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Comment by biddlesby | Hacker News Reader

> Well guess what, that's a design decision and we live in a free market - so if you don't like it you're welcome to buy a different laptop or phone.

This shifts blame off suppliers and on to consumers. Suppliers can do whatever they want: it's the responsibility of consumers to choose what is best for society.

In my opinion this is not an effective approach for society, for example because of unbalanced information. I think the responsibility needs to be shared.

> The fact that these design decisions have been integral to making Apple one of the most valuable companies in the world probably indicates they were good design decisions.

I don't think the author is disputing that the designs were good decisions, when the goal is profit. They are complaining that sustainability was not taking into account.

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But equally, the consumer buys what the consumer wants. All Apple is guilty of is making decisions that feed the consumer's wants. Apple's income is proof positive that the consumer is willing to pay as much as they are, and quite probably more, to get their hands on what Apple have designed and for all the bad there is in the phone's design, there's enough good that enough people are willing to part with high amounts of money to get their products.

> But equally, the consumer buys what the consumer wants.

I don't believe in this equality. The consumer is limited to buying what is available in the market, which may not be what the consumer wants.

For example, if I had the option to buy a current Macbook Pro without a touchbar, and with the circa-2015 keyboard, I'd do so.

There's never going to be an infinite array of choices in a free market; there's only so many people and companies, and they can only make so many different things efficiently and sell them.

Apple made the decision to sell the Macbook with the touchbar, and you're free to either buy it or not. Personally, I don't like Macs or Apple, so I don't buy them at all, and I advise my friends and family to avoid them too. Most of them don't listen to me, and insist they "need" Apple products and pay top dollar for them, even though many of them are struggling financially. I try showing them my nice Android phone with removable batteries and dual cameras that I got for $140 on Ebay and that has MVNO service that costs a fraction of what they pay monthly to the big carriers, but it goes in one ear and out the other. Then they wonder why they're always broke and why I seem to be loaded....

Anyway, if you don't like the current Macs, don't buy them. It's really as simple as that. I have a Dell Latitude laptop that's (I think) 4 years old and easily repairable which I also bought used (ex-corporate lease), so I'm keeping it. And I have a phone that's 2-3 years old and has replaceable batteries, an SDcard slot with a 128GB card in it, and that cost me relatively little, and I'm keeping that for the time being too. Maybe if I see something better that I get excited by, I'll buy it, but I'm not dumb enough to buy something just because that's what some company wants me to buy.

But it's not that simple.

No other company can legally sell OS-X computers; some of the software on the platform is Mac only. So if you're in the Mac ecosystem then making a switch to Windows or Linux can be a major hurdle.

I'm saying that as a die-hard Windows fan (well, after Nadella took over) who's now currently enjoying Windows Terminal (beta), the Linux Subsystem, and some major improvements in the usability of the Win10 OS. Not to mention their new Edge Browser, Code, and .net Core - the list goes on.

Even though I believe the grass is much greener on this side, I can fully understand that a huge number of people don't want to or can't easily change. The new Macbook Pros are beautifully designed, if it just wasn't for that missing row of keys and total lack of travel in those that remain.

> Even though I believe the grass is much greener on this side

It is? Forced upgrades and fucking ads in the OS, not to mention tracking that cannot even be disabled in the Enterprise editions?

I rather pay more for a Mac and not be haunted by ads. There's enough ads on the Internet even with an adblocker, all over public space (TV, radio, newspapers, on the sides of buildings, cars, in public transport), I don't need them in my OS too...

I haven't seen much of any ads after I performed my post install clean ups.

I agree the pre installed games are a nuisance and need to go.

I can manage my updates by using the many tools provided in the Pro edition in later updates (1 year ago). You probably haven't seen those?

I don't mind Microsoft collecting telemetry that relates to Windows updates Vs hardware configurations. You don't really need so much of that in osx land as Apple owns all the core hardware. In Windows, there's many magnitudes more configs.

> I haven't seen much of any ads after I performed my post install clean ups.

One should not be supposed to do manual clean-ups simply to have an OS that's ad free. We pay for Windows, after all.

> I don't mind Microsoft collecting telemetry that relates to Windows updates Vs hardware configurations.

The problem is that the "telemetry" is totally intransparent and uncontrollable. In the case of Office 365 there is no way to operate it inside the EU and conforming to the GDPR (https://www.datenschutz-notizen.de/office-16-und-office-365-...).

> Anyway, if you don't like the current Macs, don't buy them. It's really as simple as that.

I like my Android phone, and I am happy buying non-Apple laptops for myself. However, my company machine choices have me stuck on Apple. It's just not as simple as you'd like it to be.

>However, my company machine choices have me stuck on Apple.

This isn't really a problem. The whole point of work is to make money to support yourself; you're being paid to put up with whatever BS is entailed with that job. No one likes everything about their job, and for software people, there's very, very few jobs where they actually love their IT environment. Usually they complain about it in one way or another. The IT environment is just another factor to consider when choosing between offers, along with company culture, commute, office environment, salary, etc. You can't have it all. So my advice before doesn't apply to whatever your employer chooses to make you use in exchange for you collecting a salary, it's only for your personal use, where you really do have the power to choose what's best for you and what you like the most without worrying about external factors (unless perhaps you have a spouse/SO who will dump you because they don't like your choice, but if that's the case you're probably better off without them).

>For example, if I had the option to buy a current Macbook Pro without a touchbar, and with the circa-2015 keyboard, I'd do so.

Given enough money I'm sure you could find someone to do a custom build :)

Ah yes, but you'd still buy the Macbook Pro, because all other things being equal the Macbook Pro with the touchbar still suits your purpose better than the alternative available product.

The market bears out because you vote with your money. It may not be quite what you want, but you'd rather make the trade off and pay Apple what they want you to pay than go without or have the alternative product. Thus you pay for what you want. Your money tells Apple that even though you may not like their product completely, they're still doing a good enough job for you to pay what they demand you to pay for it. That's all companies really care about.

It's like an abusive relationship with a narcissist, they give you juuuuuust enough to keep you there, but never enough to feel truly happy about life.

"consumer buys what the consumer wants"

And the supplier uses AI-guided targeted advertising to tell the public exactly what it wants.

The market decision loop has been broken for a long time.

You could go back to the US auto industry of the 1950s - early 70s, telling (and convincing) the buying public that it wanted huge, heavy, overpowered, inefficient, unsafe, poorly-handling, and tremendously fuel-inefficient cars. Until reality did what it does and imposed, and the buying public didn't, and Japan and Germany were more than happy to sell them what they discovered they did want: well-engineered, efficient, inexpensive (until 1980s import quota limits drove manufacturers up-market), better-handling, and safer cars.

This isn’t how markets work. Suppliers can’t just “do whatever they want”. If there’s no demand for a project you’ll very quickly go out of business that way. It is up to the consumers, and people chose iPhones over chunky android phones with hot swappable batteries and the like.

You can’t really be a “sustainable” company (or anything, really) when you’re out of business.

It's not like there are any alternatives for running macos...

No, it's up to regulators to fix market failures like this one.

people chose iphones when they were far superior to everything else and have been (largely) locked-in by switching costs ever since.

Suppliers can’t do whatever they want, as they will quickly go broke when people vote with their wallets. You and I might disagree strongly with disposable electronics, but people are happily handing over their money for this stuff. And it makes sense when you see polls that say people aren’t even willing to pay $100 more a year to stop climate change.

I for one am excited about how my home value will go up once the coasts flood and I have beach front property here in Kansas. Less land = more expensive land, I can’t lose!

Climate change will probably mean more tornadoes for Kansas.

part of this is because of an ongoing disinformation campaign by the companies and individuals who benefit the most from not addressing the climate crisis. People aren't willing to pay $100 more a year to stop climate change because from all the information they've been fed, it's not a big deal. There's very good reason to believe that if people understood the current and future effects better there would be a much more drastic response.

Just look at similar failures in the past where corporate interest spread disinformation to continue making money (cigarettes, lead in gasoline, health insurance companies today, sugar industry, etc.). When people learn the actual facts the prevailing opinion tends to change pretty heavily. Sure suppliers must cater to demand, but that ignores the fact that often suppliers play a large role in cultivating that demand regardless of the moral value of that demand.

If I decide which product to buy based on whether I want to be able to repair it myself, I’m making a decision for myself, not for society.

I think the argument is that a product that is hard to repair is less likely to be repaired, and, thus, more likely to become waste and be more quickly replaced with an altogether new product when confronted with a minor, and otherwise repairable, fault.

For an individual user who may be disinclined to repair a machine, it may make no material difference. For society as a whole, it has an impact.

Of course, if the overwhelming behavior is disposal, repairability may have negative environmental impacts (extra material use for modularity, etc). A similar example would be people discarding reusable plastic bags after one or two uses, resulting in more plastic waste than with bags intended for single use.

It takes time for markets and users to adjust, and we may find that Apple was well-positioned to take advantage of market trends in processor and efficiency improvements at the right time for portable device markets like phones and laptops. Maybe we'll swing back to longer lifetimes and more modularity at some point...

> This shifts blame off suppliers and on to consumers. Suppliers can do whatever they want: it's the responsibility of consumers to choose what is best for society.

Wether you agree with it or not, this is how capitalism and a free market works. It's a feature, not a bug.

Yes, it is well known that unrestrained capitalism is bad. Next?

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