by Charles Miller

Someone brought me a laptop with a broken keyboard, expecting that I should be able to fix it in a few minutes and for a few centavos. The only thing needing repair was one key, the inoperative [Spacebar] but repairing or replacing individual keys on a laptop is not as simple or inexpensive as many people think it ought to be. Deflating her expectations I told her replacing the keyboard was a major expense, assuming it would be even possible to find replacement parts for her very old laptop. I then suggested to her she could continue using the laptop if she wrote in Classical Greek, but having no appreciation of my sense of humor she angrily accused me of schadenfreude. (Students of the Bible will remember that large parts of it were originally written in scriptura continua that used no spaces between the words.)

Obviously, trying to type on a laptop without a working spacebar would be quite a challenge. Another unpleasant reality about many laptop computers, especially newer ones, is that many of them are simply not repairable at all. This is never more annoying than when the failure of something like one key on the keyboard leads to being forced to junk the whole laptop.

Most inexpensive laptops are simply not designed with repairs or upgrades in mind; and this is also the case with one very expensive brand of computers. One of the tech-oriented web sites I regularly follow features articles on how to perform repairs and also has tear-down reviews of new products. This web site ranks the laptops it reviews on a scale of zero to ten based on their reparability. A score of 0 means unrepairable and ten is the easiest to repair. Reading the latest edition of this web site I noticed a troubling trend; that Apple products are becoming progressively harder to service. It is a troubling trend because I own both a MacMini desktop system and also a MacBook Air laptop.

What I noticed is that over the last decade the various Apple laptops that had been reviewed had steadily decreased in their reparability score. The MacBook Air 2010 had a score of 4; not good but possibly repairable. The MacBook Air Retina Display 2018 had a score of 3; less likely to be repairable. And the MacBook Pro 2019 came in with a score of 1; meaning that you can probably give up hope ever being able to repair one.

Various computer components such as memory chips, hard disks, modems, and CPUs used to be socketed to facilitate upgrades or repairs. Today those components are increasingly being soldered down onto the motherboard. In many laptops the battery assembly is solidly glued in place, making replacement extremely difficult. This does solve the problem of failures resulting from components working themselves loose of their sockets, but it means those parts are no longer easily serviceable. So the conundrum is that having parts of a computer soldered in or glued down makes for a more rugged computer, but it also limits reparability, upgradeability and longevity. Unfortunately, this is the new reality for many computers, tablets, and smart phones.

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Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant with decades of IT experience and a Texan with a lifetime love for Mexico. The opinions expressed are his own. He may be contacted at 415-101-8528 or email FAQ8 (at) SMAguru.com.

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