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Comment by kappuchino | Hacker News Reader

Forgive me my specific view: The M2 itself is marvelous. But the highly integraded path apple chose with all its hardware ruins it for me. For me, its enviromentally insane to buy such a device that is nearly unrepairable.

In context, my Macbook air just died yesterday ... the one from 2014. Luckily, its the replaceble SSD that went dead. And due to OpenCore, it still runs the latest MacOS.

If I would by the new M2 with the new MacBook Air: Same problem would doom the complete hardware. And I would have been stuck with the OS that Apple deems I can have.

Maybe this comes with age, but I see buzzwords + glitz + speedups ... but little to none envirmental progress. Which is a shame.

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It's a real shame, but the people working on Ahasi Linux seem to be making steady progress. With a bit of luck, the device will remain usable when Apple eventually drops support for this machine, assuming the non-user-replaceable parts like the storage or the RAM don't wear out.

> If I would by the new M2 with the new MacBook Air: Same problem would doom the complete hardware. And I would have been stuck with the OS that Apple deems I can have.

There is nothing preventing you from installing an alternate OS on AppleSilicon Macs. Apple supports this officially via something called Apple Secure MultiBoot.

What alternate OS? The one where developers are still in the process of reverse engineering Apple's SoC?

Asahi Linux

That would fit the second part of my message.

It's usable (like right now) and certainly will be when Apple drops macOS support for it.

This was not an option until MacOS 12.2, and AFAIK is not "officially supported" or even documented by Apple. Can you link to somewhere where they describe supporting this?

At least in the US - the cost to repair a laptop is quite high & cumbersome - and the depreciation is quite fast - such that there aren't a lot of cases where it financially makes sense to repair.

This is a problem not unique to laptops.

I don't know how to feel about it.

> Maybe this comes with age, but I see buzzwords + glitz + speedups ... but little to none envirmental progress.

They are doing plenty of environmental progress considering MacBook Airs have no competition in terms of price to longevity and power usage relative to the performance and utility one can get out of them.

I think you did not misunderunderstand me on purpose, but the modularity/repairablity is abysmal, period. One example: Internal ssd dead - system cannot be used. And since its soldered in, thats it. Am I wrong?

Sure, but they are making tradeoffs, whether it be portability or profit. Either way, their machines and product tend to last very long relative to the competition, and they seem to be doing the most to drive down power consumption. Little to no environmental progress seems overboard from my perspective.

I think their point is there multiple ways that you can tackle the environmental impact of the devices you use and Apple is approaching that in multiple ways, just not in terms of easier repairability. That doesn't mean you can't be critical of what they're doing here, of course.

You are not wrong and it's a really terrible thing they are doing with all their devices outside of the Mac Pro and maybe Mac Studio.

> For me, its enviromentally insane to buy such a device that is nearly unrepairable.

I would generally feel the same, the only reason I don't is that Apple laptops tend to last a very long time for me and get replaced due to becoming obsolete, not due to becoming nonfunctioning. My 2011 MBA was in use until 2016, my 2015 MBP is still in use and due to be replaced soon. The lifespan of one of these devices is roughly 5 years in my use case, and I usually hand them down to someone else that needs a decent computer but where my use cases have outgrown it. I know one I handed off is still being used 10 years after it was purchased and it still works "fine" for some value of fine.

That's not an argument against repairability, but to say that a well-made product often has a longer lifespan than a useful lifespan for its original owner.

A large number of Macbook Pros from around 2013-2015 have had failed SSDs. Mine failed 4 years ago.

Because I was able to put in a new SSD - one twice the size and about twice the speed, I might add - I was able to keep using the system, and still am. I had to use an adapter, because Apple tried to discourage SSD replacement by using a proprietary pinout on the NVMe connector.

If the soldered-on SSD in an M1 mac fails, you can't even boot the system. You can't send the system off to have someone do a board-level replacement, because apparently they do some bullshit to "pair" the flash chips with the flash controller.

Apple has gone out of their way to take systems that used to be incredibly durable and long-lasting, and give them a very finite lifespan.

You can't make that form factor and a repairable laptop, no?

I don't see why not. With M.2 SSDs and DIMM sticks you've got quite a thin minimum footprint. Apple has decided that soldering everything onto the PCB is worth the cost of making the device unrepairable, and that's their business decision (and yours if you decide to buy such devices).

There are downsides to normal solutions (i.e. higher latency, needing to design places for screws to go) but it's not nearly as impossible as modern tech companies would like you to believe.

Framework has designed a laptop with some excellent repairability and they're just a small team with extremely limited funds. Tech giants like Apple should have no trouble coming up with similar devices if they actually cared to do so.

Idk where this idea of repairability = good for the environment came from.

You’ll be hard pressed to find a laptop that is built with more recycled material than a MacBook.

Are you open to ideas? Repairability = good for the environment comes from replacing a small piece of a larger hardware item so the whole hardware does not have to be recycled in the first place.

Now what happens when the MacBook has a defect processor or ram or ssd or screen? The whole thing is trash. And thats much more footprint than any smolten copper/gold/... that was put into it.

The only reusability is shredding - most of the time! - and smelting/separating the metals, which causes a lot of enviromental issues.

The old slogan "reduce, reuse, recycle" is written in priority order: buying recycled products is good, but extending life and avoiding consumption are better.

Apple forces people to buy base configs, they support their devices longer than others, and their laptops are built from more recyclable parts than the competitors.

"they support their devices longer than others" - true. its just after that time apple keeps the key to the device so they become insecure electronic ... paperweights? I mean, whats the use of an old phone / ipad / ... that you can infect with a single message, yet you can't run an alternate os on it. This is the point of the critcism: Unrepairable Hardware + Lockdown = Paperweights over time = less ecological than a modular, repairable and unlocked laptop, computer or phone.

> they support their devices longer than others

They support the laptop/desktop hardware longer than others. Software-wise, Windows supports a given hardware set longer than macOS does. Note that you can mod macOS to support older hardware than it official does (dosdude1, ben216k, opencore).

They've ended support for 2015 Macbooks after seven years. Even Microsoft, heavily critisised for its arbitrary cutting off point in Windows 11, still supports Windows 10 for years to come, supporting devices for well over 10 to 13 years. Personally, I think it's unacceptable that a $2k device from 2016 gets less support than a $700 laptop from 2012, especially in cases where the hardware manufacturer is also the software manufacturer.

If you want to run a fully patched operating system on the top-of-the-line Macbook you bought in 2016 you'll have to run Windows or Linux. Apple's software patches for older versions are spotty and often incomplete, after all, because so many devices upgrade to the latest OS immediately unless they have no choice.

iOS definitely receives excellent support, but Apple's reputation for long term support only seems to apply to mobile phones. The computer market has higher standards for software support in which Apple doesn't perform well.

> Idk where this idea of repairability = good for the environment came from.

> You’ll be hard pressed to find a laptop that is built with more recycled material than a MacBook.

How is swapping one part built with "recycled material" not better than swapping that one part plus the whole rest of the device with equally "recycled material"?

Reusing instead of recycling will always be more environment friendly. No exception.

The idea came from logic, and from people who study the environment, and from endless peer reviewed studies.

Had you spent a few moments looking into the issue, you too would have come to the same conclusion.

> You’ll be hard pressed to find a laptop that is built with more recycled material than a MacBook.

From reading their materials, all the aluminum and most of the tin in the laptop are recycled, and most of the packaging they send you the computer in, and that seems to be it.

Chips can't be recycled. Macs seem to contain very little recycled plastic. The circuit boards are definitely not recyclable.

Reduce; reuse; recycle in that order.

> I don't see why not. With M.2 SSDs and DIMM sticks you've got quite a thin minimum footprint.

The memory used in Apple laptops is not the same type of memory that you find on a DIMM. The architecture is more like a GPU, with high-speed memory placed as close as possible to the CPU.

Nobody complains that they can't upgrade the RAM on their GPU because we all understand the benefits of putting it on the same PCB. Apple did the same with CPUs.

> Framework has designed a laptop with some excellent repairability and they're just a small team with extremely limited funds. Tech giants like Apple should have no trouble coming up with similar devices if they actually cared to do so.

99.9% of consumers do not care about upgrading. They wouldn't be opening their laptops and trying to swap out components even if they could. It's not reasonable to expect Apple to compromise the design of their system to cater to the vanishingly small minority of customers who demand such features.

For that minority of users, companies like Framework exist to fill the void. However, let's not pretend like the Framework laptop is on par with an M1/M2 Apple laptop in terms of speed, size, power, battery life, or really any other metric beyond ability to swap out parts. They're cool laptops, but Apple's highly integrated products are on a different level entirely.

> The memory used in Apple laptops is not the same type of memory that you find on a DIMM. The architecture is more like a GPU, with high-speed memory placed as close as possible to the CPU.

That was a design decision too. It's not that they bought a chip, they made it themselves.

> It's not reasonable to expect Apple to compromise the design of their system to cater to the vanishingly small minority of customers who demand such features.

I repaired an upgraded dozens of laptops for friends and family, extending their service life for years. Less rare earth in a landfill and more money in the pockets of my acquaintances. The "small minority" is "vanishing" because people are being trated more and more like consumers that throw away the current toy to buy a new one. Companies like Apple are the root cause to this. They want this.

They build upon an architecture they knew from their phone socs and arm mobile socs never had dimmable ram. I get your viewpoint but your arguments are null if you look back on how their silicone came to be.

> vanishingly small minority of customers who demand such features.

I'd love to see apple do an A/B test with a model of, say, their current 15" MBP vs. a modular 15" MBP that made those compromises to get repairability/expandability, and see how the models sold and actually measure the demand.

"Nobody is buying them because we don't give anyone the choice, so nobody cares about it" isn't terribly scientific or even market-driven.

Apple's extremely limited specs speak of LPDDR5, which is just standard. They might've chosen to put the controller and power supply from the RAM slots into the CPU and motherboard for reasons, but that's still just a choice.

I don't concur on your 99.9%. Consumers don't necessarily think in upgrading, but in my circles people will generally go to some third party computer dealer and ask them "to make it fast again". This usually includes stuffing more RAM or an SSD (if they didn't have one yet) into an older PC, cleaning up some crapware cruft, and unless the CPU was cheap and shitty (i.e. Celeron, Pentium, the castrated i3 in some products like the old macbook Airs) the system will feel fast and responsive again without spending $2k on a new device. With unmaintainable stuff like Apple's these computer stores will have to tell people to buy a new device. This is not a "small minority", it's more like 30-40% of people in my experience.

Perhaps maintainability of Apple hardware isn't important because if you've got enough money to buy into the Apple ecosystem you've probably got enough money to buy a new one after three or four years.

You are right. But instead of making things smaller all the time, a company could chose to make things better repairable - like the framework laptop. Would Apple do that? No, why should they, since most if its hardware buyers are oblivious to the implications of bad repairability. It least thats what I think, but what do I know ...

Well, the framework laptop is really going places for one. They just need to hit that slightly higher high end with an i9 and an OLED imo

Check out the service manual for a Lenovo X1 Yoga. You can replace/repair almost everything and it's one of the thinnest devices. Apple goes for the soldered internals to spill you even more money since thy are the only ones able to repair it.

https://download.lenovo.com/pccbbs/mobiles_pdf/tp_x1_carbon_...

I have smaller x86 tablets that are more repairable.

Repairability is certainly something that could be improved, and extending the life of your machine is great for the environment.

However, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a machine with a better power-performance curve than the M1 (or now M2) machines. Reducing the electrical power needed for the same amount of processing power is absolutely helpful for the environment; the new chips are doing much more for much less.

Additionally, Apple tends to support old hardware far longer than competitors. My personal machine is still a 2012 MBP and it's just now starting to not receive the latest OS updates.

> Reducing the electrical power needed for the same amount of processing power is absolutely helpful for the environment

Just not buying a new device is likely still better for the environment, though a jump to the ARM architecture makes a bit more sense in that regard.

There are many lower hanging fruits than the energy consumption of laptops.

Maybe it failed because it was repairable...

Sealing everything into one blob is going to be way more reliable than thousands of crusty connections.

Thats an interesting opinion. I wonder if there are statistics on failures of ssds that are soldered and that are modular ... ;-) You would be amazed how similar they are.

I’m sure Apple has data. Ultimately user xp is better when device doesn’t fail instead of easy repair when it does.

Replacing cheaply the ssd with 4 times the capacity / speed a few years later sure seems good xp for me.

Seems you need different hardware then. Most people don’t care.

We are literally on a thread where new CPU is made every year and you say people want to replace ssd…

Huh, that's a new one.

> Citation needed?

> I’m sure Apple has data.

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