§ Of MacBook Pros and Hard Drive swapping
I don’t think Apple really thought this one through. The new MacBooks and MacBook Pros have easily replaceable hard drives. This is one of the things that really made me want to get one as I wanted to have a dedicated Linux hard drive to play around on and not bork my main work drive when I decide to go tinkering in the Linux innards.
Well, lo and behold, Apple done made a stupid. On the one hand they come up with a pretty neat system of using little stubbs instead of screws in the standard hard drive mount points on the hard drive itself so that the hard drive could be mounted in an anti-vibration rig. Pretty smart. What they didn’t do was make those nubs a part that any user can get a hold of.
That’s right – the stupid proprietary nubs that are used to mount a hard drive in the new MacBooks and MacBook Pros cannot be obtained by us mere mortals.
I spent 15 minutes trying to get an Apple store sales person to even understand WHY I would want to be able to quickly swap hard drives. Then I waited another 15 minutes while he went in the back and supposedly looked through the parts bin and checked the parts catalog. The part is not available. He even pointed out that when they do a hard drive swap in store the new hard drive that comes in from Apple doesn’t have the nubs on it and they have to re-use the nubs that are already in the laptop.
I have three words to express myself here: Screw you, Apple!
If anyone can explain this to me I’d really like to know what the rationalization is behind making a hard drive easily accessible and replaceable but also making it task that requires tools even if you’re prepared ahead of time. I’d really like to know this. Its 4 screws. Sell ‘em for $5. I’m sure it’ll only cost $.25 including the packaging to sell them and with Apple’s recent propensity to selling things that used to be included as extras this fits right in to their extra revenue stream model.
Apple, I want to buy a part from you. Why can’t I?
Tagged as: apple hard drive macbook pro screw
