They'd use M.2 SSDs in their Macs instead of soldering flash chips to the board to allow for upgradeability, but that would seriously hurt the average profit margin on their devices and (maybe) take more time to engineer.
The areas where their self-interest and the environment overlap are truly awesome, like shipping iPhones without chargers (increased margins) and in smaller paper boxes (more efficient shipping), but I don't wear rose-colored glasses about it.
They'll also never let the iPad run macOS, because if people could own one device instead of two, that would be bad for their profits. They'll keep them cleanly differentiated for as long as they can.
(I also worked in engineering at Apple!)
Wow, it’s almost like they are a publicly traded company with a legal obligation to do so!
Maybe people are just tired of the same old low-quality axe grinding that fills the HN comments section every time any story appears about Apple.
This whole page is filled with people rehashing 15-year-old complaints, moaning about computers other than the one in the article, and generally turning the whole thing into yet another off-topic bitch session.
You can put together a BINGO sheet for HN comments any time there is a story about Apple ("walled garden!"), Google ("graveyard!"), Microsoft ("Micro$oft!"), or Adobe ("subscription!").
It's old. It's boring. It's off-topic. It is rightly downvoted.
(no, you did not forget, you had no such reason, only that you are bored or some are even offended by others do not like what is grown to be precious while done with a megaload of pretention and are not tired of pointing it out. Like a fella closeby, participating in distributing billions of electronics using a sizeable chunk of Earth's resources, then is proud of not throwing away each and every vessel he/she drank out of on the campus. And does not see the galactic inbalance. Does not want to, I suspect. Happy with the rigtheous image put on like a t-shirt. Being bored is no fucking mandate to make actions or criticize in this free discussion. Your bored sensitivity is insignificant in the subject, try to grow up, be adult and see the significant part of picture too and take seriously what is serious - unlike your boredom - instead of trying to wrap reality around your lack of amusement, please. People like yourself yield to pretentious greediness preserving a problem with willfull an intentional ignorance make problems 'old' - but definitely not boring. Would you care please yawn a huge one and downvote anything of a different an even bigger and even older 'boring' problem like child poverty for example? Just as an instance, there are mountains of 'old' and 'boring' problems you could consider boring and righful of shut about it! :( Before biting on details or analogies, the subject of criticism is the ignorant and egocentric mentality you represent, not the randdom elements came accross.)
This is an amazingly common misconception about fiduciary responsibility to share holders. Nowhere in the law does it state that they must seek profit and shareholder value at all costs, above all other concerns, regardless of the impact. Companies are absolutely allowed to do things that are not 100% aligned with self interest. Many companies routinely do such things like charitable giving, excellent customer service, expensive processes that make the product more recyclable or repairable, etc.
I was actually just trying to explain that the internal feelings of employees are not the driving force, even if those feelings are real and deeply felt.
Apple, the richest company in the world, who spends millions in money and engineering hours on stuff like making sure the packaging having the right neutral smell, and the box sliding out with the right amount of friction when you open it, and on security teams/mercenaries able to pull family members of workers from warzones, and you're telling me they have to nickel and dime their HW team for routing an NVME slot on the board instead of soldering the NAND chips because that would cost some more engineering time?
Thanks for the chuckle, I loved it. I think Apple spends more on toilet paper or hand soap in a month than the effort would cost their HW engineers to do that.
That said, I have bought many cheap Windows PCs/Laptop in my lifetime and I have only ever upgraded them once and they also don't last as long. Somehow... I don't feel shouting at Apple. These things do last a bit longer...
Soldering them to the board is just an asshole thing to do though, especially since these machines can't boot off of USB if the NAND dies. Surely some elastomer BGA sockets wouldn't cost that much. There's no sane explanation other than they're doing it so you have to buy a new Mac to get more storage.
The increase in per unit cost probably would be entirely insignificant and minuscule compared to the revenue they'd lose by not being able to charge predatory prices for storage upgrades. So it would be a secondary or a tertiary concern at best..
What they/everyone really ought to do is to standardize that, with the flash chips themselves still connected via a modular connector and the "NVMe controller" as open source.
Imagine integrating the flash ECC/RAIN with ZFS et al. Or the ability to decide for yourself if you want a lot of QLC or a bit of SLC or a mix of both, in software at runtime.
At least some portion of an operating system's bootloader chain must be installed to the internal storage, because that's all the firmware knows how to read (unlike Wintel PCs where there's a UEFI driver providing USB storage stack support). That bootloader running from internal storage is then free to enumerate external storage devices to locate the rest of the OS it is trying to load.
Irony, of all laptop I have owned, the most problematic was the Apple PowerBook. It's screen became defected a month or two after the warranty ended. The external VGA connection had issues and might require a couple restarts to get a signal. It could barely be used as a desktop computer. Even though I used it to write my first production software solution. It was ditched as soon as financially possible.
If they made their devices repairable, easily resellable, etc. then they wouldn't have to greenwash.
How else would the conscious consumer justify another marginal hardware update?
I don't even know how they do it with all of that.
None of the changes between successive versions of the iPhone — ever — have felt like good value for money to me. I get new ones when the old ones break. Then again, I am a weird outlier in economic things, and I've known that since I was a teen.
I'd ask if people really are so much more interested in signalling green than being green, but of course I know they do — an old flame campaigned Green in the US, despite also having a big thing about supporting the striking coal miners in the UK (that happened before she was born).
Two years later I updated my login password and then promptly forgot the exact punctuation of the new password. I ended up getting completely locked out of the laptop with no self-service options to fix anything.
That day I learned that you have to boot into a special mode to truly factory reset, not just delete the administrator accounts with other AppleIDs. I was able to get Apple to remotely unlock the computer for me, but only because I could "prove" it was mine by sending them the original invoice slip from store.apple.com with my name, email, and the serial number of the laptop on it.
But that invoice slip is literally a piece of paper in a box, and you can't access it yourself after 18 months - I had to call into Apple support and get them to email me a new copy because it had been longer than 18 months.
If I had purchased the laptop from someone else on craigslist 2 years prior and then got locked out, I would be completely shit-out-of-luck, because I wouldn't be able to prove I truly owned it.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/102664
With the way modern macOS is immutable and exactly the same on all machines thanks to signed and sealed images, no one needs to DFU to reset a Mac unless there is something very wrong.
The factory reset process is simple. Proving ownership (and transfer of ownership) for getting around anti-theft lockouts is not.
Device works completely fine and lives behind a well secured network (battery was stuffed but it lives plugged in). Apple took it upon themselves to dictate to the user that it was no longer fit for operation. Apples solution was "replace the device and send the old one to landfil.
Apple literally greenwash their entire business model. But they are one of the most wasteful companies around.
Meanwhile I'm still reformatting 8, 12 and 15 year old windows pcs with Linux and putting them back into service for email checking and basic web browsing without a single hiccup. Saving more and more from landfil, they get used once in a blue moon but it's literally all the owners want. They don't mind waiting a bit for stuff to turn on, hell plenty of them are over 60, they've spend their life being patient and a few mins to make a cuppa while something turns on is a blessing to them.
Is that your way of saying "it doesn't support any modern SSL ciphers?" I don't think there is anything built into the OS that asks Apple if it's allowed to visit websites.
Ancient software has trouble talking to modern services; modern services and devices don't want to fall back to speaking the old versions because of downgrade attacks.
And if you have an important CA certificate expire, you can't talk to anything.
(But in the same way the OS ones weren't working, you wouldn't be able to use a 12 year old version of Firefox or Chrome to access most websites either for the same reasons).
This is shite design. Let's not kid ourselves here. This is one of the wealthiest companies on earth and thy control their entire hardware and software stack from the ground up. If they can't keep stuff sorted so when an old system plugs in it atleast limp mode upgrades it to the latest offering that system was supported with, this isn't because it's something that's impossible, it's because they don't want to.
If community non profit managed linux distros can get installed on 15 year old machines and just you know, sort out the drivers for the ancient ass tech in them without the user doing any more than running the update manager to hell apple couldn't have worked out the same.
It's a load of crap sold under the guise of security. Some nefarious actor wants to dl updates from their servers for ancient tech? Why in the world should they not be able to? Their update servers shouldn't have any services attached other than being a glorified dl directory.it shouldn't even be something they care about because there is zero risk attached.
But if it took an organization 1,500 people strong, like Maps and Siri did, I’m not so sure the Apple of today would do it.
The praise goes first to the hard working engineers and managers who deeply care about this stuff, and second to management is all I’m saying.
For context, I built the Shortcuts app!
(edit: AX is also a much broader effort, because it improves usability for everyone on the ability spectrum, and it digs into design, too. So I do think it does have a more foundational role because Apple is still at its core a design-driven company. I think of all of the effort to make the apps usable at all text sizes, for example. The easier to use the products are for more people, the more people will buy them. There are less inherent trade-offs in AX than with the environment/carbon, where selling fewer devices is in direct conflict with sustainability goals.)
One way of true environmentally-friendly innovation could have been to find a way to attach the SSD chip so that a user could safely replace it, though, with little additional space.
For an iMac, though, they have a bigger thermal envelope and no battery. It seems more reasonable. Apple even did the software engineering necessary to support the Mac Pro.
That would be Apple’s counter-argument right there. Want Linux on your M1? Get a Mac, not an iPad. Want swappable storage? Get a Mac Pro, not an iMac.
I don't think these are real problems. The M.2 device would take up space you could have used for the PCB, but then you would have had to use that PCB space for the chips that are on the SSD.
The SSDs in current Macbooks do around 3GB/s. NVMe Gen5 does 14GB/s. The speed-of-light latency from any kind of connector is going to be totally irrelevant compared to the latency of the flash controller itself. There is no performance concern. Power is the same; when idle the link goes to sleep, when in use the connector is negligible compared to the device itself.
Heat transfer doesn't even seem related. If you want to improve heat transfer from the SSD then you put it into thermal contact with a heatsink or the chassis, which you can do regardless of whether it's M.2 or not.
> One way of true environmentally-friendly innovation could have been to find a way to attach the SSD chip so that a user could safely replace it, though, with little additional space.
The only real space requirement is the size of the connector itself, which is on the order of 50 square mm in a PCB which in a 12" laptop is some tens of thousands of square mm. <0.5% is "little additional space" to begin with.
Obviously you could design a connector which is even smaller, but the premise would have to be that that's even a real problem.
The idea that a PCB gets larger with M.2 slots is truly insane.
Further, when I buy a new one, I’m now incentivized to over-provision it based on my current needs by that same logic.
OWC has an entire business around this (for older Macs): https://www.owc.com/
Photos and videos get larger each year with larger sensors, so it can be hard to predict future usage if you take a lot of those.
I used OWC parts to make a 16 TB m2 SSD array that connects over Thunderbolt. It's fast enough to edit 8K footage, just like the internal disk. Look for the 4-bay Thunderbolt enclosure on Amazon. I did add extra cooling (heatsinks on the modules, and a bigger fan).
Total cost was about $2000.
USB4 can hit those speeds, but then you’re in dongle town.
Back in the day when this was possible (iBooks, Powerbooks, early-model MacBooks), I'd say that a large percentage of Mac laptops eventually did get upgraded. I certainly upgraded 100% of the Macs I owned and also did many for friends and family. Some models made upgrades quite easy: the RAM slots, especially, were often accessible without special tools. It was common to buy the base model Mac with the fastest CPU, then install your own RAM modules and big HDD/SSD to save money. Swapping HDDs out for SSDs was also, of course, a huge performance upgrade for a while.
Even non-technical users who wouldn't upgrade their Macs on their own would often trade them in to dealers/resellers who would refurbish and upgrade them for resale.
It was even easy to do it, no need to take it all apart. There was a lid behind the battery.
Remember that for people who used computers in that period, opening a computer to replace a component was a completely normal operation.
That said, I do think upgradable laptops are important as a resistance force against constant upgrades and planned obsolescence; if you could hypothetically add 2x32GB DDR4-2100 to a decade old ThinkPad and run stolen Apple Intelligence LLM just fine, the humanity wouldn't need $5k worth of labor wasted on one laptop per person per year.
You're saying few people would buy the 256GB model and pop in a fast 2TB M.2 SSD for 103€ if they could?
They also don't have profiles on the iPad because then families could share devices which would be bad for their profits. Instead it is one iPad per person.
A cheap android tablet only costs a couple hundred bucks. That's just not that much, even for a poor family.
And that buys years of 'childcare'.
If that’s not planned obsolescence I don’t know what it is.
I don't know where you expect people to get new usb-c chargers other than buying phones, or buying the charger directly. I've never in my life found myself having too many, and frequently found myself lacking one entirely.
Apple is also the king of integrated batteries. First with phones, then with laptops. I'm still baffled they got away with this. Such mindless waste at an incredible scale.
Being extremely environmentally conscientious while designing the packaging isn't going to offset that.
Many people (I suspect the vast majority) would not reuse the iMacs as displays.
Would the total amount of extra hardware inside discarded iMacs (those not used as displays) be less than the amount of hardware saved by reuse of the others?
Would it affect apples bottom line if they couldn't prevent people from reusing their displays? You bet.
Hardware that costs a few cents at Apple's volumes and adds about 1mm of thickness and 2g of weight.
Also, it's standard hardware
They could resell them as displays, given the resale value of Apple devices that might not be unpopular. If Apple actually cared they could easily add the hardware necessary. Would it cost them a few bucks more? Sure, but that's what choosing environment over maximum profit means.
Or they could at least make it easy to modify so tinkerers can quickly turn it into a display without having to destroy the case or something.
I go on a site, pop in the serial number, and they ship me a box for free with a return label.
I basically got $45 for an incredibly slow brick, so I’d say that’s pretty good incentive for their recycling program.
Sure, you could install Linux and upcycle it, but how many people are actually going to do that? I think the recycling program is actually great for the 95%+ of people and how they use their devices.
Unlikely to ever buy an Apple product again.
Then please tell us why they can't put a HDMI/DP input on the iMac to be usable as an external monitor when the internal computer dies or just to be used as a secondary monitor?
Or why the SSD NAND on Macbooks needs to be soldered when a guy on youtube managed to hack an NVME connector on the motherboard to make the storage replaceable and expandable? What are the reasons other than driving more sales of new devices when old ones break?
Because they're clearly not technical limitations and without any substantiated info from your side, your comment just reads more like astroturfing ("Apple is so conscious, trust me bro I worked there").
Exactly, and it would be even less useless in totality if the screen was still feasible to use on its own.
> HDMI-in port on the iPad and MacBook so you can use it as a display when the internals are outdated?
Now that you mention it, I would like to use my old iPad as a second screen, since it's a mobile form factor already and is otherwise nearly useless for no intrinsic reason. But for the iMac, which is obviously a stationary large screen in an appealing enclosure, it would be a returning feature with a standard TB 4/5 port and cable, like it was originally with TB1.
How about Apple just puts the 2 cent connector & PHY, and let the users who paid for the device decide how they want to use the product. Gaslighting people with the "you're holding/using it wrong" argument today is just .. I can't even express anymore without breaking HN rules.
Yet people who complain about this "gaslighting" from Apple continue to buy Apple products.
Link? I've seen several instances of third-party repair shops doing BGA swaps to replace the NAND with larger packages from other Apple products. I've seen one instance of somebody making a pair of custom boards, one soldering down to the original NAND BGA pads to provide a slot, and the other board slotting into that one to hold the scavenged BGA packages in an easily-replaced module. But I haven't seen anyone retrofit an off the shelf NVMe device to operate as primary storage for an Apple Silicon machine.
The fundamental problem, which is out of sight out of mind from the consumer, is how much energy is required to produce and move assemblies around. See also the automotive industry, where the "green" thing to do is drive and maintain older vehicles for a long time.
And to be honest, this doesn't bother me that much, but if I'm not on the take as an engineer I have no particular qualms punching through the bullshit smokescreens as a customer of a company that takes my money. The attention and empathy fatigue of the bullshit does take away from things that do matter such as national versus international manufacturing.
Visually, sure. Under the hood? Wrong.
>The business model is built on a revolving demand cycle that is unrelated to long term thinking, maintainability, efficiency, nor sustainability.
Sorry you need to qualify this statement. An iPhone 6S is still completely usable and almost certain to be in a functional condition assuming it has been looked after correctly. That's a 8-9 year old phone. Meanwhile my 2001 phone was hopelessly outdated e-waste in 2007.
Kicking off with a logical fallacy, strong start.
>There is "change", sure - the chip is now every so slightly faster, it can do "AI things", it can take slightly better photos, etc.
Just say you're technologically uninformed.
>But any comparison of these changes with the previous model for an average use case
Kathy using Instagram while she waits in line at the supermarket is not a useful point of comparison when we're comparing iterative improvements, keep up.
>Apple could have easily skipped releasing a new model this year, packaged exactly the same hardware and released the iPhone 16 the next year and fundamentally nothing would've changed.
What an absolutely ridiculous statement.
>But the shareholders won't like that, will they?
Low IQ statement.
Come on are you really that unaware?
- They deliberately limit the functionality of devices unsupported by their first-party services (eg. App Store and Safari) which prevents reduction of new hardware required. Third-parties are prevented from offering serious and lasting alternatives.
- They've systematically prevented repair of both their laptop and phone hardware, obviating the "reuse" part of the cycle. In their current scheme, independent repair shops are deliberately and unnecessarily cut off from the parts they need to repair Apple hardware at-cost.
- Their stance towards recycling is asinine and insidious. Since store owners can't recycle partially-broken hardware as donor boards and users can't extend the use of their devices once iOS stops supporting them, Apple graciously offers to take your valuable hardware for free and destroy it for parts or materials for their own benefit. Users aren't expected to want any better and instead are supposed to thank Apple for pocketing their broken hardware to pay for Carbon Credits and Mother Nature spotlights.
Apple's "serious" dedication to the environment is a joke, and the cracks have been showing for a while. They prioritize obstinate and unnecessary proprietary features instead of differentiating themselves through natural competition on their merits. If it wasn't for regulatory concern Apple would continue abusing the environment and people like you would keep defending Apple regardless.
This is bad. I expect better.
My point was that GP made a strong assertion that didn’t quite bear up to scrutiny IMHO:
> I say this as someone who worked several years in engineering at Apple, and they were extremely environmentally conscientious years before it was a thing.
It seems to me that an “extremely environmentally conscientious” company would place a much higher priority on serviceability. But I am very open to contrary reasoning and I don’t know any Apple engineers. This was a rare opportunity.
I hasten to say that Apple products are so good I overlook this disadvantage, but then I don’t describe myself as extremely environmentally conscientious.
That aside, comparing a phone battery to an high-voltage high-amperage battery is a bit of an apples to oranges.
needs citation. I say this as someone who worked several years in engineering at Apple, and they were extremely environmentally conscientious years before it was a thing.