You post suggests you think optimizing for other things (cost, weight, thinness, etc) is bad. People can and do vote with their wallets by choosing products that optimize things that are important to them. That's not wrong.

I don’t think average “Apple product buyers” think about “optimizing things that are important to them” when they buy Apple products. They just buy them because they look “pretty and shiny”. Most of them don’t understand how Apple takes advantage of them. Any reasonable person would be repulsed being treated like that. Unfortunately, most people either are not tech savvy enough or don’t care to understand that Apple takes advantage of them. People need to be educated on how computers work and should work so that they understand what companies are doing and so that they could vote with their wallets.

I'd get a Framework if I didn't have Apple Silicon as an option, but I like having a supercomputer in my backpack that can run for 6-8 hours on a charge with two VMs, 10 web browser tabs, a smart code editor, and several chonky Electron chat applications open. It also has 64GiB of unified CPU/GPU memory, making it able to run non-trivial local LLMs.

I have never seen an Intel or AMD laptop that delivers both those things. There are underpowered light ones that last a long time, or portable workstations that will cook an imprint of the bottom of the case into your legs. AFAIK there is nothing in that domain that can run large LLMs due to either underpowered iGPUs or separate GPUs that would never have that much RAM on a laptop. A laptop CPU that can run, say, llama3 at a decent speed without GPU would be a portable space heater.

I could replace the battery if I wanted but it's been two years and it still holds a charge fine.

The thing that would make me ditch Apple is if they locked down the OS any more than it already is. Right now macOS treads a fine line between being restricted enough to be secure and safe for the less-technical user while remaining a "real computer." If they took away even the possibility of sudo root or worse tried to lock people into the App Store I'd be gone within a week or two.

Also why I am not an iPad customer. It's basically a giant phone and as near as I can tell putting M processors in them is simply a waste. If I'm buying something that big and that expensive it should be a real computer. Part of the definition of real computer is that I can run any arbitrary code I want on it. If I can't do that it's a "console," which is how I classify most phones as well.

Edit: making iDevices able to run VMs would get you almost there. You'd be able to run any code in theory but it'd be too disjoint from the main experience so still probably a nope for me.

> I like having a supercomputer in my backpack

This shows where your priorities are, which is personal abundance over helping bigger global issues like waste and resource mining. Unfortunately you are joined by the majority of the population which is why things like climate change and poverty are still increasing even though everyone is very well aware of it.

The biggest source of gratuitous pointless e-waste isn't laptops anyway. It's pointless "IoT" devices and random gimmicky e-bullshit like that ridiculous "AI pin" that made the rounds.

I don't think what laptop you buy has any effect on climate change. Replacing coal is like 40% of that problem, then as much oil as we can, then gas, in that order, and everything else is a rounding error. Your Framework modules don't help if they're manufactured with coal power and shipped with the same bunker diesel that ships Apple products over here.

This is the same attitude as people that say 'The plane is flying anyway whether I am on it or not'.

Nothing will change while people are still making decisions on an individual rather than global level.

In reality Apple products overall have very good build quality, long software support timelines and very good software-hardware integration. OSX is more user friendly than Linux and a lot less user hostile than Windows. Spending 8 hours fighting whatever idiocy Windows or Linux or Dell throws at me costs me much more than an extra $500 for an Apple laptop.

For example, my Macbooks have never woken up in a backpack at 2am and proceeded to thermally cook themselves for 6 hours to the point of the battery not working at all after 6 months. My windows laptops have.

Linux at least never breaks userspace. x86 sadly can not match arm on efficiency, so the MacBooks are king for thermals/battery life. Although I don't travel enough to need more than 1 work days battery life, which I easily get on a Linux Ryzen laptop. If I could run Linux on the MBP I might consider it - I find macOS is not ideal for an engineer.

But in this modern age of extreme levels of e-waste and resource mining, companies should definitely be forced to prioritise repairability and sustainability over things like cost, weight, and thickness.

I dont mean to offend anybody but IMO if you think that having a thinner laptop is more important than reducing electronic and plastic waste on the planet then yes, you are wrong.

My thinner essentially “unrepairable” laptop is now on its 6th year of use and I will probably get another 2 years out of it and has never required repair. The highly repairable all plastic laptop my company tried to provide me lasted 3 years and was repaired twice. I don’t mean to offend you…but if you are really worried about e-waste, you need to really think about longevity stats of the device as a whole within the brand and model. Even if you get a lemon that breaks and requires replacement because it cannot be repaired, that might be offset by a hundred or two that have lasted years.

I'm saying Apple's laptop design optimization wasn't the problem, the problem is that Apple refuses to sell replacement batteries. I think refusing to sell replacement batteries is worse than optimizing a laptop for thinness instead of reparability.

As much as I hate tech corporations, I don't really agree that the Macbook Pro is "built to work against you". Mostly it's a great laptop that serves my needs really well. It's mildly annoying that I'm paying for integration with a whole Apple ecosystem that is of no value to me (no iPhone, no iCloud), but it's nothing like intrusive marketing shitscape that is Windows.

This is exactly why Apple is thriving. People have no patience, and are not willing to wait or compromise on anything to get their powerful laptop right now.