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Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

Only a tiny percentage of laptops are ever upgraded. If making the device upgradable and accessible adds the same percentage in materials then it's pretty much a wash.

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.

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> Only a tiny percentage of laptops are ever upgraded.

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.

Upgrading a laptop might increase its useful service life, but if bought well-specced, this isn't the biggest problem.

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.

Exactly. When I had some sticky keys on a 2015 MacBook Pro, the Genius told me that the only way to fix that was to replace the whole top case and it wouldn't have been cheap. I just went home, searched a bit on YouTube, removed the keycaps and cleaned them. It's the same for batteries: they want you to replace the whole top case for a stupid battery that they could have made much easier to remove (it's still possible to do it BTW)

I feel like much of these claims are only in the past. I used my 2009 Macbook for 5 or so years, and it only lasted that long because I was able to upgrade it. It came with a comical 2GB of ram, and that would have been a trash—as in worthless to me—if it couldn't be upgraded. I was able to sell it, only because they're desirable, and they used to be more reliable. The latter quality is not so evident any more. Many naive customers are duped into buying the bottom of the line MBP or Air, and then are dumbfounded when their thing runs out of resources. I blame apple for making less reliable products for higher margins and offering their customers less agency over their devices. Their marketing pitch is usually that you should have to know the details, but you do, because they're trying to screw you. The people with money to blow I'm not so concerned about, it's more the person who buys a 13" MBP for 2k that has 4GB of ram and 128gb ssd, and can't ever upgrade the thing.

>I feel like much of these claims are only in the past.

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.

Now 8Gb is a decent baseline, but it took a very long time to get there for a very expensive computer.

On the other hand, my 2014 15" MBP didn't come with less than 16Gb and still packs a quad-core 45w CPU, a decently fast SSD, a crazy good chassis and trackpad and a bright hi-dpi display. I think it's still better than most of the 800-900€ 15" new laptops offered today, but it's not upgradable.

My only issue with it is the battery which will fail sooner or later, but it shouln't be too hard to remove it.

I was quite fond of my 13" from late 2013. One of the major differences that I find quite distressing is the soldered on SSD in most if not all new models. Good luck with data recovery if necessary.

This is true, but increasing RAM or disk capacity over time could extend that even more. Maybe not so much visible right now with those machines that are sold today and look awesome, but I have a few examples of 2006/2009 MBPs that had hard drives being replaced with SSDs, and extended their lifetime many more years! In my today's 5-year-old MBP, I would enjoy doubling the RAM for example.

> Only a tiny percentage of laptops are ever upgraded.

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.

My 2013 13" is still at over 80% design battery capacity.

Yes, batteries are probably the biggest issue, because they deteriorate.

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.

>> If making the device upgradable and accessible adds the same percentage in materials then it's pretty much a wash.

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).

> Only a tiny percentage of laptops are ever upgraded.

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?

> 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.

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