alt Hacker NewsThat said, I've a MacPro 3.1 in production (also 17 years now – always up), which is from Apple's era of easily (or even hot) swappable parts. Apart from failing 3rd party RAM, no issues ever. – And I'm probably going to upgrade the drives to SSD (still HDD) this year, since you can still get new upgrade parts for its ancient busses.
(And for the failing RAM: open the hood, a LED tells you which strip is failing, swap it, close, go on… The build quality is quite amazing, BTW.)
Replies
> Apple's era of easily (or even hot) swappable parts.
This. It existed. The laptops still commanded enthusiasm, felt great, capable, and solid without being too heavy, and had swappable RAM and disk. Keyboard and battery swap were screwdriver set DIYs. Heck, the old Pismos had hot swappable battery and drive bays.
I'm still frequently using a MacBook Pro 11,3. Only lets you swap the drive but that by itself is a great point of flexibility.
The M series does amazing things which have their own merits, but the particular set of tradeoffs aren't inevitable.
The "sacrifices must be made" idea apparently sacrifices recall of other possibilities first.
> failing 3rd party RAM
Unless you're Samsung, almost all RAM is 3rd party. It's either Sammsung, SK Hynix, or Micron.
I'm a huge Thinkpad fan. I'm an even bigger MacBook fan.
None of my MacBook Pros ever had any issues, and I used my last MacBook for 9 years. I could keep using it with Linux instead of MacOS, but I think almost a decade of use is plenty of value for me.
There were recalls and scandals with the MacBook Pro over the years, but nothing that other vendors also didn't see, and that wouldn't have required the same exact parts being replaced. I'm thinking of the GPU issues with certain MacBooks. The difference is Apple is usually able to be held to task to fix issues, while almost any other vendor did not care to stand behind their product, including Lenovo.
I had a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon with the HiDPI screen that was absolutely awful, requiring replacement multiple times. Each time, the moron from Unisys that Lenovo sent to do the on-site repair would return me with a laptop that was poorly reassembled, and with new problems due to the tech's ineptitude. The same dude did service for Lenovo servers, and he once dropped a server that needed a fan replaced on the floor. Talk about fragile.
Thinkpads are great, and the oldest ones are still solid to use, but to say that MacBooks are fragile ignores that Thinkpads too are fragile.