HP’s User Serviceable All-in-One Workstation

Computers & Mobile
HP’s User Serviceable All-in-One Workstation
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The 27" monitor opens to expose user-serviceable components designed for no-tools swapping.

The Z1 isn’t even supposed to ship until April, so it’s all just hype right now. But it’s working on me. Will be curious to hear what the early adopters report. [Thanks, Phil!]

HP Z1 Workstation

16 thoughts on “HP’s User Serviceable All-in-One Workstation

  1. j says:

    As someone who has worked in IT for over 15 years, few things are more consistent than the bummed out feeling I get when someone brings me an HP to fix. There has been no consistency to their case design, and they are never intuitive to disassemble. Couple that with their tendency to use cheap and shoddy components and it is a nightmare situation. Compare that to a company like Dell, who, in my opinion, has almost always had great case design (I remember the revelation that was those first clam shell Dimensions).

    Anyway, about this attempted change of HP philosophy, I’ll believe it when I see it work.

  2. matt says:

    How it really went down HP’s latest and greatest 27″ desktop replacement was planned to be a real monster, but it wasn’t panning out so well, constantly over heating, 10 minute battery life, sub par keyboard. So they pulled the keyboard and battery, flipped the LCD, added a stand, stuffed it with fans and called it a day. ;)

    All joking aside it could actually be a fairly cool idea assuming that HP isn’t throwing a bunch of proprietary stuff at us, mostly I hope the video card and stand mount attachments are industry standards. Looks like you gut one full pci slot and 3 minis as well as 5 internal usb 2.0 ports so it is expandable space allowing. Imagine this with a wall mount and touch screen, it would make an awesome community bulletin board / public use video terminal.

  3. Threebean says:

    My experience with PCs has been the opposite.

    I’ve been given several dead or badly damaged laptops in the past. So far the HPs have been the ones I’ve had the best luck with. They seem to be put together reasonably well, and with some searching I’ve always found service manuals for them. Well written manuals that have step by step instructions to get to the various main components. They even contain listings of screws, by size and count.

    The only Dell I’ve messed with was a garage sale find. It was a slim type tower. It pitched errors because the previous owner had fixed it’s fan with a generic one. Once an overpriced new old stock fan was put in place the errors went away.

    I like HPs and this looks pretty interesting. Like an iMac but with accessible innards. I wonder if the graphics card in it will be open to others or just a select few that HP will make specifically for the Z1?

  4. jake says:

    After nearly losing my sanity replacing the hard drive in my Core 2 Duo 20″ iMac (which took almost 3 hours by the way!) this makes me drool…an all-in-one that is designed to be serviced. What a concept.

    1. kicking it old school says:

      The old iMac G5 was a lot better in that regard

  5. Dominic Muren (@dmuren) says:

    I got to agree with Matt on this one. It’s a great idea, especially if the LCD and case are high enough quality that they last long enough so the user will actually get to replace some of the innards. The real challenge of user serviceability doesn’t come down to the upgrades, it comes down to the bits like the latch on that “hood” or the hinges on a laptop that fail, invalidating all the tech around them. In my perfect world, I’d want a bomb-proof case design first, and then talk to me about how all of the bits inside of it can be swapped out — preferably with non-proprietary bits…

  6. Christopher Gosnell says:

    I think the last couple of years’ HP laptops, especially the ‘workstation’ quality machines are fairly easy to repair/upgrade.

    I have taken to ‘standardize’ my home laptops on older HP Z9010’s. They are inexpensive, easy enough to take apart and work on, fairly rugged, and replacement batteries are not too expensive.

    One problem I always have with laptops especially is the need for custom drivers for Windows XP to recognize the mouse, display, WiFi, etc… It would be nice to have a .iso for all of the custom drivers in one place on the HP website, rather than downloading each driver individually.

    On Linux (PCLinuxOS in particular) I am pleasantly surprised that most all of the devices are recognized, and the drivers installed out of the box without problems.

  7. Apple desiste da certificação ambiental EPEAT [update] | fabiano.ec says:

    […] quanto o MacBook Air e permitem reparos e upgrades normalmente. O all-in-one HP Z1 permite que se substituam os componentes sem usar ferramentas ou enviar o aparelho para a manutenção. Os exemplos são incontáveis, e não vem só da […]

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I am descended from 5,000 generations of tool-using primates. Also, I went to college and stuff. I am a long-time contributor to MAKE magazine and makezine.com. My work has also appeared in ReadyMade, c't – Magazin für Computertechnik, and The Wall Street Journal.

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