MorePowerBook
As previously threatened, I performed the hard drive transplant surgery on my baby PowerBook tonight. The hardware portion of the procedure took nearly three hours. I hope this is the first, last, and only time I will ever need to see the insides of my PowerBook.
The good news is everything went perfectly, and I now have a 5400 RPM, 8 MB cache, 40 GB IBM/Hitachi Travelstar in place of the 4200 RPM, 2 MB cache Toshiba drive that came with the machine.
The bad news is that it took so damn long. When I replaced the hard drive on my Dell Inspiron 8000, it took about ten minutes. Now, I realize that Apple did not design the machine to have people replacing the hard drive. Certainly there are other manufacturers who design their laptops to have non-serviceable hard drives. But I expect more of Apple. You might say I expect perfection. I honestly don't think it would have been too much trouble to have designed this case to allow a hard drive replacement procedure involving only 6 to 10 screws (as opposed to the 30 to 40 I removed and cataloged as I went tonight) and about 15 to 20 minutes. My conclusion then, is that they purposely made it so that only a very meticulous electrical engineer would dare attempt the procedure. This is a real shame, especially because the drive they give you is so... nominal. You can't even order up a faster drive as an option when you order the PowerBook from Apple. I mean that I could at least understand, if not condone.
Anyway, here's a picture I took after the disassembly process -- right after I removed the 4200 RPM drive and just before I put in the 5400 RPM drive.
Comments
You are indeed brave, good sir knight.
Posted by: tony | June 10, 2003 8:18 AM
They've never really concerned themselves with catering to techie h/w geeks AFAIK, except incidentally (i.e. it's happened, but never seemed to be a priority). Other than the Apple (original and II) of course.
I like how you have you iPod sitting over to the side with wires coming out of it, making it seem like a DMM...
Hope the new HD rocks!
Posted by: mlee | June 12, 2003 1:01 AM
Hahaha.... I guess the iPod does kind of look like a DMM in the picture. That's pretty amusing, since I'm one of the shameful EE's who doesn't actually own a DMM. And yeah, you're definitely right about Apple's design philosophy. I guess that's part of the price one must pay to be a Mac user and a geek at the same time. Oh well.
Posted by: jet | June 12, 2003 4:58 PM