I love how Apple claim to care so much about the environment and then goes on to create basically the most unfixable pieces of hardware possible.
Great job, really awesome for the environment Apple.
Great job, really awesome for the environment Apple.
Also Apple devices on average have much longer service lives than devices from most other manufacturers. On average they stay usable longer, and even when they are replaced they're more likely to be handed on and keep in use even without upgradability. This is why they retain more of their second hand value. That factor alone is dramatically more significant from a whole lifecycle impact point of view.
The elephant in the room are repairs. Due to the design, too many repairs are not economic, so machines get thrown away early. Repairs, which should cost way less with a design that at least allows repairability.
Probably yes and that is also probably because behaviors like this. Manufacturers have trained consumers for years that upgrading of fixing stuff is not worth it. Personally, I have upgraded every laptop I have ever owned. This isn't possible with todays Macbooks.
> Also Apple devices on average have much longer service lives than devices from most other manufacturers
Bullshit, if anything I believe the opposite is true. What is your source for this?
In my experience this is true, but not for technical reasons. It just seems to me that there a lot of people happily using almost 10 years old macbooks just because they want a macbook, but probably can't afford a new one.
Just try to sell a 6/7 years old mac and then try doing the same with a Windows laptop from the same year: you'll sell the mac much more quickly, for a higher price.
I think that old macbooks still have a market, most old laptops don't, but this is just my impression.
A larger percentage however needs repairs (apple care sells well for a reason). A 1/10 score means that a "repair" will basically be throwing (large parts of) the laptop away and exchanging it for a new one.
Similarly recycling is made much harder by this design.
> This is why they retain more of their second hand value.
And because there is large base of people paying that much for them. A high-priced sony vaio, elitebook, thinkpad etc. stays usable just as long and there is large interest in the secondary market (e.g. see reddit's /r/thinkpad) but at much lower prices. Macbook buyers instead treat them as design objects first (which keep value) and computers second.
It's not actually possible to buy a new Mac with less than 8GB RAM these days, and that seems likely to be plenty for a typical user for the lifetime of a machine bought today. 128 GB SSD is a bit tight, but flash drives are cheap. I see it the opposite way, in the past minimum Mac specs always seemed miserly, but nowadays they're pretty capable.
My only issue with it is the battery which will fail sooner or later, but it shouln't be too hard to remove it.
What about batteries, they're basically consumables.
I still remember a friend of mine breaking a single usb port on his macbook, he had to change half the components, the bill was something like $1.5k for a $2k macbook.
On all the retinas you have to separate them from the chassis using a thread (something like a fishing line). It's not too hard to do, but it's not fun neither.
In the case of Apple products, it can save you a pile of money.
The last Mac I bought was the early 2011 MBP (yeah, -that- lemon), and Apple's prices for RAM and storage were ridiculously above market prices.
I was able to max out the specs of my MBP more cheaply by buying my own parts, and upgrading to larger faster storage at my own timeline. Heck, you could even get a cage to replace the optical drive on those MBPs and put in another 2.5" drive (which I did, and it was a very bad decision, especially for battery life).
Not that there would be any proof in the comment, no. For example, how do Lenovo, Samsung or Dell handle this stuff and can you explain why their approaches produce less waste? Of course not, but let's put some hate into the HN comment section!
A centrally managed maintenance process where Apple hardware is managed and its waste properly disposed off (recycling, proper sorting of waste, secure handling of toxic materials...) vs. risks like customers putting Li-Ion batteries into their home trash causing landfill fires. And throw the left-over SSDs and RAM right into the mix as well.
No, it's just about hating on Apple without any evidence or data to back it up. Mimimi Apple ecologically bad but I won't tell you why or how others are evidently making it better!
Which leads to this link: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Microsoft+Surface+Laptop+3+(...
Microsoft just released Surface X with a door on the back for replacing the drive. The device is 0.28 inches thick.
Thinkpad X1 Carbon and Dell XPS both have replaceable drives. From opening the case. If anything I'm struggling to find another laptop maker who solders the drives to the boards like Apple does...
Drive failure isn't a possibility, it's a certainty and soldering them to the board creates a hard deadline when the laptop turns from a computer to a brick.
And the parts that I wasn't using after the upgrade I've all sold to other people who had their mobo or battery fail. Nothing was wasted.
All this and I've got a pretty slick looking powerful laptop!
If Microsoft can do it, Apple could do it too and even improve upon it.
Also I can't see why the original comment is about "hating on Apple". All I see is legitimate criticism about some issues with Apple products, that apparently many other people have too. Your comment on the other side is very emotional and full of snide remarks.
Here you go:
https://www.ifixit.com/laptop-repairability?sort=score
HP, Dell, LG, Acer and even Samsung manages to do a lot better. Lenovo is also very simple to at least change battery, ram and disk. I know this since I own one and have added memory and disk.
On the Thinkpad versions the battery is located outside and can be switched without even having to open the machine at all.
> can you explain why their approaches produce less waste?
Yes, by letting me as a consumer change parts myself for the only cost of purchasing the actual part that needs changing or upgrading, the increase the service life of the machine I purchased.
Also, by not participating in this anti-consumer behavior, I can take said machine into a third party service shop and get it repaired there. I don't have to wait weeks for the proper parts to arrive and so on and I can get it fixed the same day.
I am not hating, I am stating a fact. By indirectly forcing people to buy new machines instead of repairing their old ones that often work perfectly well, except for maybe 1 thing that is broken or needs an update, they increase their environmental impact for no other reason than profit on their part.
Apple can do better and Apple have done better in the past.
Apple has a fairly comprehensive recycling system, to strip their own systems apart and reclaim reusable components. Are you suggesting when people take their MacBooks to get replaced that Apple are just throwing them in a landfill or something?
The next best thing to recycling (from an environmental standpoint) is being able to repair and continue usage. However Apple's hardware becomes more and more unfix-able (actually impossible, because parts are basically tailored to a single device, thus there can't be secondary parts, and Apple doesn't provide them at all). Go down the rabbit hole yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTpHa70DDX0
For most other laptops, repair or replacement of common components doesn't depend so much on the manufacturer. The skill and equipment required to do the repair is significantly reduced. All else being equal, this makes it more likely that the laptop will be repaired rather than discarded.
How many (in percentage terms) of laptops will ever need repairs, how many of those will actually be repaired (as opposed to consumers just deciding to buy something new, even if repair would be relatively easy and cheap), and then finally, what percentage of these defective laptops will actually been thrown away without any form of recycling? I'm pretty sure that if you do the math, in the grand scheme of things, these numbers will be utterly irrelevant except for HN talking points.
I would recommend spending public outrage about environmental concerns on areas where it really matters instead, such as e.g. food waste, plastic bags, energy efficiency etc. I'm pretty sure that even a tiny, tiny fraction improvement there would offset the environmental impact of the worldwide total of laptops that cannot or will not be repaired after they break down.
Whether end-users try to repair their laptops depends in part on their expectations; and their expectations depend a lot on how repair-able laptops are in general. My second-to-last laptop, a Dell, lasted me nearly a decade. I upgraded the hard disk, upgraded the memory, and replaced the inverter in the display twice. I mainly replaced it because it was about 4x the weight of newer laptops, and had started eating batteries. There's no reason more laptops couldn't last as long.
The point is, that if it weren't for the fact that I explicitly asked her to let me have a look to see if I could repair it, she would have thrown it out even though it was perfectly possible to repair it (it's working 100% fine again now). My mother is not the exception, she's the rule. I would guess over 90% of people don't bother to repair 5-year old laptops, under any circumstance. They just write it off and get a new one.
That's why I was saying all these discussions about how repairability of laptops impacts the environment are largely moot. Probably better incentives to promote proper recycling (e.g. a tax on electronics that gets re-imbursed when you properly dispose them) would have much more positive effect compared to improved repairability.
If you have devices that have "simple" faults (bad RAM,storage,wifi card etc) that would normally be a simple swap out, but now can only be repaired with a high degree of skill (micro soldering) and access to a parts supply which is intentionally restricted and knowledge which intentionally obfuscated (take you pick of Louis Rossman repair videos on youtube)then those products will skip this second life and head straight to material recovery rather than re-use. so >How many (in percentage terms) of laptops will ever need repairs as long as it's non zero then it's irrelevant >how many of those will actually be repaired For apple products this is rapidly approaching actual zero while for others it's non-zero
Basically Apple need to want this change. They need to... be brave? To... think different?
example RAM is soldered to the logic board!
Also, SSD drives have a limited number of write cyclew before they stop working, usually some 10's of TBW (terabytes written). For normal users, it will take them a very long time to wear out the drive. Conversely, developers and power user types may find their setups doing 50GB or more of writes per day. So for example, if a drive is rated for 75TBW, a power user could wear it out after only a couple of years.
I have some Samsung SSDs at home where I regularly track and monitor the write usage, and I'm always surprised at how many writes occur on my [often idle] Windows machine. Background OS and application activity is my hypothesis for the cause. The primary windows partition drive will probably need replacing within a year, and will have lasted three or four years.
But even I don't seriously fear my MacBook pro SSD will die because of write load. I've done the math, and I should be good for way longer than the projected use of the laptop.
My actual annoyance is the inability to upgrade. I would love to make use of the currently laughable prices for m.2 SSDs and upgrade the 1TB internal storage to 2TB or more. But I can't, thanks to soldered storage.
Surface X is 0.28 inches thick and has a door on the back for accessing the SSD. Apple could do better.
I don’t have a Mac, and I think they should be more repairable, but I still think they’re ahead of most the rest.
I used to have Macbooks, I upgraded them with new disks and memory. Today that would not have been possible which is one big reason I would never buy a macbook to begin with.
This behavior is bad for all consumers of their products and should not be defended with anecdotal stuff like "people don't throw away their macbooks" which is easily refuted by going to a garbage site.
Anecdotally (which is all your point boils down to) I know that businesses rarely upgrade machines. Home users rarely do either. Gamers and enthusiasts are the people that tend repair or upgrade. These people are a vanishingly small number. I have no problem with Apple, or anyone else, replacing broken or damaged items with new/refurbished ones, so long as they are responsible with the disposal or reuse of the damaged article. Apple demonstrably are.
Apple offer free recycling[0] and it’s available in most countries, if not all. It is reasonably well publicised and easily searchable. If an individual chooses to dispose of a device in an inappropriate way, that’s on them, not the manufacturer of the device.
> I’ve never known anyone to throw away a Mac
I'm just telling you that there are people who do that. What are your sources for that business don't upgrade machines? In my experience, business are often the kind of places that actually do upgrade their machines but of course not if it is macs since they cannot be upgraded.
I have never said anything negative about their recycling program. But it still is more resource heavy and more polluting than simply continued use of a product when you upgrade parts.
This seems like its explicitly your problem given that apple will take and recycle your old macbooks for free if they are worthless and if they arent they will take them for a credit.
Many people with the overheating 2011 MBPs did.
Even within my very small social circle, I knew of three 2011 15" MBPs (including my own). Of those 3, all of them had to get the recall service, and since then, 2 of those MBPs have become bricks/e-waste.
I've gone through a lot of laptops (PC and Mac, my first was a Powerbook 170), and the only one to ever crap out on me was that 2011 MBP.
When it was working, it was one of the best laptops I ever had. When it had issues, I felt like Apple couldn't care less about the issue. It's pretty well documented that Apple pretended the problem didn't exist for quite some time.
The first logic board replacement (during AppleCare) had the exact same defect as the original board. It displayed the same symptoms within a couple of months, and then it totally crapped out right after AppleCare ended, and there was no way I was going to pay $500+ CAD to replace the logic board with yet another defective board.
I was lucky that the recall was announced before I recycled it (I ended up having to buy a new laptop in the meantime). The recall board has since died as well. The saddest thing is that computer (quad core i7 with 16gb ram) would still be more than usable today if it still worked.
I was completely locked into the Apple ecosystem prior to my 2011 MBP experience. And while I realize that the 2011 MBP is an outlier in terms of Apple product quality, the experience pretty much guaranteed that I'll never buy an Apple product again. There were so many ways they could have made me whole, but instead, they just kept providing a fix to a design defect with another defective part.
Except the huge part that you're missing is that, when they do a swap or a replacement at an Apple store, they don't just throw away the hardware. They send it back to be disassembled, tested, and remanufactured. They re-use a vast amount of these components and all of their warranty devices are remanufactured from good, tested components that were pieced out of larger components. Just because they don't do individual component repairs at the stores doesn't mean it's unfixable hardware.
If they're soldered you need to replace everything. How is that not worse?
Users complaining that laptops are too easy to repair seems absurd to me but then again, I'm not an Apple customer.
if you want cheap devices that can be fixed by the side of the road there are countless windows laptops. countless.
but when you've got a laptop that costs more to repair, then you can expect its re-sell value to stay high.
the cheaper it is to repair, the cheaper the device gets.
the more expensive the repairs, the more expensive the device.