Apple’s latest MacBook Pro is a dazzling thing, with its upsettingly crisp Retina Display and pleasingly refined, razor thin, neat-lined form. They’re beautiful, hideously expensive and now wholly counter to a PC gaming fundament – that the machine and its components are yours to own, use, toss, repair, replace and upgrade. The MacBook Pro is impossible to tinker with, and even if you manage to crack one open you’ll find everything from the memory to the CPU soldered firmly in place. The reason is obvious enough: there’ll be another two-grand MacBook Pro along soon, and that’s the only upgrade Apple want you to consider. In an Alienware interview with PCGamesN, Alienware’s Eddy Goyanes discussed how likely it is that they the gaming PC manufacturer would ever follow suit. The short answer? “No way”.
“The CPUs in our notebooks aren’t soldered,” stated Goyanes when asked about the upgrade-proof MacBook Pro. “You can upgrade the CPU, the hard drive, memory, wireless. I’ve seen people on our forums who’ve changed out the optical for a hard drive. So there’s a lot of upgradeability that can occur, even in the notebook space.For gamers, the potential for upgrades is always something they consider when making a purchase. So there are no plans to make any of our systems closed-off or of non-upgradeable design. No way. Our audience would have to change dramatically for that to occur, and I don’t see that happening any time soon.”
Some reassurance that Apple’s brushed metal walled gardens are unlikely to become a reality of PC gaming laptops, then, as well as a clear indicator of the uphill struggle faced by a games industry trying to gain some Apple-traction beyond iOS. And if upgradeability isn’t a word, it really should be.
The fullAlienware interviewwith Eddy Goyanes can be found here.