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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

> The main problem with devices like Apple's Mx series laptops is that everything works fine...until it doesn't. This device is non-repairable and non-upgradeable as far as CPU, RAM and disk are concerned.

Given inflation, the Macbook Airs are pretty crazy cheap. If they break you can just replace them. The base base low end M1 Air is only $1000 last I looked (and another $100 off for those in education). They're some of the best price:perf in a laptop the world has ever seen. "inflated prices" is not an accurate description of an $899 retina M1.

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Money is only part of the equation. It's pretty wasteful to have to toss a computer because one component failed, when that specific component would be replaceable in other brands.

Apple has a tradein program where you can trade in your current Apple device for a discount on a new device.

And get paid peanuts in return?

But how much of what is traded in is actually repurposed?

Thats even worse! Tradeinn orogramm are insidious, their purpose is to drain the marlet of second-hand goods, so to increase sale of new ones.

Every time you sell a second. hand conouter you are cutting their sale of new ones.

This seems like a movement of the goalposts. I'm not that concerned about electronic waste, and I haven't seen any great arguments why anyone really should be.

It's not replaceable in other brands, because approximately no one is making a laptop remotely equivalent to the M1/M2. Perhaps the Surface Pro, but even that isn't a good comparison.

Remember when Apple made the first Air and it was so far ahead of every other laptop out there that Intel had to invent the term ultrabook to describe it so Asus and Dell could clone it? Yeah.

>I'm not concerned about electronic waste.

Why not?

If you’re concerned about electronic waste specifically you’d never buy a new computer, only repair computers destined for the trash.

Concerned about it in general is appropriate for governments and large companies, of course; they can make a dent.

That's an insane thing to say. I am concerned about electronic waste. I am not concerned about it to the extent that I would never buy or use a new computer. I am concerned enough about it that I don't want to waste a perfectly good computer because it has been designed to be thrown away.

Would you say that someone concerned about food/food-related) waste should not ever buy any food? Of course not. But don't buy food that you don't intend to eat, and don't buy food that causes unnecessary waste like food that is unnecessarily individually-wrapped.

I go out of my way to recycle things appropriately: dropping off old computers at the local e-waste depo, recycling old rechargeable batteries at retail, etc. It may very well be pointless, but at least I feel I tried.

That’s good, but reuse is best - maybe something like https://www.pcsforpeople.org/ is nearby. They’re great.

The base model price is a little misleading.

256 and 8 gb are lowkey unusable for anything but a Facebook machine .

I always look at the price for the 16/500 or 16/1t machine as the reference point

That’s not true at all. Have you actually used one?

Edit: obviously if you need a windows vm you’re out of luck at 8gb ram

You’re out of luck if you need docker.

M1 Macs would make fantastic Linux laptops, because macOS is appallingly bad at backend development. It makes it up in sheer hardware power and efficiency, otherwise I’d be completely at loss why it’s so loved.

> macOS is appallingly bad at backend development

That's news to me. In what way are they bad compared to Linux? Both can run docker, Intellij, Insomnia and Dbeaver.

The main thing is Docker requires emulation

True although if you develop for arm then you can use virtualisation. Still, performance wise I've not noticed any impact.

Docker runs fine... Both x64 and arm64 containers run

It requires a full VM. macOS is the only OS with that requirement.

And? It still runs fine.

It works. It doesn’t work fine. It breaks, sometimes in a way you need to manually clean it up.

I used the M1 Air 8/256 as a dev machine for a whole year. It was faster than a 16/512 Intel 16" MBP from 2019.

Calling it a Facebook machine is silly.

I have the base model $1k M2 air and it functions excellently as a development machine. Both web dev for work (running multiple react clients, node servers, Pg instances, docker containers, etc all at the same time), and for basic game dev for recreation - though admittedly I’m using Godot for that which is among the lighter weight game engines available.

That to say, it’s far more than a glorified Facebook machine and is a truly excellent value. I much prefer it over my work issued intel MacBook Pro.

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