Apple Pioneers Fix-It-Yourself?
Wired has an article about the new Apple iMac G5’s. The RSS summary reads:
The new iMac G5 is completely user serviceable. If something goes wrong, Apple ships you the spare parts and you do the work. It’s the wave of the future: Soon most PC repairs will be done at home.
Uh, what? Maybe it’s news to Wired, but PC users have been repairing their systems at home for decades! True enough, this is a big step for Apple, who has been notorious for its “no user serviceable parts inside.” My co-op job boss once told me, “Apple intentionally makes their systems hard to get into,” and she was a Mac fanatic! This was just before I was to put some extra memory in our Mac server at work. She was right - even its tower case, which you’d imagine to be roomy, made it incredibly complicated to get to the memory slots.
Yes, I’m nit-picking. What Wired is trying to say is that repair of retail computers will be increasingly done by the consumer, which is interesting. One of the things I like about Wired, though, is they assume a more computer-guts-friendly crowd; they don’t generally dumb down their articles. This is the kind of material I’d expect to read on CNN.com.
Also interesting: Wired apparently found the nationality of its token consumer for the article important: “…said Laurent, a French Mac user…” Gosh, even the French are computer-savvy! Good deal.