I spent last week at the Electronics Reuse Conference in Houston, and people who fix Apple computers know they will soon have to change their business models.Īpple has little incentive to help these people and arguably has little obligation to build computers that can be repaired and resold on the secondary market. "When paranoid recyclers ground the SSDs into dust, you end up with hundreds of beautiful laptops that are no longer viable computers"īut there's another side of the electronics market that we rarely think about, made possible precisely because Apple computers last a long time: The people who repair, refurbish, and resell computers. So to consumers, maybe upgradability doesn't matter as much as it used to. As a general rule, Apple's computers last for a long time regardless of the specs it has.
Change motherboard macbook pro upgrade#
Until it got stolen this summer, I used a 2010 MacBook Air without feeling a particular need to upgrade it, and I'm sure there are tons of you out there in the same boat. The downside here is that both the touchpad and the SSD are proprietary, which means finding replacement ones will require going to the grey market-Apple does not sell replacement parts to the public or to independent repair shops for MacBooks or iPhones. Two potential bright spots: iFixit's teardown showed that the touchpad is easily removable, meaning you'll probably be able to clean yours up with minimal difficulty if you spill beer on it. The new MacBook Pro logic board has soldered-on RAM (the red boxes) and a soldered-on Wi-Fi card (in the yellow box).