Apple Otaku

The Macbook Pro series represents one of the finest designed notebooks available today. They pack a lot of power in a sleek and easy to use package. The keyboard is top notch. I’d say it’s a close second to the legendary Thinkpad keyboards.

But try to change out the hard drive and you’ll question what the Apple engineers were thinking. Swapping out the hard drive out of a Macbook Pro involves removing the battery and a whole mess of screws. Once that’s done, one has to remove the keyboard/trackpad palm rest assembly. With that done you can remove the mounting brace and have access to the hard drive.

It may all sound simple, but trust me, it’s a pain. Also, I haven’t read the fine print, but as it stands right now, I’m pretty sure the act of upgrading a hard drive on a Macbook Pro voids your warranty.

Now compare this to the Macbook series. Remove the battery, loosen a few screws, pull out the L-shpaed plate and pull the tab to remove the hard drive. I’d say the process of swapping a hard drive on a Macbook takes less than five minutes. For a Macbook Pro, you can easily quadruple that time.

Changing a hard drive on your typical PC Notebook is even easier. On a Dell Inspiron, you remove two screws at the bottom of the unit and pull out the hard drive tray.

Apple really needs to do a redesign on their future Macbook Pros. Since Macbook Pro owners tend to be power users, these are the people who are most likely to upgrade their hard drives.

Apple should adopt the base design of the Macbook, include a discrete graphics chip, and throw in a LED backlit display. Apple, please make this happen with the release of Leopard.

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