A Box With No Screws

[Daniel McIntosh]

Hey, I'm a Mac guy.

Infantalizing hardware

Then there's the device itself: clearly there's a lot of thoughtfulness and smarts that went into the design. But there's also a palpable contempt for the owner. I believe -- really believe -- in the stirring words of the Maker Manifesto: if you can't open it, you don't own it. Screws not glue. The original Apple ][+ came with schematics for the circuit boards, and birthed a generation of hardware and software hackers who upended the world for the better. If you wanted your kid to grow up to be a confident, entrepreneurial, and firmly in the camp that believes that you should forever be rearranging the world to make it better, you bought her an Apple ][+.

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/02/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either.html

[Marc Wielage]

Steve Jobs has notoriously been against users opening up his products, both from a design standpoint (no seams, no screws, no visible openings), and also from a maintenance standpoint (as in keep your fingers out of there).

I steadfastly refused to buy a Mac until 1987, when they finally came out with the Mac II. This allowed you to open up the machine, change out your own RAM, swap out drives, etc., all without any special tools. But it took a whole new management team to approve this (and it happened after Jobs left the company).

One can make the argument that closed devices show contempt for the user, but there's also the other side, that they're trying to make the device sleek and simple. From Jobs' point of view, the user should never need to open it up. Me, I'm a hands-on guy, and I'll find a way to open it up, even if I have to use an axe and a chisel. (Or I'll save the trouble and just go to IFixIt.com and follow their simple instructions.)

--Marc W.