This article from Wired gets to the heart of the problem I tend to have with Macs (as well as with tablet PCs in general)–they’re not easily repairable.

The New MacBook Pro: Unfixable, Unhackable, Untenable.

I’ll admit, that I went through personal laptops at a pretty fast rate for the past couple years, primarily because I couldn’t find one that I liked. But when I upgraded, I gave my old laptops to people who could use them, so I wasn’t trashing them.

And I tend to run my desktops forever–I had one desktop that eventually had every single part replaced (some parts more than once), one part at a time; I had that computer forever. My current desktop is two years old, and still works fabulously. I’ve added more memory and another hard drive (because photo processing eats memory and hard drive space), and added Michael’s monitor after he gave up his desktop. And aside from trying to set up local networking with Windows 7 Home edition (gag) I haven’t had any issues at all.

Now I know that most people are not capable of upgrading their computers on their own. But there are tons and tons of place that will help you. And even if you have a laptop, you don’t need to be any kind of expert to replace your battery. And adding memory is doable project for all but the most timid. But you can’t do those things yourself on a Mac.

But I think I’m more disturbed by the throw-away nature of Macs. These paragraphs from the article really got to me:

When we choose a short-lived laptop over a more robust model that’s a quarter of an inch thicker, what does that say about our values?

Every time we buy a locked down product containing a non-replaceable battery with a finite cycle count, we’re voicing our opinion on how long our things should last.

Why is this important? Because throwing away electronics leeches poisons into the soil and water, but in many cases, recycling is no less evil. (If you do nothing else, click on those links and just look at the pictures.)