Current location:	On the bus
Current mood:	bored

Apple planned obsolescence: the good, the bad, the ugly.
While I originally thought that we had maxed out the RAM in Eugenia's PowerBook, it turned out that we were still operating it at about half of its maximum capacity. Eugenia reminded me that we hadn't maxed it out when we bought it because the relevant RAM was too expensive at the time. One point goes to Apple for using a memory controller for which a memory upgrade would still be relevant 5 years after the machine's original release. I ordered a 1GB SODIMM to replace the 512MB on that's still in there.

The sad part however is that this specific PowerBook supports two banks of memory, but that one of those banks is permanently soldered to the motherboard. Of course, that wouldn't be a big deal if that bank was maxed out as well, but since it happens to only be populated with 128MB while it would obviously be capable of holding 1GB, we'll be forced to operate that machine with 1152MB of RAM overall, when its chips could obviously could support 2GB. Apple loses one point for arbitrarily limiting us to barely more than 1GB when 2GB would be a very good option at this point.

Finally, since we were thinking about upgrading that PowerBook, we also looked at changing the hard drive (especially since one of the benefits of growing the RAM is the ability to run a more recent version of MacOS, which pretty much requires a reinstall). Changing the hard drive on Eugenia's PowerBook is a major undertaking. There are more than 30 screws to remove, and that's the easy part: there are also quite a few cables to disconnect, some keys need to be removed from the keyboard, and there are a few similarly exotic operations. This is in very sharp contrast with the PowerMac 7200 that I used to own years ago, where it was possible to open the entire case and get a hard drive out (or an optical drive, or to add some main RAM, graphics RAM or cache RAM) without using a screwdriver at all. It's also in total contrast with IBM-designed laptops, that are so good in that domain that they play in a different league. It's so horribly bad on the PowerMac that Apple loses 2 points on that one.

That experience seems to summarize what I've seen from Apple: they can hit many high notes, pushing design and innovation further than just about any other company in the same business, but sadly they are also consistently inconsistent, and they routinely forget about a specific area and end up cobbling crappy hacks together that are akin the the proverbial chewing gum, paper clips and duct tape. I've owned 5 Macs from the mid-90s until now, and I can remember every single one of them for having the same kind of gross flaw, whereas I don't remember any of the other machines I've had for having such problems.