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Comment by dshep | Hacker News Reader

My recollection is that Apple has not compared very favorable with their competitors in this respect for a while now. And now that their products are becoming increasingly difficult to repair/disassemble, perhaps the strategy is to bail now rather than face even poorer ratings in the future?

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Even without structural changes, the new Apple has never been environmentally friendly. They "design for the dump" and bring out new versions every year, and quickly obsolete old versions.

In my personal experience, Mac computers tend to last much longer than their Windows counterparts. For example, my parents continued to use a Mac SE they bought in 1989 until about 2005, and I know several people who continue to use 8–10 year-old Mac laptops. My last two Mac laptops have each lasted 4–5 years, and the one I’m typing on is still going strong.

I don’t think a reasonable evidence-backed case can be made for your implication that Mac laptops are designed to be obsolete more quickly than, e.g., HP, Dell, or Toshiba laptops.

I was more referring to their mobile division, but it applies to some extent to Macs.

I wouldn’t expect that Apple is far from the industry norm in any of these categories. Most phones of every brand are replaced every 2–3 years.

If you meant merely that electronic consumer gadgets as a category seem to get dumped out too quickly, I heartily agree.

I would expect Apple to be better than the average. The 2nd hand market is quite strong and they only release a new model once a year and don't drop their prices within the life time of the model. Also there is at least some avenue for recycling.

Compare to their competitors. They release more models quicker, poor 2nd hand market, and they aggressively drive down prices. How do you recycle a Samsung or HTC? Do I have to rely on services provided by local government? Do they have stores that act as drop off points?

That said, I hope they have a way to maintain the same level of recyclability as their old products. It would be shitty of them not to.

My personal experience is that the phones are built to last. My iPhone 3G is now 4 years old, and receives heavy daily use from my 15yo daughter. The battery runs all day - it's still totally reliable and doing good service. That's more than I'd expect from a phone after 4 years.

"I don’t think a reasonable evidence-backed case can be made for your implication that Mac laptops are designed to be obsolete more quickly than, e.g., HP, Dell, or Toshiba laptops."

Just more obsolete than all the laptops that can be serviced and upgraded without the same restrictions. I wouldn't go lumping all of the models from all of those makers and settling for a blanket statement like that because that reads false just by picking one model that passes the conditionals, just one per any given maker.

In the end it is a choice and some will try to sugar coat that choice with whatever makes them feel better about it.

But if you have to imagine a given brand tops the lot because you "don't think a reasonable evidence-backed case can be made", when it clearly can, that speaks lots about brand engadgement from your part as a customer and not much else to the merit of that brand, and stand for the ethics behind it.

I think we should distinguish between Apple's _restrictions_ (as in App Store policy) and the _constraints of their engineering_ (as in the serviceability of unibody laptops.) I'd venture the latter is weighed against e.g. weight and battery life, not "restricted" out of spite.

Could Apple deliver the specs of a Retina MBP with a replaceable battery?

> Could Apple deliver the specs of a Retina MBP with a replaceable battery?

They can certainly deliver the specs without switching to proprietary screws. That colors their other actions and makes it far more likely that the unreplaceable battery is about control and not about delivering certain specs.

There are piles of evidence that Apple's computers have a longer useful life than a typical PC if you look for it. For instance, comparing measures of installed base vs market share. Here are a couple of links. If you put some time into it, you can find more going back to the 80s and 90s:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2010/03/mac-os-x-north-american...

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/9E601E8E-2AC... (cmd-f for "Mac vs PC Life Span")

By your own provided links, and some third party information on the subject it should be considered that;

The second hand market for such a highly valued brand is a factor that improves real product life cycle. Also, access to said premium priced devices and user brand entanglement tend to slant device usage past its prime.

Pc's (mostly corporate windows machines) tend to be cycled at higher rates, and that has to do with finantial arrangements linked to fiscal incentives. This data will slant any analisys that doesn't account for this specific motivation.

I was just showing how the premise presented by the poster didn't hold up if only one single model per poster referenced brand showed positive.

So, machines that can be serviced and upgraded without the same restrictions, in comparison, will have expanded usage life cycle. This is parallel to your provided information but doesn't become mute by its introduction, it does however make good thinking points on the amount of waste we currently produce...

This is balanced by the fact that Apple has an incredibly strong second-hand market.

Good point. I once thought I could get a cheap Mac second hand.

Boy was I wrong.

I saw a site with a sale on used iBooks earlier today. $140 for a 12" 1.33 GHz G4 with a 30 day warranty. That's a 7 year old computer that can't run anything newer than 10.5, and won't run recent versions of any 3rd party software. I don't understand who buys these.

It still works perfectly as a nice typing machine, it will play your music etc. A friend of mine is a musician and considers getting a PowerBook (!) to run an older version of PureData. The machine is cheap (which matters to him) and still you can get a lot of kick out of it.

I'd rather spend an extra $100 on a decent netbook, mostly because of the warranty. Spending $140 for a piece of hardware that might fry in 91 days feels risky to me.

It'll probably run OpenBSD just fine. Got a link to that site?

Well, it's already running a BSD variant.

Your lucky day, it's back in stock! http://www.megamacs.com/index.php?action=frameview&id=40...

So what- are you saying that any company that builds products with a strong secondary market or longer shelf life than the category norm should be exempt from maximizing recycle-ability?

I'd make the exact opposite claim. Apple's been extremely aggressive about minimizing their impact on the environment. They've reduced or eliminated packaging whenever possible, reducing the carbon costs of transporting their products. Heck, they've stopped physical shipment of their software, which means they're no longer pressing media and shipping boxes around the world.

When it comes to their machines, they've aggressively moved to using more recyclable materials throughout the entire product line and taken steps to reduce toxic chemicals used during production and assembly. Based on the OP and other articles, it does seem that some machines are less recyclable than others, but overall they've taken huge steps to improve recyclability. If nothing else, current machines are certainly more green than "old Apple's" machines (or any other manufacturer's machines of which I'm aware).

Thanks to the increased importance of mobile products, even their OS is more power efficient than most others out there. They've gone to lengths to architect the system to be aggressive about stepping or powering down hardware when it's not needed, and to also be intelligent about when work needs to be done so that the system's more often in a reduced power mode. Because they make the whole widget, the hardware and software are complimentary in reducing power drain. The same reason a MacBook Pro gets 20 hours of battery life is why an iMac pulls less wattage that other desktops.

Finally, addressing your explicit point: a machine's only obsolete if it no longer meets your needs. I know people still using PowerPC Macs, or early generation Intel hardware. Apple no more "designs for the dump" than any other computer or phone manufacturer. Everyone releases new hardware every year and wishes consumers would immediately upgrade. Ultimately its up to the consumers themselves to upgrade; no one's forcing them to buy new hardware.

Again, comparing "old Apple" to "new Apple" – Mac OS 8.1 was the final OS release that supported 68040 Macintoshes. The first 68040 shipped in 1993 and Mac OS 8.1 shipped in 1998 (as did 8.5, which removed support for the 68040), giving us a supported OS lifetime of ~5 years. This month OS X 10.8 ships, which will remove support for 1st generation 64-bit Intel hardware (those machines ran 32-bit EFI which can't support OS X's 64-bit kernel). The oldest supported machines will be the second generation Core 2 Duo and Xeon, which shipped in 2007. That gives us a supported OS lifetime of ~5 years. Old Apple seems rather similar to new Apple, in this regard.

According to Mactracker, Macintosh 128k only had a supported OS lifetime of 2 years – System File 3.2/Finder 5.3 are the last supported Macintosh software releases, and they debuted in 1986, just two years after the first Macintosh. Perhaps "new Apple" is better than "old Apple". ;-)

Nice comment overall, interesting facts about os support, especially the support of the 128.

However, 20 hours of battery life for the MacBook pro? Where can I get one of those? My MacBook pro gets 4, maybe 5 if I am lucky, and I even use a utility which switches to integrated graphics when on battery. 2011 15" MacBook pro.

Doh, should have fact checked that statement. The 20h is a power stat I've heard for another product, and it was stuck in my head as I wrote that post earlier today.

7h is the advertised time for the latest MBPs and the 13" MBA. Sorry for the mix up!

Apple has actually been best-in-class for a while. The problem with Greenpeace's rating is that it doesn't take into account that Apple uses mostly aluminum and glass in their products, which are both extremely durable and recyclable.

Maybe so and maybe not. But when I first saw the Greenpeace rankings, I was astonished that they awarded HP points for using large quantities of recycled raw materials to create consumable plastic parts explicitly designed to deter re-use, and for planning to do even more of this in the future.

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