Bad.
I was bored to sleep by this MacWorld keynote.
The 17 MBP looks like a very nice computer to USE, and a worse computer to try to support, hardware-wise.
An hour of demoing iLife and iWork? snoooze. I am sure it is all fun and good, and what-not. But it is software. The place is FULL of software vendors that sell other software. APPLE is the only one who can present new APPLE HARDWARE!!!
No MacMini??!! It had better be coming out soon otherwise. THAT is what I have been waiting for.
I am pretty much sole support for more than 250 17" Apple laptops, and a similar, slightly higher number of 17" PC laptops, from Dell, to Gateway (don't even ask.
) and HP.
I have made my feelings known in the previous rumor thread about the built in Batteries, but I will re-iterate it here, because it bears repeating.
BAD IDEA. Battery performance NEVER meets the high marks that marketing-speak gives them, and some very mobile users can partially cycle a battery two or three times a day! And a significant partial cycle counts as a cycle, even if it isn't a full charge->discharge.
LiPo batteries are particular little beasties, too, and have to be treated just right, or they become lithium-napalm.
I am seeing several current 17" batteries per month that are swollen out of their shells. If not allowed to swell, the get hotter, and start fires.
Apple has had battery recalls before.
And no battery swapping for long duration without AC power, and lots of downtime to get the battery replaced before the end of the computer's useful life. 1000 days is ~3 years. A laptop like this, especially at this cost, should have 5 year useful lives, at LEAST. That means, even at best performance, at least one battery replacement.
Apple care does not consider a battery to be warrantable after 1 year, excepting some swollen batteries. That means that a battery replacement of a built-in battery is a non-warranty repair, but requires disassembly that voids warranty if not done by authorized personnel. STUPID, and time consuming.
IF the battery swells, it will actually DAMAGE THE STRUCTURE OF THE COMPUTER, and it internal components, and possibly become a very severe fire hazard!!!!
And what do have replaced in 17" laptops more than batteries or any other component...
HARD DRIVES. Hard drives fail more and more, as they get cheaper, and quality control becomes more lax, and physical damage wipes out more data, which is more densely packed. SSDs are not inexpensive enough to be economically attractive at this point, and 3-5 year durability is not yet widespread and well known, with NAND having limited numbers of read and write cycles, and having to have access spread across the volume of storage.
It is bad that I cannot replace a hard drive in a MBP17 as it is now, and this is a step in the wrong direction by encasing the battery and RAM as well.
When I buy 60 or more MBPs per year, I don't always want to pay Apple's HORRENDOUS markup on RAM. That adds up to a LOT of money. But now it isn't user serviceable. NOTHING is user or non-Apple-Authorized IT serviceable, and I don't work for Apple, I work for my employer and users.
As I said, for the end user, when the computer is working well, it seems like it will be a very nice computer to use.
But when stuff goes wrong, this is going to be even worse than it already has been.
