But that is not the essence of the term. To avoid ewaste, you should avoid creating any in the first place. Creating products that will be useful for 10+ years instead of until the next model cycle.
I've had my current Apple laptop for three years, and see no need to replace it any time soon. The Apple laptop I had before that lasted me five years, and a relative is still using it (so, eight years). The HP laptop I had before that lasted about a year and a half before literally beginning to fall apart.
If anything, I would have said that Apple, along with Lenovo, are about the _best_ for longevity in this space.
Other than that, 8GB RAM and a 120GB SSD gave it the much needed boost (5 years ago...).
Which actually proves the GP point that making devices not easily repairable and upgradable does generate more e-waste
My iPad is also 3 years old and I will probably not update it until 5 years or so. Even then I will just give it to a family member so it will still have a useful life after me.
>Creating products that will be useful for 10+ years instead of until the next model cycle.
Which products does apple sell that only last this long? Most of my old phones have gone to either family members, craigslist/ebay or resellers like Gazelle.
> Which products does apple sell that only last this long?
My own experience with iPhones has been that as new software comes out, they get slower and less stable. My MBP, as mentioned above doesn't give me great hope for its future (for reference I have a Thinkpad from 2008 that's still trucking along nicely with Linux, and when I do boot into Windows it performs nicely). I don't think that Apple is any worse than competitors in the same price range, but that doesn't mean they all shouldn't strive to be better.
Well that's just a matter of opinion, isn't it? Nothing's going to stop you from running this laptop 10 years from now just like nothing's going to stop you from running a PC laptop 10 years from now. The question is _are you going to want to_ continue using a 10 year old laptop? That's an eternity in technological terms.
Sure you can upgrade a PC laptop to squeeze a longer life out of it, but there are practical limits to that to (i.e., it's unlikely that a 10 year old chipset is going to support the amount of RAM that we would consider "bare minimum" in 10 years, likewise for the CPU).
I agree with your argument in principle but "10+ years lifetime" is not really a good point to argue.
Except for the parts that fail and can't be easily repaired...?
Incidentally, I know many people who are still using machines in the 6-8-year-old range, and it fits their use cases perfectly well. We're long past the days of multiple-times improvements in efficiency with each new generation of CPU, the improvements are much smaller now.
If the original PC from 1981 could work after 30 years with only a bit of repair...
http://www.pcworld.com/article/237878/can_you_do_real_work_w...
...do you think you could do the same with this Macbook in 2045? For what tasks would it still be useful if you could?
An interesting related article on this: http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=1927
And there aren't parts like that on a more open PC? I mean, if your USB port or display stops working, it's going to be a bit of an undertaking fixing it, glue or no glue.
> Incidentally, I know many people who are still using machines in the 6-8-year-old range, and it fits their use cases perfectly well. We're long past the days of multiple-times improvements in efficiency with each new generation of CPU, the improvements are much smaller now.
Indeed, I still have a very old laptop kicking around. But it's not my daily machine or even free from dust for that matter. I think there's a bit of masochism involved in using a machine WAAAY past its expiration date (6 years isn't, but 10 certainly is) when it's likely that a $299 Walmart special will smoke it.
> ...do you think you could do the same with this Macbook in 2045? For what tasks would it still be useful if you could?
The repairing part would be much more difficult, yes. But unless you're interested in antique computing, are you seriously going to make a go at using this thing on a day to day basis in 30 years? I really don't think that's the standard by which you should judge this thing.
And for the record, this thing would be much more equipped to handle computing 30 years from now than a machine from 30 years ago is at handling today's computing. But that's not saying much.
Depends how you define "more open".
With a home-built desktop, if the USB port goes, you can either get a splitter for one of your other 8 USB ports, or a PCI card with USB ports on it. You can get a new graphics card or monitor.
An extensible laptop will be easy enough to fix for most failures excepting, as you say, display (as long as not ALL your USB ports go out, you can still get a splitter).
And then there are apple-wannabes who glue everything together and charge a kidney for repairs. Such is life...
> But unless you're interested in antique computing, are you seriously going to make a go at using this thing on a day to day basis in 30 years?
Who knows? George R.R. Martin keeps an ancient DOS warhorse around so he can use Wordstar.[0] People have different needs.
I've changed the display on my Dell XPS 15 laptop and it was very easy, since there's no glue. Open the case (~8 screws), pull out keyboard, unscrew the entire "monitor" part (1 screw), pull out the cable between monitor and motherboard, pry open the "monitor" with a guitar plectrum or a screwdriver to get to the glass, push in the new glass, perform above steps in reverse.
I've never done that before and with YouTube's help to find out which screws to leave in and which to take out the whole operation took about 30 min. No glue!
You present this as a normative argument, that things should be a certain way. But do you have a cogent argument for why we should be retarding the growth of memory and speed with our personal computing devices?
That might have been true 10 years ago, when typical speeds and storage capacities were increasing dramatically from one generation to the next and those increases were actually useful.
But even entry-level PCs have been able to run typical home or office applications -- things like reading e-mail, browsing the web, writing a letter or putting together a spreadsheet -- for a very long time. You don't (or at least shouldn't) need an i7 hexacore processor overclocked to 4+GHz and 16GB of RAM to write a letter. The only sharp improvements in recent years have been high-resolution displays (much more important on smaller screens, but generally a noticeable benefit) and SSDs (particularly in much faster boot/load times on otherwise modestly specified machines), and for applications that need them, GPUs.
Even for more demanding applications that really do benefit from greater RAM and processing power, the real world specs for both processors and typical system RAM have barely moved the needle for probably 5 years now, with the emphasis more on low power consumption and more cores within a single CPU. The cost/benefit for upgrading even a high-end workstation from a few years ago to the state of the art today is rarely favourable.
The biggest problems with longevity today, in my experience, are monolithic hardware where components can't be swapped out on failure and, more than anything, software. The reason my third-generation iPad isn't as useful any more has nothing to do with the hardware spec, it's because Apple chose to write more recent versions of iOS in a certain way and then forced the app ecosystem to upgrade because they have absolute control via the App Store. Now we have a choice between not using a lot of newer apps or upgrading to a new version of iOS (which is widely reported not to work reliably on our equipment, and with no way to downgrade again if those reports prove to be accurate in our case). All of this is entirely due to artificial problems caused by a throwaway software culture, and nothing to do with the hardware.
The companies involved have researched the market and the needs of the market and come out with what we have now, trying to argue the end result is wrong would need data to show otherwise.
From an engineering stand point, integrated/monolithic hardware fails less, there's a whole class of failure scenarios removed (ie connectors and interconnects, better sealing, etc).
Hardware has reached the point where it's on the same level with every-day things people throw away and buy new versions of without even thinking, like kettles or toasters, it's fine to argue that's wasteful but that doesn't stop most of the world from doing so for practical reasons.
No, technology companies are researching how to make more money. That frequently means making changes that are not in consumers' interests, in particular when it comes to either closed ecosystems and lock-in or when it comes to built-in obsolescence.
See also: "Smart" TVs, the history of pricing in the printer industry, Anything-as-a-Service, multi-year contracts in the mobile phone industry that obscure the true cost of these devices, DRM, and countless other trends in technology.
From an engineering stand point, integrated/monolithic hardware fails less
In some cases, yes. But when it does fail, you lose the entire device. It is far from clear that any benefit in reliability is a net win relative to any loss from making all failures catastrophic when they do happen.
Hardware has reached the point where it's on the same level with every-day things people throw away and buy new versions of without even thinking, like kettles or toasters
Not even close. That's just what people who make a lot of money selling new devices that don't actually offer much benefit over "old" devices want to convince everyone to believe with their marketing.
The current wasteful attitude is not sustainable, either economically or environmentally. We've only had this "two years and you throw away your $500 iThing and get a new one" kind of mentality quite recently, and most people have been through these kinds of change no more than once or perhaps twice so far.
Just like no-one doing corporate IT assumes you'll throw away a PC every three years any more, the market will learn, and probably very quickly. I already know plenty of people who have had exactly one generation of Apple gear and then become frustrated with the short lifecycle. I know almost no-one going the other way. That's just anecdotal of course, but looking at market share trends and general commentary over time, it looks like the experience and sentiment within my network is not unusual.