We stopped by the CyberpowerPC suite at the Palazzo yesterday and were shown some interesting products. When we walked into the suite the first thing that caught our eyes was a very unusual looking PC. This was set up like a three armed star with a power button in the center. In talking with Eddie Vong we were told that the Trinity Fang is fully customizable so you can get the components you want… within certain limits. You have to use a Mini-ITX board simply because of the space available to you.

With some of Apple’s latest products it seems as if they have built in some obsolescence into them or just made the cost of repair too high for most consumers and repair shops. They have done this in a number of ways including gluing the batteries to the cases, gluing the glass to the displays (and then gluing them to the case!) and more. This heavy shift towards disposable products (meaning that people are more likely to throw them out than try to get them fixed) has been noted by sites like iFixIt who recently called the Mac Book Pro Retina one of the least repairable laptops they have ever worked with.

Apple has lost another VP of Hardware this time to retirement. Bob Mansfield, how replaced Mark Papermaster (you know him, he is at AMD now) in 2010 is retiring after being with Apple since 1999. Bob has been the lead of iPhone and iPad hardware since 2010, but before that he was in charge of dealing with Mac hardware (beginning in 2005).