this past month our mac book pro optical drive went south. what to do? do we try and fix it? our options would be to take to local mac repair shop, fine history of repairs, send it to apple, long shipping and wait, or try and fix it ourselves.

my history with the mac line is that they are user fixable from learning from my mac ll ci i could just pop the lid and there i was. motherboards were another affair but maybe not.

installing memory, hard drives, pci cards etc seemed pretty easy if one had the right tools and a bit of knowledge, and in those days it was pretty simple. but apple smarten up as they want to do all the repairs along with selling you the device and software. heck even designing special screws for the ipad and iphones so users can’t replace their own iphone battery. it was so easy to expand a mac tower using pci cards to add additional functionality to your computer. it was only limited to how many slots apple wired into computer. then they cut back on those.

apple has even now cut out their Green products, with the effect being not being about to sell to government agency’s because of dropping the green restrictions. apple thinks it customers don’t really care about being green. i guess it’s more profitable for apple or they wouldn’t do it. remember when people friendly apple wanted government work? oh well i guess the chinese factories can’t comply with making green products in their sweat factories.

apple has developed a wonder screw for their i phone thinking that would stop hackers trying to change the batteries taking profit away from apple.  i wonder how general motors would have fared in the auto industry had they made their own tools able to access only their engines. oh well we know that story. but apple is mega successful doing much the same thing. i am sure in the board room they are smug in thinking “it’s for our own good”. it’s  only a matter of time before someone produces the iphone screwdriver.

but along comes other companies with different ideas, yea team.

one of them i had contact with is called One World Computing whom i bought the cd burner from. they have video tutorials along with printed instructions in the shipping box showing one how to install their products. having the right tools helps, but they sell those also. we replaced our optical cd drive in a half hour.

now i’ve learned of another company called ifixit.org who believes differently. yea team. i’ve had to fix my epson 7600 printer manuals downloaded from the internet. of course that was before epson got wise and made things complicated and secret on their later models.

apple has changed and continues so keeping a tight grip on ios having learned from the debacle of letting other companies produce better and faster clones. while apple internal busses were running at 33mhz,  power computing  doubled that. whoa that was fast, as i owned one.

yes one could gather from this post i am tired of apple telling me what i need, there are rumors that apple is considering dropping optical drives from it’s line altogether. we drag our mac pro along with us on trips in order to back up files off our cameras now since epson dropped making their epson p HD viewer,

so what’s a poor family of togs to do when traveling, i guess we could go back to film although the tsa doesn’t know how to handle film opening infrared  film nor not too many other things like people.

oh well jene