My Ideal Laptop/Notebook Would Be Easy To Fix and Upgrade
by Charles W. Moore
As much as I love the Mac operating systems, and admire the coolness and elegance of Mac hardware, I find Apple’s generally unfriendly policy toward user repairs and upgrading, and the often fiendishly difficult to work on Apple products that reflect that philosophy frustrating. Philosophically and temperamentally, I’m a do-it-yourselfer, and as such in some ways much more sympatico with the freebooting, mix and match motif of the PC world and the Open Source software movement. I’ve always tinkered with my cars and done most of my own auto repairs. The saving grace with my Macs has been that they have for the most part been very reliable, and have required very little attention.
But I would still be a lot happier if it was easy to get repair and replacement parts if I needed them, and that Macs, especially Mac portables, were easier to open up and work on.
Last week, Low End Mac’s Adam Robert Guha posted a column entitled ”Apple, Please Bring Back Flexible, Easy to Upgrade ‘Books.” Adam is right. Some older Apple laptops are a lot easier to repair, fix and upgrade than the current fleet of MacBook Pros and MacBooks, as well as later model PowerBooks and the iBooks, the latter which represented something of a low water mark in user-serviceability.
Adam suggests that Apple’s uncongeniality toward DIY fixing may be calculated, observing that “ it forces users to ask whether they should purchase a new machine instead of repair what they’ve got - even if it’s adequate for their use.”
Since the screen on his 12” PowerBook developed some issues, Adam says he has been using using an old IBM ThinkPad 600E from 1999. Aside from the ThinkPad’s larger display (13.3”) and better keyboard, Adam says that:
“Every single part in the 600E is something I can access and replace myself - it recently had a new motherboard and a larger hard drive installed, and a new battery and keyboard are on their way as I type this.
The hard drive simply slides out the front of the machine, and a new one can be installed in the cage that IBM provides. In about five minutes you can go from having 4ÊGB drive to 40 GB - try that with a recent PowerBook! And in about five seconds you can go from having a CD-ROM drive to a CD-RW or DVD.
Thanks to its upgradeability, this computer, which is already seven years old, still has more life in it.”
Well, bravo to IBM for intelligent engineering that preserves the value of that machine long past its typical best before date. To give credit where credit’s due, the MacBook has made hard drive access in Apple’s lowest-priced notebooks quite satisfactorily easy, but optical drive, keyboard, and display servicing will still be beyond the skill of most users.
A concept that has intrigued me for a long time is the idea of a modular notebook computer. If I could design my ideal computer it would be a portable for sure, but it would also be easy to take apart and repair, and composed of modular components, criteria that interestingly it sounds like that old 1999 ThinkPad satisfy to a considerable degree.
For example, the 2.5” hard drives used in laptop computers are essentially modular items - they plug into a circuit court connector, and are held in place usually by only a few screws. They are very easy to replace if you can get at them. In this regard, the G3 PowerBooks were pretty good. Just pop open the keyboard, remove the processor heat sink, a few screws, and the hard drive is out. You can change one in five or 10 minutes without hurrying. This is how it should be, but rarely has been with Apple portables. Changing the hard drive in a 12” PowerBook or an iBook - clamshell or dual USB, is challenging even for trained technicians with access to a fully equipped shop. As upgrade vendor MCE puts it:
“For 12” PowerBook G4 Owners: We highly recommend that your drive be professionally installed. The installation of the hard drive into the 12” PowerBook G4 involves the removal of some 40 plus screws and parts and is not for the faint of heart. Only an experienced technician should attempt this upgrade into the 12” PowerBook G4.
After that caveat, if you want to vet it out, check the iFixIt illustrated teardown guides for these models:
http://www.ifixit.com
In my ideal laptop, not only the hard drive, all of the major circuit board components would be modular and easy to replace. Apple has at times in the past seemed to embrace the idea of modular componentry. In the early-mid 90’s, several Mac desktop models, including the Color Classic and the 500 series all-in-ones, had a very slick and intelligent design in this regard. To remove the motherboard from my old LC 520, for instance, all it takes is to push down a couple of clips that hold the back panel in place, and then slide the motherboard out. The whole operation takes about 15 seconds. The hard drive is nearly as easy, and is, like the motherboard, a slide-in component. Unfortunately Apple seems to have lost interest in this sensible way of doing things. The iMacs, for example, are a relative nightmare to work on.
In the portable orbit, the G3 Series PowerBooks again are the high water mark in intelligent Apple portable design so far, although they are far from as good as those old desktop units. The G3 Series ‘Books do have their CPU mounted on a fairly easy to remove daughtercard that among other things facilitates processor upgrades. My ideal laptop would definitely have a processor daughtercard, as well as a slide-in/out motherboard, and easily removable and replaceable video cards, sound cards, and power manager units -- all user serviceable. The video RAM would be upgradable too, a feature that no Apple laptop has ever supported to date.
My ideal laptop would also have a removable device expansion day, or even two, like The Wall Street PowerBooks G3 did (the Wall Street supported 3.5” removable drives like floppy drives, hard drives, and Zip drives in its left bay, and both 3.5” and 5.25” devices in its right bay). To my mind, one of the biggest shortcomings of the post-Pismo Apple portables models is their lack of an expansion bay.
An expansion Bay also facilitates loading up with two batteries for long computing sessions away from plug-in power.
My ideal laptop would *probably* have a polycarbonate plastic case, although I’m hedging bit on this point, as I’m willing to be convinced that aluminum is a sensible material for this purpose, even though painted titanium sheet metal obviously isn’t. The aluminum case of my 17” PowerBook G4 looks spectacular, however, it’s hard to beat the strength, toughness, and versatility of polycarbonates, and then there is the wireless range issue with metal skinned laptops.
Another qualified candidate for inclusion would be a detachable display screen. I’m equivocating a bit on this one as well, because it has been argued that it would be very difficult to engineer that feature and make it strong and durable without adding prohibitive amounts of weight and bulk. I’m not enough of an engineer to argue otherwise, but it would surely be cool to be able to remove the display and situate it at a more ideal viewing angle for desktop work.
I would also like to see laptop display screens engineered to be more easily (user) replaceable and interchangeable at least within their physical size range. For example, Apple used 1024 x 768 resolution 14.1” screens in the WallStreet, Lombard, and Pismo, 800 x 600 12.1” screens in the PowerBook 3400, 3500, the low-end WallStreet, and the clamshell iBook. a 12.1” 1,024 x 768 display is used in both the dual USB iBook and the 12” AlBook.
However perhaps a more practical solution to the ergonomics issue would be to make the keyboard detachable so it could be separated from the computer, with the latter then elevated on some sort of stand while the keyboard is placed at a comfortable and ergonomically sound lower plane.
Something else I would like to see in my ideal notebook is PCI Card support, although ExpressCard 34 on the MacBook Pro will likely prove a reasonable substitute. The MacBooks, like the iBooks has no PC Card or ExpressCard support, alas. However, in a machine with the ample footprint of the 17” MacBook Pro, it should be feasible to engineer an internal PCI slot, although probably not without giving the machine a thicker section, which would also help facilitate the inclusion of expansion bays. Why does the ‘Book have to be just 1 in. thick anyway? It looks cool, but it handicaps functionality. The Lombard and Pismo machines were amply thin by my reckoning.
It would also be nice to have at least three RAM expansion slots, which would allow a second RAM upgrade without having to remove and discard a perfectly good module. They got three RAM slots into the Cube, and the old PowerBook 1400 had two slots plus the base RAM soldered to the motherboard, so it should be doable at least with the larger portable models.
I don’t anticipate seeing many, if any, of the items on my wish list incorporated into MacBook Pros and MacBooks in the foreseeable future. It would be great if Apple surprised me, though!
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