gain in space. For instance, if the MacBook had a standard SSD, it would need the following: - A SATA controller chipset on the motherboard - The physical connector on the motherboard - The physical connector on the SSD - A SSD controller designed for SATA - Maybe even a plastic enclosure on some laptops Instead, Apple can use a lower-level interface, embed the flash controller and directly put the NAND cells on the motherboard. That's two chips.