Removing the 3.5mm headphone socket

Sounds a lot like that. [quote=“MissionMan, post:203, topic:1523”]
At least you can get an appointment in an Apple store. I’ve resent my complaint to Microsoft 5 times and they haven’t even acknowledged it.
[/quote]

Yeah, its great to go into the genius bar to be told “We aren’t aware of blah, its probably you using it wrong”.

I’ve actually got a work Surface Pro 4 with keyboard and blue tooth mouse and pointer. I use it mainly for remote access to my work desktop machine. It’s a bit clunky from an interface point of view but it’s given me zero issues. Of course it’s no more upgradable than an iPad Pro.

I’d have bought an iPad Pro but I got the Surface Pro 4 with all accessories and 256GB SSD (i5) for around $1500, the iPad Pro was $1699 plus accessories but a better comparison would be the work Lenevo laptops vs my MacBook Pro.

I swapped out the screens on the work Lenevos and replaced them with IPS screens, then I swapped out the 1TB hybrid drives and replaced with 512GB SSD drives then I upgraded the RAM from 8GB to 16GB. They cost $999 on special stock and ended up costing under $1500 by the time I was finished with them.

With the MacBook Pro I did… err nothing. Coz I couldn’t.

I don’re mind paying extra as long as I’m getting extra, with Apple I used to get a longer lifetime which balanced the higher purchase price so the Total Cost of Ownership ended up similar to the Windows machines.

Now though the usable lifetime is no longer than an upgradable Windows machine.

Yes Mac Os is nicer to use but I’ve got a business to run.

A similar situation exists with the ‘new’ (but really not coz it’s V3 of the iPhone 6) iPhone 7.

Why upgrade when the new phone offers so little extra over the iPhone 6S?

Why upgrade when the new phone takes away a widely used port forcing upgrading of expensive accessories?

Why not cross grade to a different phone with a 3.5mm port?

And I think a LOT of people are going to be asking those questions.

1 Like

And the fact that Microsoft provides far better support for PCs to run its latest OS than Apple does with OSX, means you’ll probably get longer out of a PC. My $350 (or whatever it was) 2008 Compaq runs Windows 10 happily, where as the 2008 White Macbook which cost $1800 is stuck with 2011 software.

SSD’s will be the last upgrade I’m sorry to say. The speed of an SSD basically means the machine will last until end of life. That’s why the new SSD based machines won’t allow it. It’s all but redundant now.

With the exception that Microsoft essentially enabled torrenting of their updates to other users globally by default. I used $500 worth of data while it torrented the latest update out to other users without my knowledge and while I only had email open.

Where Microsoft fails is ironically on their own devices. I had to restart my machine every day because the scaling was screwed when you plugged in external displays. My partner has the SP4 and he still can’t get scaling right with plugging in external displays when he moves from site to site.

As I said, i’ve been there and tried Windows 10. It was enough for me to come back.

Doesn’t account for RAM. Also doesn’t account for people requiring more storage. Also doesn’t take into consideration the finite life that components like batteries and SSDs have.

Same thing happened from wifi assist - people who thought they were on WIFI had huge amounts of data downloaded over their mobile plan causing huge bills. Similar situation and Apple was just as unhelpful.

I never use my surface pro with an external display as it’s only used in hotel/motel rooms so that’s a non issue for me.

At home or at work I either use a desktop which had it’s own dedicated display or a laptop and as mentioned earlier I fitted IPS displays to the Windows laptops.

As for Windows 10 I find it less polished than Mac OS but it offers more choice of programs so that’s pretty much a wash.

You can pick up and external SSD the size of an iPod for nothing these days. I carry a 500GB version for VM’s that is half the size of an ATM card. It’s not an inconvenience as it weighs nothing. As I said, storage upgrades aren’t the issue they used to be. Upgrades aren’t the issue unless you make money off upgrades. As people move onto SSD, the requirements for upgrades will die. By the time their hardware needs an upgrade, the whole machine will.

Ram is also less of an issue with SSD as the virtual ram does a good job. I have 16GB and I would say I almost never use more than 8 unless I’m running virtual machines. We run Windows Server VM’s on next to no ram. My old MacBook Air ran fine on 8, even with VM’s.

Wait. Your fun is coming then. For a device that is designed to use a docking station, the scaling issues are ludicrous

Why would a scaling issue caused by external displays bother me?

It’s NEVER going to be hooked up to one as I said.

Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of thin machines, machines that are thin because of the lack of upgradability? It is an inconvenience and people still ask for storage upgrades. People don’t want to be carrying around external drives just to cope with their data. One of the biggest regrets of my Macbook Air friends is how small their storage is. I’m constantly helping people reclaim storage just in order to back up their phones.

Batteries die well before machines have reached their useful end of life, so do SSDs, which as I already said die. Upgrades and repairs extend the useful life of machines and provide an environmentally friendly way of utilising machines especially for second hand machines.

Upgradability has been phased out by Apple for literally 2 reasons. One is the obsession for thin-ness which does make sense in ultra portables, the other is money. Less upgrades = more machines sold. Less repairability/Upgradability = reduced machine lifecycle = more profit for Apple. Gluing in Macbook Pro Retina batteries is a great example. Batteries are consumables, so gluing in an item that is bound to lose capacity and become erratic guarantees new machines purchased or a very expensive repair (top case replacement).

Ram is still an issue. RAM requirements will still rise. It is a fun situation when your SSD is filling up and you’re running out of ram, I can tell you from personal experience. Sure SSDs lessen the need for RAM upgrades, but they don’t completely remove them.

1 Like

That’s a contradiction. If you increase the size of the laptop to allow for upgrades, the incremental in crease in weight would exceed the weight of a single compact SSD which weighs…yes…26 grams. In the old days of spindle, I could understand the weight and inconvenience of a external but when it’s the size of a business card and weighs 26 grams, is it really that big a problem?

Apple will replace batteries, but the reason batteries were glued is actually very simply, you can make a larger battery to fit a space that could not be handled by a conventional replaceable battery. Since Apple went this direction Apple has consistently had the longer battery life out of any laptops. And other manufacturers have followed their direction as well. Anandtech have said that Apple is the only company that they can match the claims when it comes to battery life.

1 Like

They will replace them for a high fee, that includes the wasteful replacement of the top case.

The Macbook Air battery is not glued in and it achieves the best battery life of the whole Macbook Range.

Who the F*** cares about “extra features” on headphones? It’s just another thing that can break due to normal wear and tear.

Nah they can remove it for all I care.

In addition, those who want the ‘extra features’ can already utilise the lighting port on their device right now without removing the 3.5mm headphone port… I’m not even aware of these extra features, maybe noise cancelation, but that can already be achieved…

If you want less siblance and more noise cancellation buy better headphones :laughing: No real such thing as active noise cancellation if you want noise cancellation buy IEMs or closed backs.

We go back to the bad old days where my Macintosh 6100/66 was the size of a pizza box but required an external breakout box for a larger SCSI hard drive, an internal riser card to use the NuBus slot for a decent video card with a few megs of VRAM and an AAUI to Ethernet adapter to be able to connect to the internet. Oh yeah, the RAM was soldered to the motherboard also.

That was fun… :joy: In the end I hacked the firmware and ran Linux on it. That or OS 9 on 136mb of RAM and a 66mhz processor. Hmm… grandfathered system limitation nonsense reminds me of the current Macs and Mac Books. But in credit to that machine, that was in the good days when you could go up 3 whole system software versions from System 7 to OS 9.

Try that today and see what happens.

I think that’s the keyword here for geeks like us - it’s frustrating, but it’s also fun, to muck around with not just the software, but also the hardware. I find it less fun as I get older (for example, I don’t jailbreak my iPhone) but I still manage to get some nostalgia upgrading things in my Mac Mini or external drives…

Haha, OK.