No surprises here. Just like the lockdown on iPhone screen and part replacements, Macbooks suffer from the same Apple’s anti-repair and anti-consumer bullshit. Battery glued, ssd soldered in and can’t even swap parts with other official parts. 6000$ laptop and you don’t even own it.
Considering the serious move EU as made regarding right to repair and imposing that any equipment must be repairable and have parts for it for at least 10 years, this ia going to be another serious pain for this brand.
I’ve also read an article recently where it was reported that all cell phones circulating in the EU must have replaceable batteries. And from what I took from the article it was meant replaceable by the end user.
Serious anti obsolescence legislation.
This will hurt Apple again.
10? That’s one way to discourage competition from new companies.
How is that?
As it is, that same argument was used by Apple to try to dodge from complying with the demand for having an industry standard for data and charge port/cable - the USB-C.
Planned obsolescence is a thing. Having law put in place to curb it is a good thing.
If you know you can buy something and you know that something will be repairable at least for a decade, it passes confidence to the end user.
Competition is welcome. Innovation as well. Legislation like this just means companies need to share standards and cooperate more and not aim to skin the client in an endless cycle of replacing expensive items that get thrown out before they are worn out.
another example of why apple laptops are so expensive.
80% of the price is to cover the R&D for fucking over the consumer.
Seriously, tying the goddamn *hall effect sensor to the system so it cant be replaced? Thats some freaking cyberpunk level corpo shitbaggery.
It’s so annoying. I want to love Apple, heck I’ve been there and HAD Apple everything. They have a great *nix OS, well polished ecosystem, very good security and privacy practices… but hostility towards repair, along with planned obsolescence, ended up turning me off. One aspect is sustainability. Repair is more sustainable than recycle. They have good recycling credentials but that should be last resort.
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Framework laptops are getting better. Not Apple levels good, but it certainly beats them in average longevity.
The only hope with Apple is having the EU step in again to stop this kind of bullcrap.
ThinkPads are far superior than MacBooks for longevity, user repairability, durability, keyboard and thermals. Also Linux compatibility is highest alongside System76, Framework, Tuxedo and others.
Not that I’m advocating for Apple’s inexcusable behaviour, but as someone who’s worked in IT managing fleets of hundreds of Thinkpads (among others like Apple, Dell, Acer, HP), respectfully, they are far less reliable and durable than a MacBook. The only devices I had with higher failure rates than ThinkPads were Acer laptops.
They are certainly more repairable, but so are others like Dell and HP. Lenovo were one of the earlier manufacturers to pull some anti-repair moves such as soldering memory to the mainboard (on the Yoga models).
I think your statement is far more accurate in the days when IBM owned the ThinkPad brand, but unfortunately Lenovo have run it into the ground as far as quality goes.
All that said, I certainly hope we see more projects like Framework so that these big manufacturers can get some sort of reality check.
Lenovo did not run ThinkPad to the ground. User repairability has become a lot more accessible to the average user since, and unlike greedy IBM, Lenovo prices them at various tiers. The only thing that has become less accessible is the battery, which is behind a few screws and a back cover now, to make the laptops thinner and lighter.
I have seen plenty ThinkPads being given to employees in corporate India, and they just work, unlike Dells and HPs, and are not astronomically costly to to buy and repair like MacBooks.
You’re just flat out wrong on this.
There’s a Wikipedia article for each series of thinkpad/idea book or whatever and it’s got a color coded chart you can scroll through to see the progression from more user replaceable to less.
Lenovo still has some lines that are modular, but they’re doing what everyone else is.
Only the X serie ultrabooks and Yogas are not as modular. What else is so non-modular among ThinkPads? Hot swappable battery versus battery behind few screws does not practically count, because they are easy to replace.
The e series and non-yoga L13s after 2019 (no surprise there), the t-series is available with partial soldered ram and a bunch of other stuff after 2013 (O.O) and only has a few configurations without soldered parts after 2020. Even the p series has partial soldered skus and one fully soldered one.
Oh yeah and all that is true for cpus as well. I didn’t feel like deciphering the two incredibly close colors they use on that chart for “socketed” and “soldered” so I’m not making specific claims but there’s a lot of soldered cpus in the thinkpad line now.
There has been a movement industry wide towards soldered components and Lenovo hasn’t completely committed the thinkpad line to it but they’re absolutely dipping their toes in.
Non-soldered CPUs basically have not been a thing since a decade, and only the most niche maker Framework has something resembling that today. That is less on Lenovo and more on how the “slim” trend has gone for laptop industry as a whole.
I have noticed the soldered RAM in the E/L serie, but did not know T has that now. But I think the general essence of a ThinkPad with user repairability and durability is retained even now, with even the base E serie since E480 having MILSPEC certification. Great ThinkPads are simply more expensive, and any ThinkPad you get will be way better than consumer grade laptops, which I think has merit.
