The new MacBook Pro? For all intents and purposes, cannot be serviced.

Basically it's so thin, and packs in so big a battery etc., that everything had to be glued in to make it fit in as thin a package as Apple wanted. They went to the extreme of manufacturing the Retina display directly in the lid, which means the least problem and it's replacement time, which is VERY expensive.

iFixit, a well-known repair depot for Apple gear who publishes DIY repair manuals, tears apart every Apple product as soon as they get their hands on it. The previous model MacBook Pro's scored 7 of 10 for being repairable, apparently a very good score. The current model? 1/10.

The sad thing about it is that laptop will set you back $2,000. I'm used to paying more for Apple laptops because I think they deliver good value and longer life. But a product that cannot be serviced? If I could get a four-year warranty on it, that would be one thing.

This is going to make my next laptop purchase very difficult. My first Mac, a MacBook Pro, was bought around five years ago and it was retired last December, replaced with an Air. Though there are no user-servicable components, to the best of my knowledge it is serviceable. I got a good four and a half years out of my first, and I think that is an acceptable lifespan for a laptop, especially as much as mine travels. A $6-700 laptop, obviously not an Apple, that lasts three years and can't be serviced? Wouldn't sting as much.

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/06/macbook-pro-unfixable/

A retired Federal judge joins the fight against the DOJ in the Megauploads case

Megaupload was sort of a cloud/hosting provider. The Department of Justice swept in, co-opted the New Zealand police to arrest the founder and top executives (the founder is an NZ resident), and the DOJ seized 11,000 servers representing 66 million customers data at their hosting site in Virginia and shut them down.

This was basically at the behest of media content providers. Some of those 66 million customers were pirating movies, games, music, etc. But a lot of them were not. And the government has basically stolen non-infringing information and denied them access to it. One case in point, a high school coach is suing for access, he stored team video footage on Megaupload's servers and can't access it.

It gets even more complicated when you take in to account that some people uploaded movies to Megaupload from countries where such activity is lawful.

Then judge stepped in when "The Department of Justice told the federal judge overseeing the prosecution that the government has no obligation to assist anybody getting back their data, even if it’s non-infringing material."

Yay for the judge!

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/06/retired-judge-megaupload/