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Comment by itg | Hacker News Reader

And I can keep my non-apple laptops for longer b/c I can upgrade ram and storage and easily put in a a new battery when needed.

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On the flip side, I've sold every one of my old Apple laptops, usually for a few hundred bucks at least after 4-6 years of use. After 4-6 years I can get maybe $100 or a little more for any of the Lenovo and Dell laptops I owned.

Apple laptops depreciate much slower.

Apple stops giving you software updates after seven years which makes such a device unusable for normal use (browsing, banking, coding etc). Also the ssd will fail sooner or later.

at the 7 year mark you should probably get a new laptop... really at the 5 year mark unless you got a top of the line machine.

Can’t confirm - my parents still use one of my first work laptops which is over 12 years old and is powered by Linux. It’s enough for all their casual use cases.

Edit: throwing away laptops after 5 years won’t help us to live more in a more environment friendly way don’t u think?

But at that point, you can install Linux on the 12 year old Mac too.

As I wrote, the ssd will die at some point and can’t be replaced

Why after 5 years if it's still working fine?

This is true, but on the flip flip side…

I’ve administered several hundred Macs for a few years, and when they do break you’re at Apple’s mercy for turnaround. The business I worked for had surplus, so not that big a deal, but it would be a bitch for my personal business and life.

If all I need is parts then it’s a day max, or I can switch to whatever can run Fedora halfway decently.

Flipping again, I just go to the Apple Store, of which there are multiple in any major city. I was on a Surface for a while but Microsoft closing all their retail stores meant my next upgrade was to a MacBook.

I just breathed new life into a 2015 MacBook Pro, OpenCore Legacy Patcher to install Ventura, 2TB NVME SSD with the help of a random Amazon adapter, and a new battery in the mail. All can be had for a couple of hundred dollars or less.

I hope to delay a year or two the inevitable of having to buy a nicely specced Macbook, now that even the disk can no longer be upgraded, if I understand correctly.

Yup I sell mine after 3 years, still get at least half its value back. Zero chance of getting anything close to that with a Dell/HP/Lenovo/etc

Alternatively, used Thinkpads and Dells are probably quite affordable for the capability, which includes the ability to repair and upgrade.

I am running code right now on my desk (archival ops) on a ~10 year old MacBook Air (MacBookAir6,2 from system report;8GB ram 512GB SSD). Apple replaced the battery for $100.

Same. Still have my 2012 Air as my backup device, and it runs fine.

We are already in situation that if you buy 32gb RAM for your PC, it is likely that there are other bottlenecks than RAM for the next 5 years. Also the disk requirement is not increasing so drastically anymore, unless you are gamer.

Those are some chonky laptops I assume.

That’s a non sequitur. Repairable / upgradable doesn’t exclude a sleek design. See high end business notebooks or the Framework laptop.

I had an ASUS that was only marginally thicker than a MPB with upgradable ram and storage (which puts it miles ahead of the MBA I ran out of both on immediately despite using it for almost nothing). The battery was likely also replacable, I just never tried.

I just pay apple for insurance and they replace my battery at no additional cost. And if I ever spill water on the laptop or damage it in any other way that's my fault they replace it for a fraction of the actual cost of the thing.

It's not difficult to upgrade ram and storage on M1. The problem is limited availability of memory chips. But if you have pre-balled chips and hot air station (even the cheap ones would do) it's fairly quick to swap them out.

Even if you have used chips re-balling with right stencils is relatively easy.

I think legislators should compel Apple to make chips available to general public so these upgrades can become mainstream.

If general public is not comfortable doing that themselves, I am sure any repair shop would be more than happy to do such an upgrade for the customer.

"not difficult" is a very different thing in your world than it is for nearly everyone else in the world.

For all intents and purposes, for basically everyone, memory and storage are non-upgradeable in the M1 Macs.

Batteries on Apple laptops have always been pretty easy to replace (if not RAM and storage), just not swappable on the go. No glue, just screws- not sure if that's changed recently though.

That hasn't been the case since the Retina models. My mid-2013 Retina MBP had to have the battery replaced, which involved the top case, track pad, keyboard... and the battery.

And then the charging circuit went on the motherboard, for which only a like-for-like replacement was permitted. I had hoped to purchase one with more RAM, so I bought a Thinkpad instead of fixing this one.

This is an increasingly niche need. It’s rare for people to upgrade HDDs or RAM in laptops.

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