On 2010-02-05 10:15 , Godfrey DiGiorgi wrote:
I was deeply involved with Apple as an external developer from 1984 on and then worked for Apple from 1991, shortly after the first PowerBook introduction, to 2004. I sat in laptop development teams representing Developer Relations during the first decade of my involvement there. RAM and hard drives have *always* been user upgradeable, on all of them, although some have been easier to do the upgrade than others.
i didn't work at Apple, but i have direct experience replacing hard drives with several of these models, and a lot of knowledge of Apple policies and hardware ... for laptop hard drives, what you say is only generally true for certain uncommon definitions of "user upgradeable"
all of the g4 PowerBooks and the MacBooks Pro until the Unibody have had a deeply buried hard drive -- the vast majority of users would not feel comfortable with, and might well bungle, the replacement task; but yes, if it were accomplished carefully, it would not void the warranty, so that meets one definition of "user replaceable"
in contrast, Apple has officially sanctioned the hard drive as user replaceable in the current Unibody units; the instructions are in the user guide (whereas for previous G4 and later laptops no public Apple instructions are available for hard drive replacements); if you have good touch with a fine Phillips screwdriver, you can replace the hard drive in a Unibodoy MacBook Pro in less than five minutes, though it still takes some care; it's at least 20 and more like an hour the first time with the older models
comparison - three steps (numbers 5, 6, and 8 here) are all you need for the Unibody models:
<http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook-Pro-17-Inch-Unibody-Teardown/618/1#top> versus the 15 steps here: <http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Repair/Installing-MacBook-Pro-15-Inch-Core-2-Duo-Model-A1211-Hard-Drive-Replacement/459>
They've always used industry standard components for these items too.
yes and no; the hard drives always (still) have a custom label with an Apple logo on them, and the model number often doesn't exactly match what is commercially available, though the actual differences from "standard components" are miniscule because, of course, Apple does not make hard drives
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