True, but it was sometimes the only way you could do a hard reboot on those things!
> JAVA MESSAGE ERROR
Which required removing the battery to do a hard reset (which took about 120 seconds).
>We went to lunch afterward, and I remarked to Dennis that easily half the code I was writing in Multics was error recovery code. He said, "We left all that stuff out. If there's an error, we have this routine called panic, and when it is called, the machine crashes, and you holler down the hall, 'Hey, reboot it.'"[0]
Exactly. The distinction between a "device" and a "component" is no longer particularly interesting or important. We're dealing with pieces of the 2001 monolith here, for better or worse.
is it easy to re-use parts from these failed devices?
(I don't buy the anecdotal "Nobody can recycle aluminium with glass pressed into it" line from the article.)
Actually it is! The failure rate for a MacBook Pro was way under 2/10 when I was there during the lifespan of the product.
Apple calculates the lifespan of a product in different terms to the warranty. The warranties differ by country (EMEA & US have different warranties thanks to EU and individual state laws).
You're right that these machines can and will go for five years. My current laptop, a 17" MacBook Pro, has been with me since ~2007. It'll go for another year at least.
Apple will replace these devices when they are in warranty. True. But the concept of a warranty is what is wrong, not the replacement of an entire device.
It's better to have a device which is far less likely to suffer mechanical failure, which happens to require a more expensive repair when it does, than it is to have a device far more likely to suffer mechanical failure but with cheaper repairs (for a few select problems).
If you can't afford a MacBook Pro don't buy one. There are other machines on the market which are highly user-replaceable. I'm going to buy the new Retina, I won't be getting AppleCare, and I bet it lasts just as long if not longer as anything else you buy.
So yeah, I can afford a MacBook Pro. I'm just choosing not to, anymore.
But I'm probably not going back to Linux (where I came from). Honestly, Windows doesn't looks so bad anymore. I admit I don't know the first thing about it, but maybe I'll give it a try.
Integration with tools like git and svn are only through 3rd party solutions, and aren't as polished as one would like.
I could get by with it, but I would prefer not to. However, I'm also not particularly happy with the idea of going back to Linux, and my work still requires a Mac. Thus, stuck on Mac OS X.
How do they come off as sustainable and cool when their are responsible for all this trash production?
How do they come off as sustainable and cool when Greenpeace was protesting in front of Infinite Loop a month ago?
Greenpeace protesting outside of <random PC manufacturer> is page 5 at best.
When you want to make the 6pm news you go after the guys that gives you the most publicity, rather than the guys that are worse offenders.
The other thing to consider is that the same applies to repairing technology. Why are we putting resource into catering for the tiny minority of a given product which experience mechanical failures which we can fix?
90% of BlackBerry users will never change the battery on their device. 100% of BlackBerries have a stupid door on the back which allows you to remove the battery and eventually becomes very loose and slides off.
80% of MacBook Retinas (at least) will never have a hardware problem (as long as Apple has finally learned how to correctly apply thermal paste). The ones who do we replace.
The economics of replacing an entire device are finally starting to make sense. That's the really exciting thing about this. It is no longer cheaper for Apple to pay technical people in stores and service centres to cater for failure rates in hardware. It is now cheaper to throw the broken thing away and get a new one, and take a chance on not having two successive one-chance-in-a-million failures for the user.