On 2010-02-06 09:39 , Godfrey DiGiorgi wrote:
Sorry Paul, but I've changed hard drives and RAM (as have many of my
non-computer-industry friends) on those exact models. I've changed
them on ALL of the laptops I've had, both my own and many pre-prod
units.
Godfrey, i am not Paul, but i too have also changed an awful lot of hard
drives and other parts in Macs, starting with the Mac II (the eMac was
the worst, iirc); there are currently four different models of Apple
laptops in my household and i've upgraded the hard drives and RAM in all
of them, as well as a few that have flown the coop, and i've helped
quite a few others through similar tasks; i am speaking carefully and
from experience
note the part where i wrote "for certain definitions" -- my distinction,
as i may not have explained well, is that while yes of course the user
_can_ replace the drives, and some of us feel comfortable with it, this
is not a design feature of most recent (pre-Unibody) Apple laptop
models; most users would not feel comfortable with the task, and perhaps
most importantly, Apple does not sanction users replacing those hard
drives; with the Unibody models, the policy and the design took a U-turn
for the better ...
beyond my direct appreciation of how it is to do that work (also
visually explained via the links i shared), i also have some experience
with Apple Support on the subject -- i got a 13" MacBook Pro last July
and the hard drive soon failed; in order to test it and recover what
data i could, i removed it and put it in an external enclosure; when i
called Apple for warranty service, and explained that i'd removed the
drive as part of confirming it had failed, the rep immediately denied my
claim; i had to escalate and point out the passage in the user manual
for that model which explicitly describes to the user how to replace the
hard drive; my claim was then accepted with an explanation that the
initial rep was applying the policy for older models
Apple puts its own label on the drives they use as OEM and you might
not find the part number for that OEM unit in a Hitachi or Western
Digital list, but that doesn't mean the drive units are not industry
standard equipment. I've changed out the drives in virtually ALL my
systems (for larger ones) as it has always been less expensive to get
a lot of disk space that way.
again this boils down to a definition -- if the exact unit is not
available for general purchase, but is very similar to available models
(differs in model number, and might or might not differ in details like
cache size or ROM), then is it "industry standard"? it is not literally
off-the-shelf, but since the part works like and can be replaced by
off-the-shelf items, yes, it is industry standard by some ways of
thinking; to articulate this point, there was a time when one couldn't
use Apple hard disk formatting tools with drives that didn't have an
Apple ROM; to use non-Apple drives, one had to use a third-party
formatter as well (not a huge obstacle, since these were readily
available); this post-dates the Mac II by at least a bit, evidence here:
<http://macfaq.org/hardware/harddisk.shtml#Q2.2.2>
similarly, with RAM, if you send a Mac in to Apple for service, and
you've replaced Apple's RAM with some other brand, Apple might or might
not remove the RAM and send it back to you in a baggie with an ambiguous
note about how unsupported components weren't tested; i've avoided that
experience myself, but have seen many others describe it; that doesn't
mean that non-Apple RAM won't work, or that Apple RAM is "non-standard",
but it does by way of policy make Apple's modules a different part than
what you can buy elsewhere
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