Ready, Aye, Ready

Apple's industrial design has always impressed me. A few years ago, probably in 1997 or so, when I was fiddling around with a PPC desktop Mac, I was stunned at the way they'd designed the case so that mounting backets were balanced and would swivel; that edges were rounded; that the entire machine was made nicely accessible. At the time all the Wintel PC cases I used, regardless of cost, seemed to be roughly finished on the inside and always involved large numbers of screws and required interesting maneouvers when adding or removing hardware.

A month or two ago I decided the default amount of memory and harddrive space in my MacBook (512k, 60GB) wasn't sufficient so replaced them with rather more (2GB, 120GB). As usual, I liked with how easy Apple made the change (click on the link labelled "MacBook (13 inch) Hard Drive Replacment Instructions (Do it yourself Manual)". The battery compartment hides both the harddrive bay and memory slots, and those in turn are secured behind a small piece of metal with just three fixed screws. It's pretty easy to change -- with the exception of the winner at Apple who decided that despite using Philips screws elsewhere, they'd use a #9 Torx for the harddrive sled.

The teardowns of the Mac Pro also looked similarly polished with good access to mounting points and components.

It didn't occur that to me that Apple had no equivalent DIY instructions for the MacBook Pro; I just assumed that if the lower end machine had a straight forward way of doing this, the more expensive one would too. Well, not so. The link is to a third party site that disassembled the unit, but also shows how to get to the harddrive in the MacBook Pro. It's a nightmare. This is not a good piece of design for access to what is basically a user-serviceable part.

I don't have one, and I don't plan to buy one, but you can do better than this, Apple.