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Comment by FirmwareBurner | Hacker News Reader

>I say this as someone who worked several years in engineering at Apple, and they were extremely environmentally conscientious years before it was a thing.

Then please tell us why they can't put a HDMI/DP input on the iMac to be usable as an external monitor when the internal computer dies or just to be used as a secondary monitor?

Or why the SSD NAND on Macbooks needs to be soldered when a guy on youtube managed to hack an NVME connector on the motherboard to make the storage replaceable and expandable? What are the reasons other than driving more sales of new devices when old ones break?

Because they're clearly not technical limitations and without any substantiated info from your side, your comment just reads more like astroturfing ("Apple is so conscious, trust me bro I worked there").

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> when a guy on youtube managed to hack an NVME connector on the motherboard to make the storage replaceable and expandable?

Link? I've seen several instances of third-party repair shops doing BGA swaps to replace the NAND with larger packages from other Apple products. I've seen one instance of somebody making a pair of custom boards, one soldering down to the original NAND BGA pads to provide a slot, and the other board slotting into that one to hold the scavenged BGA packages in an easily-replaced module. But I haven't seen anyone retrofit an off the shelf NVMe device to operate as primary storage for an Apple Silicon machine.

Because as a customer you should probably buy a studio display and Mac mini if that's your use case.

There are a ton of older iMacs on the used market, and if you have one, it's a fair complaint that you can no longer re-purpose it for whatever else you like. Ideally if I got a mac mini I'd just hook it up to the screen I already have, rather than spending another $2k on the only other option the brand sells.

Additionally, not having that option lets the manufacturer have control over how much value a product retains after it's useful life. Apple already does this in a number of different ways, and it's disgraceful. iPad too old to get new updates? Recycle, it's not like your backup included the versions that did work for your OS version, can't do much with the hardware. Battery dead? Recycle! Already have a 5k iMac but want Mac Studio for more performance? Well you better like spending a whole lot more for exactly no new value.

Just because the device is too slow for you does not make the device useless in totality. What are you going to ask for next? HDMI-in port on the iPad and MacBook so you can use it as a display when the internals are outdated?

> Just because the device is too slow for you does not make the device useless in totality.

Exactly, and it would be even less useless in totality if the screen was still feasible to use on its own.

> HDMI-in port on the iPad and MacBook so you can use it as a display when the internals are outdated?

Now that you mention it, I would like to use my old iPad as a second screen, since it's a mobile form factor already and is otherwise nearly useless for no intrinsic reason. But for the iMac, which is obviously a stationary large screen in an appealing enclosure, it would be a returning feature with a standard TB 4/5 port and cable, like it was originally with TB1.

I’ve been asking for this on laptops since 2003.

"My use case" of ...*squints*... not throwing amazing and still functional monitors in the trash because the computer part in them is obsolete/dead and keep reusing them instead? How rude of me to reject Apple's marketing NPC programming and use common sense instead.

How about Apple just puts the 2 cent connector & PHY, and let the users who paid for the device decide how they want to use the product. Gaslighting people with the "you're holding/using it wrong" argument today is just .. I can't even express anymore without breaking HN rules.

>Gaslighting people with the "you're holding/using it wrong" argument today is just .. I can't even express anymore without breaking HN rules.

Yet people who complain about this "gaslighting" from Apple continue to buy Apple products.

and yet you continue to moan about your NPC problem when the right product for you already exists?

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