Recording - March 2013 - 72

problems, so they didn’t need to do stuff on their own, and that designing
computers that couldn’t be worked on at home was a fair tradeoff for
improved performance in other areas.
Consider the MacBook Pro. Models from 2006 required specialized tools
like spudgers (Google it) and courage to do anything beyond replacing the
battery. On models from 2009, pulling a lever on the underside popped out
the battery and let you access the RAM and hard disks. On 2011 models,
you could access all three (with some handwringing from Apple) after a lot
of unscrewing and removing the bottom of the machine. Now? Nothing.
The Retina Display MacBook Pro is amazingly light and powerful, but
it’s a sealed box; it has a custom-shaped Solid State Drive that can’t be
removed, its battery is completely non-user-serviceable, and its RAM is soldered directly to the logic board and can’t be upgraded or swapped without destroying it. Similarly, the iMac hasn’t been user-serviceable since the

Editorial by Mike Metlay

The Mac As Disposable Appliance
You may have noticed that while
Devon Brent’s article on page 22 is a fantastic resource for Windows users trying
to get the most from their music computers, there isn’t a word about the Mac anywhere. Shouldn’t there be a corresponding article about how to tweak your Mac’s
hardware for the best DAW efficiency?
Unfortunately, the answer is rapidly
becoming “no”... because the Mac is
rapidly becoming a computer whose hardware you simply can’t tweak. This is the
tail end of an evolution from the incredibly arcane Mac innards of the 1990s,
through the relatively user-friendly internal designs of the 2000s, into a situation
unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
My favorite “beater” laptop is my trusty
Core 2 Duo MacBook from roughly 2007
that’s done dozens of reviews for this magazine. I can change hard drives in ten minutes with two screwdrivers, change RAM
in three minutes with only one screwdriver, and swap out the battery in 15 seconds
with just a coin. My Mac Pro can swap
hard drives in under two minutes with
only a screwdriver, and it’s equally easy to
add RAM or install PCIe cards. Apple
learned how to design these machines to
be more easily serviceable, in order to
help its users and its repair shops; less
labor for assembly and disassembly
meant faster turnaround and more confident users, and everyone benefited.
So what’s happened since? I think the
main change is in how computers can be
manufactured nowadays. Apple started
releasing designs that were elegant,
light, and streamlined, but it got there
by swapping out conventional parts for
ones that were custom-fit in the factory
and difficult if not impossible to replace
otherwise. Apple’s attitude seems to be
that users could bring dead computers to
authorized repair shops when they had
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RECORDING March 2013

design changed to only allow access by removing the glass front plate, and
the newest models have few or no replaceable innards. If you need more
of anything in one of these newest Macs, you have to dump it and buy a
new one, as if it was a toaster or a dishwasher.
I concede that I wouldn’t really consider swapping parts or doing my
own repairs on my iPad; I need it to be light more than I need it to be hackable. But my Mac is my computer—I want to be able to upgrade memory,
change the battery if it dies... and most importantly, swap out my storage
media (which will fail) on a regular basis! A machine where I can’t do this
makes me incredibly uncomfortable, and I don’t think that’s just because
I’m old. (A Time Capsule or iCloud to back up Terabytes of audio? Really?)
This goes with Apple’s larger trend of replacing internally-bused devices
with modular boxes attached by cables, which audio users hate. With a
non-expandable machine, we have to figure out how to get our control surfaces and external storage and audio interfaces to use a limited number of
USB and FireWire buses without tripping over each other. Thunderbolt at
least theoretically gives us access to the full bandwidth and speed of a Mac
Pro’s PCIe bus, but at what cost?
The straightforward solution is to use a Mac Pro with its internal PCIe
expandability, but that’s growing harder every year, with fewer Mac-friendly PCIe audio cards and fewer old Mac Pros compatible with new versions
of OS X. Hardcore audio users are a small percentage of the Mac community, which is already a small percentage of the world’s computer-using
community. We can’t be surprised that Apple caters to a much larger group
of users and worries less about the audio geeks in the process; who knows
how much longer the Mac Pro is for this world?
And I don’t see the iMac as an obvious replacement for it yet. A very glib
Genius at an Apple Store responded to my worries with, “You save a thousand dollars by getting an iMac rather than a Mac Pro... that’s a lot of fiftydollar Thunderbolt cables, right?” Well, yes, but when external
Thunderbolt PCIe-card enclosures cost anywhere from $400 to over $1000,
where’s the savings? And aside from the (gloriously powerful but not
exactly cheap) Universal Audio Apollo, where are the Thunderbolt audio
devices? We could lose our currently viable platform before something
better is realistically available!
Right now there are Macs on the market that are still upgradable; if you
worry about this sort of thing, you may want to consider upgrading to the
most flexible Mac you can afford, while you still can. The day might come
when the only advice we can give is, “Buy your new Mac, load it with everything you have, and work it hard... and if you can’t get it to work right within 14 days, return it for a refund and try again with a different one.”
After all, that’s what you do with toasters, right?
Mike Metlay (mike@recordingmag.com) is Associate Editor of Recording.

Recording - March 2013

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