To what end should hardware manufactures be required to inform their customers of component changes? One big advantage of Apple products compared to other competitors is that there are very limited number of decisions for average consumers to make. It will cause huge amount of confusion if a new model name and change list is generated each time any of the thousands of components in an MBP changes.
It seems to me that focusing on component changes is completely missing the point. The real problem was not that Apple had two subtly different versions of their MacBook Pro with no way to tell them apart. The real problem was that Apple was shipping seriously defective hardware. Imagine if Apple hand standardized entirely on the defective LG panels. That eliminates the "panel lottery" complaint, right? And yet the actual problem, in terms of what you get when you buy one, is worse, not better.
Manufacturers need to ship products that are fit for purpose and that perform as advertised. As long as that's maintained, swapping components shouldn't be a problem. If swapping components affects that, then it's the bad products, not the swapping, that are the real problem.
I totally agree with you. For this particular article, if there is a clear and comprehensive specification on how the drives should perform (IOPs, latency, BW, etc), the problem will be resolved immediately with no controversy. The comment I was replying to implied that Apple should provide a means for customers to distinguish the products, which I do not believe is a realistic solution because swapping components is quite common in hardware world.
I agree with you too! I'm just expanding on that a bit, and saying how even if distinguishing the products was somehow realistic, it's solving the wrong problem anyway.
Apple already has different model identifiers and different model names for their MacBook Pros. That's because they don't sell only one version of each laptop; they usually offer two or three versions that have different processors and different amounts of RAM. There were 6 different model numbers and 9 different configurations (across two different sizes and two different batches) of the MacBook Pro sold in 2013 alone:
I'm not suggesting that they advertise the MacBook Pros by their model numbers. My point is that they already have to differentiate between different models and different configurations, so it would not be difficult for them to make the model numbers different (it could be simple as one letter or digit change at the end) when they change such a significant part component.
