https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/07/apple-g...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/yp73jw/apple-recycling-iphon...
The recycling center shouldn't have resold the devices (which is, as you point out, effectively theft). However, Apple should not be shredding hundreds of thousands of otherwise usable devices.
Apple puts 56 screws in the Unibody MBP keyboards. They were practically the pioneer of gluing components in permanently. They don't care about technicians. Not even their own. They have been one of the leaders of the anti-right-to-repair movement from day one.
Also Apple's glue isn't usually that bad to work with. Doesn't leave much residue, so as long as you know where to apply the heat you can do a clean repair and glue the new component back in.
I’m not a fan of planned obselence and waste but this is clearly wrong. They’ve spent loads of engineering effort designing a machine for their store that can replace and reseal and test iPhone screen replacements out back.
But at the same time, a single chip with everything included will also make these phones pretty sturdy, where it either fails completely, or remain working for long years.
That said, the previous poster's argument is terrible and gluing a phone is not what allows """peak performance"""
Says it all pretty much.
In the very same order.
So, no sir. Apple isn't the environment friendly company that they claim to be. So much money, and so little accountability.
It's not so much fresh vegetables, but ingredients in other types of food -- especially the frozen fruit, vegetables and farmed seafood that finds its way into grocery store and restaurant supply chains.
Do you have any idea how many superfund sites are in Silicon Valley alone?
I was pointing out the mindset of people who don’t care about ground pollution of their products because their products are made elsewhere.
I see you've never been to Houston.
It has also come to a point where none of the extensions makes sense for me. 512GB is plenty. RAM might be an issue - but I honestly don't have enough data on that. The last time I had more than 16GB RAM was in 2008 on my hand built desktop.
As long as the battery can be replaced/fixed - even if it's not user serviceable, I'm okay with that. I'd guess I'm not in the minority here. Most people buy a computer and then take it to the store even if there's a minor issue. And Apple actually shines here. I have gotten my other laptop serviced - but only in unauthorized locations with questionable spare parts. With Apple, every non-tech savvy person I know has been able to take to an Apple store at some point and thereby extend the life.
That's why I believe having easily accessible service locations does more to device longevity than being user-serviceable.
(In comparison, HTC wanted 4 weeks to fix my phone plus 1wk either way in shipping time and me paying shipping costs in addition to the cost of repair. Of course, I abandoned the phone entirely than paying to fix it.)
We could actually test this hypothesis - if we could ask an electronics recycler on the average age of the devices they get by brand, we should get a clear idea on what brands actually last longer.
Also worth noting that some people might be taking laptops to repair shops precisely because they are not user serviceable. Companies like framework are trying to change this with well-labelled internals and easily available parts.
> "AirPods are designed with numerous materials and features to reduce their environmental impact, including the 100 percent recycled rare earth elements used in all magnets. The case also uses 100 percent recycled tin in the solder of the main logic board, and 100 percent recycled aluminum in the hinge. AirPods are also free of potentially harmful substances such as mercury, BFRs, PVC, and beryllium. For energy efficiency, AirPods meet US Department of Energy requirements for battery charger systems. Apple’s Zero Waste program helps suppliers eliminate waste sent to landfills, and all final assembly supplier sites are transitioning to 100 percent renewable energy for Apple production. In the packaging, 100 percent of the virgin wood fiber comes from responsibly managed forests."
https://www.vice.com/en/article/neaz3d/airpods-are-a-tragedy
Except you and I surely must know that's not true, that their machines have industry leading service lifetimes, and correspondingly high resale values as a result. Yes some pro users replace their machines regularly but those machines generally go on to have long productive lifetimes. Many of these models are also designed to be highly recyclable when the end comes. It's just not as simple as you're making out.
Was resting my 2010 MBP on the railing of a second story balcony during a film shoot and it dropped onto the marble floor below. Got pretty dented, but all that didn't work was the ethernet port. Got the 2015 one and it was my favorite machine ever - until it got stolen.
2017 one (typing on now) is the worst thing I've ever owned and I'm looking forward to getting one of the new ones. 2017 one: -Fries any low voltage USB device I plug in (according to some internal Facebook forms they returned 2-5k of this batch for that reason) -When it fried an external drive plugged in on the right, also blew out the right speaker. -Every time I try and charge it I get to guess which USB-C port is going to work for charging. If I pick wrong I have to power cycle to power brick (this is super fun when the laptops dead and there's no power indicator, as there is on the revived magsafe) -Half-dime shaped bit of glass popped out of the bottom of the screen when it was under load - this has happened to others in the same spot but user error..
Pissed Apple wouldn't replace it given how many other users have had the same issues, but this thing has taken a beating as have my past laptops. I'll still give them money if the new one proves to be as good as it seems.
Please stop copying marketing content, it really doesn't help your argument.
Additionally, macbooks have high failure rates, especially with keyboards in the previous generations, but also overheating because of their dreadful airflow. Time will tell what happens to the M1, but Apple's hardware is just as (un)reliable as say, Dell's.
No, personal experience isn't data.
Do you have data to support your statement?
> Apple's hardware is just as (un)reliable as say, Dell's.
When I had access to reports from IT on a previous job (5k+ employees, most on MacBooks) Apple was definitely much more reliable than the Dell Windows machines in use. More reliable than the ThinkPads as well but this is data from one company, unsure how it compares to other large orgs.
Not only more reliable but customer service was much faster and better with Apple computers than Dell's.
Seems like a huge waste to throw away a $2000+ machine when it's out of warranty because some $5 part on it dies and Apple not only doesn't provide a spare but actively fights anyone trying to repare them, while the options they realistically will give you out of warranty being having your motherboard replaced for some insane sum like $1299 or having you buy a new laptop.
Or what if you're a klutz and spill your grape juice glass over your keyboard? Congrats, now you're -$2000 lighter since there's no way to take it apart and clean the sticky mess inside.
Thanks to the Right To Repair, you can take the laptop to pretty much any repair shop and they can replace anything you damaged with OEM or third-party parts. They even have schematics, so they can just desolder and resolder failed chips. In the past, this sort of thing would be a logic board swap for $1000 at the very least, but now it's just $30 + labor.
Oh, there is no right to repair. So I guess give Apple $2000 again and don't drink liquids at work.
Which is ironic given that Apple laptops are often depicted next to freshly brewed cafe lattes.
/s
What makes you say that? What did you expect would happen if you spill juice into your laptop?
What they are perhaps fighting is unauthorized repairs, in the sense that they want to be able to void the warranty if some random third party messes with the insides. That's not quite the same thing.
Apple has been very helpful when I brought in a 5 year old macbook pro with keyboard issues, replaced some keys for free on the spot. Also when the batteries of 8 and 9 year old MBAs started to go bad, they said they could replace them but advised me to order batteries from iFixit and do it myself, which I did.
There are other options besides throwing it away.
You can (a) trade it in for a new Mac (I just received $430 for my 2014 MBP) or (b) sell it for parts on eBay.
Or what if you're a klutz and spill your grape juice glass over your keyboard? Congrats, now you're -$2000 lighter since there's no way to take it apart and clean the sticky mess inside.
You can unscrew a Mac and clean it out. You can also take it into Apple for repair.
"Yeah <normal guy>'s out sick today, I'm his replacement."
*yeet*
In all seriousness I would absolutely love to do this sort of thing IRL, in situations where I'll just make incompetent management etc unimpressed (because I'm showing their inefficiency) and there wouldn't be any real/significant ramifications (eg machines that processed material a couple notches more interesting than what PCI-DSS covers).
But obviously I don't mean I'd literally use the above example to achieve this ;P
I've just learned a bit about (eh, you could say "been bitten by") poorly coordinated e-waste management/refurbishment/etc programs - these can be a horrendously inefficient money-grab if the top-level coordination isn't driven by empathy in the right places. So I would definitely get a kick out of doing something like that properly.
It takes a few minutes to do that on a laptop but it's not that long.
Turns out someone got confused between left and right, gave him the wrong instructions, and he smashed 200 brand new SSDs. Ouch.
Even software updates often stretch as far back as 5 year old models, so they’re pretty good with this.
iOS 15 is supported by the 6s, which was 2015. So 6 years.
And I still know people using devices from these eras. Apple may not be repair friendly, but at the end of the day, their devices are the least likely to end up in the trash.
If you look at android phones, you're looking at a few years only.
Because of software
Of all the garbage my family produces over the course of time, my Apple products probably take less than 0.1% of my family's share of the landfill. Do you find this to be different for you? Or am I speaking past the point you're trying to make here?
Waste creates more emissions. Instead of producing something once, you produce it twice. That's why waste is bad, it's not just about disposing of the wasted product.
That being said, I haven’t read any third-party audits to know if this is more than Apple marketing. Would be curious if they live up to their own marketing.
Do people really think that companies like Apple et al (who have a huge number of people following them eager to rip into them at ever opportunity) could get away with a "marketing story" like that? Like, really, Apple just making all that up and _not one single person_ whistleblowing on it if it were a lie?
Strange that they would ask these questions if they were simply going to shred the device.
Why not? It does sound micer that way and some customers may actually think they resell them just because of this...
You have a point but if they were actually truly neutral it wouldn't matter if you make 100,000 of them and throw them away.
Because that degrades the performance overall. SoC has proven itself to simply be more performant than a fully hotswappable architecture. Look at the GPU improvements they're mentioning - PCIe 5.0 (yet unreleased) maxes out at 128GB/s, whereas the SoC Apple has announced today is transferring between the CPU/GPU at 400GB/s.
In the end, performance will always trump interchangability for mobile devices.
but it would be nice if the soc itself would be a module that you could upgrade and keep the case/display, it would also cut down on environmental impact probably as well...
So there is another, quite lucrative, option besides discarding it.
This doesn't mean Apple's carbon footprint has to suffer. If Apple does a better job recycling old Macbooks than your average repair guy who takes an old CPU and puts in a new one in a repairable laptop then Apple's carbon footprint could be reduced. I remember the days when I would replace every component in my desktop once a year, I barely thought about recycling the old chips or even selling them to someone else. They were simply too low value to an average person to bother with recycling them properly or reselling them.
How would a 5 nanometer chip be "repairable"? Who would be able to repair such a chip and what would the tool cost be?
Mac computers last way longer than their PC counterparts.
Who are you calling stupid? If you're going to call someone or something stupid, don't do it in a stupid way.
> Today, Apple is carbon neutral for global corporate operations, and by 2030, plans to have net-zero climate impact across the entire business, which includes manufacturing supply chains and all product life cycles. This also means that every chip Apple creates, from design to manufacturing, will be 100 percent carbon neutral.
But what they won't do is put the chip in an expandable and repairable system so that you don't have to discard and replace it every few years. This renders the carbon-neutrality of the chips meaningless. It's not the chip, it's the packaging that is massively unfriendly to the environment, stupid.