One reason not to buy an Apple Powerbook

[K. Eng]

http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/hdfailure.ars/2

This guy had a hard drive blowout and needed to replace the drive. This is what he had to go through:

I had to remove the battery, three screws in the battery bay, the memory card and a screw and weird little piece of metal in the memory bay, three pieces of sticky aluminum shielding, three little cables of mysterious origin (seemingly to the trackpad, the power button, and the microphone), F1, F2, F11, F12, more hidden screws, the entire keyboard, and finally the top aluminum face of the case (11 screws). There it was, the hard drive, the bane of my existence, with just two screws and a cable holding it down. 45 minutes.

Wtf?!?

If there is one thing that I appreciate about the ThinkPad T4x more than the build quality, it's the ease of maintenance. Optical and hard disk out in less than 1 minute with 1 screw each at most.

[sugo]

Thanks to engineers at Yamato Labs, Thinkpads were designed to be easily taken apart. Having such design while keeping it so thin and small footprint (T4x and X40) is much more difficult than people think.

I am afraid Apple is not the only one. Vaios can be very tricky to disassemble too.

[AtmosMan]

45 minutes? Holy cow. My hard drive would accidentally fall out faster than he could intentionally get his out.

[CoolRunnings]

Ha ha ha! I thankfully haven't had to work on too many Vaios (whew!) but the ones I have haven't been THAT hard to get the hard drives out... That's insane!

[budder]

Heh, speaking of Ars, I'd suggest the Mobile Computing Outpost in their forums for any laptop questions that might not fit here or you'd like a more diverse group to answer.

[BillMorrow]

hmm..
went over to arstechnica and was presented with avenue a spyware and an ad i HAD to watch to get in..

same for that mobil computing place..


perhaps i should start advertising here..?

[K. Eng]

Ars is a reputable site, but yes, the ads are annoying (although I'm sure you can skip the ads - I skipped one yesterday).

Advertising there might not be a bad idea. There are lots of technology enthusiasts there and many ThinkPad fans in the Mobile forum.

[CoolRunnings]

Ok I take back what I said about Vaios not being that bad. I had to pull the hard drive on one today. I am once again reminded of why I bought a Thinkpad...