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Comment by dale_huevo | Hacker News Reader

Why is this e-waste when compared to old Mac laptops - many of which are in perfect working order, save Apple arbitrarily stopping OS updates because they were too lazy to maintain or update device drivers. Somehow MS requiring TPM2 for Windows 11 was the end of humanity as we know it, but a Mac with a T2 chip is heralded as progress.

If anything many of these PCs will enjoy a second life off eBay in someone's home-lab running Linux. One of the most popular "servers" in the home-lab community are those little Lenovo Thinkstations you see in hospitals.

Edit: if you're a sysadmin at a university, aren't you replacing machines every 3-5 years anyway?

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> Why is this e-waste when compared to old Mac laptops

It might surprise you to learn that 90% of computers sold are not-Macs: https://canalys.com/newsroom/worldwide-pc-shipments-q1-2025#...

Yes, but they make up a much larger percent of computers stolen.

We do replace faculty computers every 4 years if possible. However, we tend to pass the older computers down to other areas if they are still usable, which we are not able to do. We do have a lot of Mac's in the College. I'm actually really pissed at Apple for no longer allowing to use iMac's as external displays. We have a lot of 27" iMac's that wont be usable in the near future once Apple stops supporting Intel based computers. I'd love to be able to use the iMac's as external displays since they are great 5K monitors.

Who is denying that Apple is responsible for e-waste?

It's just not a criticism I see put forth as often or as loudly. In this case, those old Windows PCs have a much better chance at a second life than a purpose-built Mac, so the criticism is largely unjustified.

Probably because macs are a small part of the market

If you compare the sheer volume of the devices in question you will see it's very justified.

I feel like a used Mac laptop has a higher chance of being resold than anything else, provided it's at least new enough to get security updates. The oldest macOS that got a recent patch was Monterey, which supports MBPs as old as 2015 (which happens to be what I have).

Apple's "3 year" macOS security update policy https://tinyapps.org/blog/macos-3year.html

I've been buying them off ebay, $80 for a pretty good PC. It's better in many ways than a Raspberry Pi.

My Dad got an old Mac in an auction. As a non-apple person, I just assumed I'd be able to upgrade the OS, however discovered it's unsupported. I ended up installing Debian on it.

It used to be that you could install Windows on those macs and get a fully supported and updated OS. Not anymore

I guess the market share, especially for use cases that extends beyond displays, is significantly smaller for Macs than for PCs. So Macs can demand whatever and it will be materially less significant.

TPM is not really the problem BTW. You can enable fTPM or install a $20 TPM. The problem is that Windows 11 doesn't (officially) support older CPUs because of VBS.

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