The genius of Apple's rise over the last decade has been its success in putting good technology (or even industry-changing, in the case of the iPhone) into unique, innovate boxes. The iMac line has always been interesting from a form-factor standpoint, from its colorful one-box hues, to the attractively spare desk-lamp model, to the current flatscreen design. The iPod and iPhone have also paved new ground for the design of the devices in their respective sectors.
A fundamental tenet of Apple's design philosophy, however, harkens back to Henry Ford. The old joke about the Model T was that you could get it in any colored you liked, as long as it was black. With Apple, you get everything you want in style and substance, as long as that is all you will ever want. The days of popping open the box to swap out memory chips, sound cards and hard drives ended when Apple began its iMac design aesthetic. Apple products are intentionally difficult to open and service, and replacement parts are not available in abundance. I have opened both my iMac and iPhone, but neither one was a particularly fun experience.
Now it turns out that Apple is turning the screws on shade tree mechanics even harder, as it were. New iPhones, or iPhones that are currently being serviced by Apple, are now assembled with screws that cannot be turned by consumers. Apple uses a screwhead design called a Pentalobe, for which there is no corresponding tool commercially available. iPhone owners will be unable to open their phones for any reason, whether to engage in mischief like changing the battery (horrors!) or to fix it.
It's about time to crack open my iPhone again to clear out the dust under the screen and devise a permanent solution to that problem. If the iPhone 4 were to collect dust under the screen the way my 3G does, and I were prevented from opening it to do the simple screen cleaning just because Apple doesn't want anyone else controlling the income stream for service, I would be mightily ticked.
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Ugh, my Sony PDA (a clie PEG-NX80, circa 2003) is the same way. The power switch broke, and I spent many an hour searching for a 5-pointed screwdriver so I could open the case and attempt a fix. No luck. Fortunately the power switch is not the only way to turn it on; several function buttons do so. Shutdown is now achieved by an auto power-off feature, which I set to the shortest interval.
Even before the power switch broke I had a love/hate relationship with this device. It is arguably the pinnacle of pre-smartphone PDAs, and it is gloriously large, gangly, and complex. To this day I get questions about it. "What kind of phone is that?" people ask, much to my amusement. At ten inches long, it looks like the worlds biggest flip phone. But it never lived up to its multimedia and file-handling promises. It is just another disappointing device in a string of disappointing Sony purchases I made in recent years. That being the case, I no longer intend to buy Sony consumer products.
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