Imagine, if you will, that you are an incredibly expensive, yet trendy computer manufacturer. You maintain a legion of cult-like followers who flock to the finely-brushed aluminum devices you hawk at inflated prices, while pushing a degree of simplicity that even the most vegetable of hospital patients would be able to operate at their leisure.

At what point does being different mean eschewing common sense?

Rambling aside, the decisions Apple makes at times completely baffle me. Take the new, unibody Macbook Pro, for example. One of the machine’s big selling points was the ease with which it could be upgraded, by even the most technologically challenged among us. The bottom of the laptop has a magnetic latch, which, when removed, reveals both the battery and hard drive – easily accessible to the intrepid user.

I decided the time was right to finally move into the 500GB club. After all, my collection of vintage cartoons was growing pretty steadily, and there’s only so much softcore Swedish pornography a hard drive can fit. Only one screw is needed to free the hard drive from its Apple-chic clutches. Or so you’d think.

Before this whole upgrade began, I can honestly say that I had never even heard of a Torx T6 screw bit. Quite frankly, the name of it reminds of me of robots, or some foreign kitchen appliance that will probably achieve sentience and become our new overlord one day. The point is, this incredibly small screw is what’s required to mount the damn drive inside the machine. And damn, if it wasn’t impossible to find somewhere that sold these; in the end, it took two trips to Rona and Home Hardware just to get what I needed.

Well done, Apple; so much for simplicity. Your desire to be different has backfired into the realm of stupidity.

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While I don’t think I was prepared to do entire backup and reformat at the beginning of the week, things have actually gone far better than I had hoped. In a moment of quick thinking, I cracked open my 2.5” external HDD, and harvested the SATA to USB connector that it runs on to pull the files off my old internal. As you can imagine, this saved a great deal of backup/reloading time, and meant that my Swedish softcore collection was, thankfully, working again by bedtime.

This also meant that I’ve had a nice array of 2.5” HDDs splayed across my desk for the better part of the weekend. It’s been a matter of making sure my data is safe and sound, and then zeroing out the drives for a nice, fresh start.

Maybe now I’ll finally have the room I need for all my pictures, and the chance to give my Flickr a much-needed update too.