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Comment by rz2k | Hacker News Reader

I think holding Apple to higher standards for its environmental impact has a lot to do with why they innovate in this respect, and I think that it is appropriate, given their size as a manufacturer and their positioning as a premium product.

Tightly integrated hardware, and efforts to develop software that improves performance of long-discontinued products does a lot to explain why Apple products are used much longer than alternatives. Compare a Mac mini to a budget mini tower, and it is difficult to argue that attaching an external Thunderbolt 3 drive in 2024 is worse for the environment, when the competing product will likely be in a landfill, due to difficult to diagnose hardware issues and there not being an easily understood recycling program.

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From where does the belief that apple makes durable products come? I have the exact opposite experience, and I have been fixing my own and my friends computers for a long time.

I started recommending against in 2014 and nothing I have seen since has given me any reason to change my mind.

My anecdotal evidence is the opposite. But I do not trust that to judge about reliability in general. The prices for used Macs are consistently higher even after 4-6 years than for comparable PC and this is much better statement about quality.

Two other reasons I can think of why Macs cost more, including used:

1. The MacOS premium. It's impractical to run MacOS on anything else.

2. Status symbol.

Anecdotally, I see a lot of people outside of HN comparing their experiences with the quality of a $1200+ USD Macbook to ~$500 USD laptops of other OEMs. Of course the Macbook wins over things half its price.

Personally I've had great experiences with Thinkpads and Latitudes, which have held up great and are very easy to repair or upgrade.

One does not get 5 year old Mac as a status symbol.

My wife's old MacBook (from before the whole unibody thing) is a tank. But I have fixed so many strange things in Macs. Chips becoming unsoldered (apple soldering is quite frankly not very good), heat issues and even broken SATA cables (!!!).

Apple makes amazing things. I would love something as slick as a Mac laptop,but I can't make myself get one.

OK, sure, but why do they need to manufacture everything out of CNC'd billets of aluminum? That seems extremely wasteful.

You know exactly why: you don’t get the quality that Apple wants any other way. Supposedly they reuse the shavings, so it might not actually be as bad as you think.

And when the machine is decommissioned, the aluminum from the chassis is easily recyclable...

This is one of the least wasteful things they do. The cuttings are recycled, and aluminum is one of the few materials that is more energy efficient to recycle than to mine/manufacture from scratch.

They also do CNCing pretty efficiently. The same piece of aluminum that makes an iMac screen bezel makes two wired Mac keyboards.

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