I agree that you will always need manufacturer help to fix major problems (like a motherboard breakage for example). It depends on the damage done or the complexity of the modification. If Apple had their say, I bet I wouldn’t have been able to fix that iMac G4 which I have ended up working on for the past few months while my team was waiting for funding to buy new computersĢ. If these had been produced as a soldered black box, forbidding them to request help from a local mechanic, they would probably have had to throw them away as soon as something minor would break down inside after the end of the manufacturer support period, which is a waste of money and natural resources. To go back to vehicle analogies, I know tons of people who are happy owners of cars and bikes which have not been produced for years, and in some case whose manufacturer does not exist anymore. I do not think that all users should know how to service their hardware, but I also think that being tied to the manufacturer of a device for servicing is a bad idea. I agree with that line of thought, to a degree. I do think that, as inevitable as this may be, we are heading towards a PC market where consumer devices will be essentially disposable (refurbishable) rather than maintainable.ġ. (Though I do appreciate the experience might differ in other countries it was much the same when I lived in London and Brussels.) I’ve not gone to ‘local shop’ to service a computer for decades. In fairness though, if your talking about fixing the device, then most manufacturers – certainly Dell and IBM which I have used for years – will either require you to send in the device or (given the right warranty) send people out to you. If your away from an Apple store then your service experience is much weaker. I’ll certainly accept your point on this. Why are computers in a separate category? The reality is their not, not to most people anyway, just those of us who can do such things.Ģ. The same applies to cell phones, refrigerators, toasters, microwave ovens, and virtually all other appliances. Modifying some facet of the car to change it’s performance characteristics is beyond the vast majority of car users. Tire pressure (much like charing a laptop) is operating the car. Operating a car is not the same as modifying or otherwise fixing the car. (Although, as you mentioned, they can try to compensate for that with more expensive services)ġ. No company, no matter how big it is, can beat the omnipresence and calm environment of a large network of independent actors. In contrast, I have nice small computer shops 10 minutes of walk away from home, and know of one who specializes in Macs about 30 minutes of walk and tram away. I live in one of the richest cities of France, and the nearest Apple store is about two hours away, in the middle of a crowded mall. Or, less dramatically, like this high school philosophy teacher who once arrived half an hour late because his bike gear shifter has derailed and he didn’t know how to fix it, and so had to wait for someone who knew to pass by on a small forest road.Ģ/Hundreds of shops is actually not a lot in the grand scheme of thing. Otherwise, you become like these people who never inflate their tires and have a spectacular car accident one day on the highway. It’s not acceptable and I hope many customers will voice their opinion by choosing products that do not suspend even such basic forms of freedom.ġ/Without arguing that everyone should know everything about his car, a minimum of technical knowledge is required to drive safely, which is why it is a requirement in order to get a driver’s license in many countries. This new MBPr is really beautiful and light, but I know I won’t care about portability at all when SSD’s will have become much cheaper and the original 256GB will have shown all their limits, or when my RAM will fry and I’ll have to send my work tool to Apple with all my private data inside. I think it is utter insanity and will never support such behaviour on part of companies as long as freer, more-easily-fixable products continue to exist. We are dealing with 2 or 3k$ machines which are becoming more and more like disposable appliances you have to send to service everytime a minor, non-vital component breaks. I humbly think the impossibility to perform simple substitutions, such as changing the RAM, or swapping the SSD for something standard to be easily purchased on the market – as opposed to chips using proprietary, non-standard connectors – are shortcomings that shouldn’t be eclipsed by the achievings in the fields of display crispness and ultimate portability.
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