We're at the point where computers, cars and phones are good enough and commoditized to the point where they should be lasting 10+ years. Instead, we're moving toward a 4-year maximum with everything sealed up and soldered, so you can throw it on the e-waste pile and replace it to keep "infinite" growth chugging. The iMac is particularly offensive.
What Foundation is doing should be the norm, by law.
Just because you don't personally see any benefit to the advancements being made doesn't mean others don't. They're certainly still performant enough to be useful but even something like h.264 decoding puts a huge strain on my haswell laptop, which is a trivial task to newer ones thanks to advancements in chips. This isn't even an uncommon task. Anyone who watches videos online probably benefits from this, especially when it comes to laptops which are concerned with battery life.
> We're at the point where computers, cars and phones are good enough and commoditized to the point where they should be lasting 10+ years.
Cars do last 10+ years. I'm driving around in a 17 year old vehicle and it works just fine. But I don't think that means we should halt all progress in vehicles. It's still using gasoline and not running on electric motors, after all. At some point down the road perhaps we'll see commoditization of batteries in the auto industry but that's not where we're at today, where the vast majority of vehicles on the road still run on gas.
> Instead, we're moving toward a 4-year maximum with everything sealed up and soldered, so you can throw it on the e-waste pile and replace it to keep "infinite" growth chugging. The iMac is particularly offensive.
If the iMac is offensive to you, then don't buy it. All these environmental arguments on this website always come off as extremely disingenuous when they pair it with their solution being imposing restrictions rather than creating a superior product.
> What Foundation is doing should be the norm, by law.
I can't stand these authoritarian takes. No one is forcing you to partake and there are options available to people that hold certain ideologies. The idea that you must impose that on everyone by law is absurd.
I never had that problem even before haswell. They have hardware decoding built in, thats probably caused by another issue. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Hardware_video_acceleration
I agree about not enforcing viewpoints on others. If you don't like it, don't buy it.
[0] https://mntre.com/reform2/handbook/parts.html#battery-packs
The X230 was having some weird power/sensor issue so I ordered a replacement motherboard for like $40 CAD in case it dies. It could be years before I need it, but like, this stuff costs peanuts and I am so much more comfortable using a computer I know I can easily maintain (and has excellent performance to boot).
Bit of a devil's advocate here, but by doing this they prevent themselves getting blamed when low quality replacement parts are cranked out on the cheap by companies who don't care if their customers' customers die in a fire.
The headline if an iPhone with a third party battery exploding and injuring someone will be "This iPhone Exploded, You Won't Believe Her Injuries", not "iPhone with Knock Off Battery Explodes".
Apple wouldn't be as profitable as they are if they weren't anticipating things like this and planning for it years in advance.
I keep it around because it works as a kiosk in my recording studio, but that's about it.
The thinkpads esp batteries from 2013 suck them most. DRM, and expensive, 2012 has no DRM and 2014 and up has way cheaper aftermarket.
If you're the type of person that needs the _fastest_ computer then yeah obviously you're upgrading every year. Or if you work on large codebases, etc.
But if you don't care about that, you can easily go 4+ years with your laptop. Yes computers have gotten faster, but the internet is still usable on a 10 year old machine.
I've replaced my battery once already, but consider your keyboard/screen are likely things to break at any point in time with accidents.
And we're comparing this to apple, a company that has been basically DRM'ing components - even if you can buy the replacement you can't use it without it being "programmed" by apple.
EDIT: Also note that the bare minimum models from 10 years ago are likely too slow nowadays, I mean to compare this to the medium-upper range devices of the time, potentially with relatively low cost upgrades like an SSD.