Price any Apple hardware and you'll find they charge a pretty penny for larger memory capacity. In Apple's latest design iterations it is getting harder and harder to make upgrades, and upgrading iPhone memory or storage capacity has never been possible. You could say Apple's whole business model is predicated on charging a premium for memory and storage.

While SSD drives are awesome and give excellent performance, we all have a fear of the "Sudden SSD Death Syndrome" or that sudden "hey why did my computer just die" moment. While spinning-platter drives also wear out and die, the risk of SSD drive failure weighs in the back of our collective mind. A truism going around is that "overprovisioning" your SSD drive will ensure a longer lifespan for the drive.

Many years ago Apple introduced the Mac Mini, a lightweight desktop computer where you brought your own keyboard and display. Unlike other Mac's, it was a simple box containing a logic board, memory, disk, DVD drive, USB, FireWire, and DisplayPort interfaces. Speaking for myself, the Mac Mini is attractive because its power requirements are miniscule (30 Watts or so), the box is small meaning it doesn't dominate our desk space, and you can choose your preferred keyboard, mouse and display. Unfortunately the current Mac Mini is suboptimal, since it's suffering from Apple's policy of non-repairable computers, and the design hasn't been updated in years.

The Mac Mini concept as a small box, low energy requirements, fitting into any desktop situation, is attractive, even if the current implementation is not attractive. Other computer companies have not been sitting still, and several have implemented similar computer designs. In particular the Intel NUC's are almost directly equivalent, and do not come with the hindrance of being Windows computers.

The backlight in laptop LCD displays produces a lot of light. Just turn out the lights and see how well the laptop lights the room. That's with a LCD in front of the backlight, blocking most of the light produced by the backlight. Suppose the LCD on your laptop dies? You can, in most cases, replace the LCD and keep using the laptop. But what do you do with the old LCD? Maybe the backlight is perfectly fine and can be used for something.

For this project, I have an LCD display from a MacBook Pro 2009. I botched replacing the display glass and ruined the LCD panel. The LED backlight is perfectly fine, and the intention is to power the LCD, mount it in the LCD display, ending up with a light panel. The project was inspired by How to make a relaxing "false window" light panel (using old laptop screens)

SSD drives are awesome, they're fast, they consume little power, they're light weight, and so on. But we all worry about whether the drive will unexpectedly die, since a truism going around is that SSD drives will just up-and-quit taking your whole computer with it. It's useful, therefore, to have fore-warning by monitoring the health of your SSD drive. A key is to ensure your drive has the S.M.A.R.T. feature (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology). The next key is getting software that can query S.M.A.R.T. data, presenting it in a way that makes sense to you.

Over the past few months a pair of mind-blowing videos have been made based in the parts markets in China. Scotty, the iPhone Guy, started with the question -- these markets have all kinds of spare parts for iPhones, but can you assemble enough of those parts to build your own iPhone. It took him a few weeks to accomplish the task, but he did so, and that phone works. For the second video, he wanted to add a headphone jack to the iPhone 7, which ended up as a grindingly difficult project that took 17 weeks to finish. But, it works. The question is whether Scotty will only do iPhone projects, what's his motivation, is he going to do more work like this, and so on.

He has a broader plan in mind, to explore other technology hubs, to explore the technology supply chain, and so on. We can expect his work to have great technical depth, going into literal nuts and bolts.

This video is an interview with Scotty as they walk through the building housing those electronics markets.

Supposedly the 5K iMac was the primo iMac, until the iMac Pro came along, but it was awfully darned expensive. This fellow worked out a method to buy a regular 2017 iMac, with a Core i5 CPU, and upgrade it with the same i7 CPU used by Apple, and other parts. Not only did he construct the equivalent of the 5K iMac, he did it for $1500 less cost, and the machine performed a lot better.

A couple months ago an amazing video popped up on YouTube, a guy had built his own iPhone from spare parts. He followed that up with another video about hacking an iPhone 7 to have a headphone jack. As a result, Scotty (his name) has been getting lots of questions about whether building your own iPhone is the cheapest way to get a new iPhone. His answer, "No", falls in line with my observation on the cheapest way to get an iPhone X, Apple's newest iPhone that goes on sale today for over $1000 apiece.

Apple is playing a game on us all. They've learned how to make us lust after the latest gizmo, and how to make us think a 2-3 year old phone is worthless. Apple has one of the largest Market Cap's in history by playing that game. However, we can play that game a different way and save ourselves a ton of money.