Steve Jobs -2011

On 10/07/2011 01:34 AM, Josh Dersch wrote: I have one of those. The problem is two fold. First, the heatsink is on the bottom of the laptop - it's a big huge pair of copper pipes that touch the CPU, GPU and northbridge and connect them to the bottom of the case and the two blower fans, so heat mostly goes to the bottom. Of course, hot air rises, so it escapes through the vent between the display and the keyboard, and some comes out of the keyboard. The 2nd problem is that these models were the ones that had thermal compound put on them with a trowel, which cooked these poor beasts. See: http://blog.johnkutlu.com/search/label/thermal%20paste and https://discussions.apple.com/message/12223482?messageID=12223482#12223482?… These, which have ATI GPUs, and a few later nVidia models develp issues with their GPUs due to the heat. The issue is supposedly that they get so hot that the BGA connectors start to have their solder melt and show display artifacts. The extra heat tends to cook other things such as batteries and hard drives too. I believe they did. But they also added wonderful innovations such as the pentalobolar screws to keep their owners from doing their own repairs, such as replacing the now "permanent" batteries. (You can buy special screwdrivers for these from iFixit and other places. Batteries for these models are starting to become available too, since these came out in 2009 and we're seeing the first batch of the batteries starting to hold less of a charge.) The one improvement to the newer unibody ones is that their hard drives are easy to replace. The earlier models, you have a lot more screws to undo, and you have to remove the keyboard to get at the hard drive. OTOH, with the earlier ones, replacing the batteries and memory is very easy. Batteries are the very first things to die in a notebook (unless you spill liquids in them, or drop them), then hard drives, then the backlights slowly dim over time for the CF models. (Not sure if the LED ones will dim over time.) Optical drives seem to go after a few years too, so when the notebook's at home, I connect to an external USB one. This push towards the replace your machine when the battery wears out for notebooks does not win my loyalty. It's even worse for things like ipods, iphones, and ipads. It's more like you're renting them and paying for the year than buying them. And don't get me started on the locked-in "store" stuff. (Instead of getting ipod, or an iPhone, I added a micro sdhc card to my blackberry, which does have a replaceable battery. While it doesn't have the best OS and the nicest mp3 player, it's good enough for my needs, and it does have a physical keyboard.) Did you also notice how you can't expand the storage in these iDevices, while their android or blackberry counterparts all have microsdhc slots? I still have much older pre-Jobs 68K and PPC PowerBooks that still run to this day (though the batteries no longer work of course.) I recently wanted a desktop computer, so I built a nice Hackintosh instead of buying a macpro. The highest end MacPro at the time cost 2x as much and only offered a 2.3GHz quad CPU. The one I built has a 3.4GHz CPU, so it was a no-brainer. I would have done the same with the notebook if the Chimera software worked fully for something like a nice high end Thinkpad, it wouldn't surprise me if it will do so eventually. As long as open source drivers for Linux exist, they can be ported to work with OS X. I loved the old IBM Thinkpad hardware, not sure if the newer ones from Lenovo are built to the same high quality as IBM made them. Hopefully they are. They're easily $1000 less for roughly the same configuration.