Repasting a MacBook

I remember doing it on a thinkpad. I didn't break any cables, I didn't need a guide, and it got significantly quieter afterwards. Macbooks are pretty, they've got a great CPU, but the repairability is just rubbish

Same with most dell laptops I've owned. Pop off the back panel and everything is there, easily accessible, standard screws. Just did this on an Inspiron I have, just about 8 screws, pop the heat sync off, repaste, reassemble and done. Took like 15 minutes. Plus the RAM and SSD are also easily accessible and replaceable, as is the battery in a matter of minutes.

> repairability is just rubbish

I wonder if something will change for the better in the future, given that the EU will force (from 18th February 2027) every computer sold in the EU to have removable and replaceable batteries.

The part I have a hard time with as a corporate purchaser is that the failure/repair/replacement rate on our small number of Dell machines is upwards of 50%. We've only got about a dozen in use, and less then half of them have just worked reliably. At a certain point I don't really care how repairable the Macbooks we buy for almost everyone else are/aren't because the failure rate on those is so low by comparison.

I'm glad the Dell repair guy who gets sent out has a pleasant experience when he replaces the guts of a machine but my team still has to spend time and money shipping around replacements and dealing with warranty repair at a rate we just don't see with the Apple gear.

Once upon a time our entire corporate fleet was all Macbooks but the only thing we had worse luck with than these Dells was training nontechnical users on how to get to their Excel or specialized actuarial/compliance software through virtualization

No argument there. Where I work (I'm in infrastructure, not a dev) we've switched almost entirely to MacBooks and experienced the same when were a Dell shop. Horrible reliability. We've been on Macs since ~2023 and I've yet to need to send one off for repair or RMA.

I keep them for use at home as Linux machines because of the repairability and ease of upgrading, but my main machine is still a Mac.

I'd love MacBook level of hardware quality combined with easy access to repair and swap parts.

Waiting for that day to come before even considering buying my own macbook. Let's see.

IBM saw their internal tech support requirement plummet when they switched to MacBooks.

I've never understood companies that cheap out on laptops. Even if you only pay someone minimum wage (€1800), a high end laptop is ~1 month wage, and you get a tax write-off on it too.

Even if that person only works there for 2 years, that's 4.2% of the cost of employing them.

Even worse is when management doles maxed out iPhones and MacBooks Pros out to themselves, but the main workforce has to make do with €650 craptops and cheap Samsung phones. For me that's always a double red flag because it tells me management is both inept and greedy.

Don't MacBooks already have replaceable batteries though?