[syshum]

It always makes me laugh when Apple (and their fans) talk about how Environmentally Friendly Apple is...

Reduce and Reuse is the best way to help pollution, yet Apple is known, famous for Planned Obsolescence and non-repairability

you can not be Environmentally Friendly and maintain the only solution to any problem is to just toss it and buy a new one

[quonn]

Yet, these notebooks last really long. I usually use them for 5+ years. My mom has been using her‘s for almost 10 years and it still feels fast (for her needs).

And it‘s easily recycled afterwards. The RAM is rarely the issue and I know few non-technical people who ever changed their RAM in a notebook.

Sustainability is really important, but I don‘t think upgradable notebooks make a significant difference at all.

[Yetanfou]

I'm writing this on a 2005 Thinkpad T42p. In the intervening years it has had its drive replaced by an SSD and an extended battery installed but that is about it. It still feels and looks newish, apart from the keyboard which show wear on the key caps. A new keyboard can be had for ~$20.

Hardware can be both long-lasting as well as upgradable.

[gbear605]

I’m still using my non-upgradable base model 2013 Macbook Pro, while I don’t know anyone still using a 7 year old Windows/Linux laptop, even an upgraded one. It’s fallen on a cement floor multiple times and has had no damage from that. Repairability doesn’t matter if it doesn’t break in the first place, and there’s certainly been no problems with obsolescence, planned or otherwise.

[markb139]

I’ve got a Dell m4600 that I bought in 2011. I specifically chose it so that I could upgrade. It’s now got a new SSD, HDD and 24GB of RAM. It works well enough for most things, but not video editing.

[Bud]

There is no "planned obsolescence" from Apple, and btw, that phrase is not capitalized in English.

There is a popular myth among the lazy-minded about this, but the fact is that Apple's hardware lasts a lot longer, and is intentionally supported for a lot longer, than competing hardware. This is true for Macs as well as iOS devices. If Apple is "planning" for anything, it's for their stuff to last a lot longer than others' stuff, not the opposite.

[gambiting]

Not everything has to be black and white. Apple can be supporting old hardware for very long time, much longer than any other manufacturer, and yet simulatiously be shit at making sure their hardware is actually repairable if it does break down. Luis Rossman had a very good series of videos on this, consider this for instance - a chip that controls USB-C charging used to be just a regular chip made by some chinese company, you could order them by yourself for like $0.10 each, a tray full of chips would cost you few dollars at most. So as he runs a repair business, and those chips fail relatively frequently for <reasons>, he could repair a dead macbook for like $50-100(practically charging just for his time to take the chip out and put a new one in). But Apple doesn't like that - so they went to that manufacturer and specifially asked for that chip to be modified, so that it only works with their machines, and asked that they are the only buyer of that chip. So now if your macbook dies because this chip failed, you cannot replace it with a new $0.10 chip - you need to buy a whole new $1000 motherboard from Apple.

This is not planned obsolescence - this is going out of your way to make the repairs harder. I can understand when certain decisions are made for engineering reasons(like say, having the ram soldered on), but this kind of thing when Apple goes to the manufacturer and asks for a version specific only to them so that no one else can buy it, ever - that's just anti-consumer, and I hope the hand of the law will come on them super hard due to this.

[slantyyz]

> There is a popular myth among the lazy-minded about this, but the fact is that Apple's hardware lasts a lot longer, and is intentionally supported for a lot longer, than competing hardware. This is true for Macs as well as iOS devices. If Apple is "planning" for anything, it's for their stuff to last a lot longer than others' stuff, not the opposite.

As someone who has bounced in and out of Apple products for ~10 years at a time (1985-1995 and 2005-2014), I have a couple of nits.

The last two Mac laptops I had (2009 plastic Macbook, Early 2011 MBP with known heat issues) - both can still run the latest version of Windows 10 adequately for what they are hardware-wise. Every "modern" (as in OSX capable) Mac I have had at some point lost support from the latest version of OSX (which means you lose the ability to upgrade some apps). In some cases, like the 2011 MBP, for seemingly no reason, as it is still a decent computer even now.

While I know a lot of people here like to change their computer every couple of years like it's nothing, I still like to use things I buy for as long as possible before recycling them.

In terms of "hardware lasts a lot longer", I generally agree with that statement, but there have been notable instances of bad designs combined with bad support (and I generally think Apple's support is a notch better than everyone else).

The most notable (in recent times) being the Early 2011 15" MBPs with overheating issues. That thing was a lemon that was poorly handled by Apple. There's still a good chance that I'd still be using a Mac right now had that experience not left a sour taste in my mouth. I've never had a laptop die on me in 20+ years of having laptops (my very first was a Powerbook 170, and I've had a pile of PC and Mac laptops since) outside of that early 2011 MBP, which lasted just over 3 years before it died. It died again after the recall service was performed on it, because they basically just replaced the logic board with the same board having the same design defect. (FWIW, someone else I know who bought the same model had the exact thing happen).

[shmel]

Well, too bad that modern front-end developers don't take this into account. I use a high-end laptop from 2015 (not apple) and it could work perfectly well for a few more years if not for 8gb ram. Nowadays a single electron app easily takes 500mb and web browser 4-5gb. Given the prices on RAM in retail I am really upset that I have to drop couple of grands just to have a bit an incremental upgrade and enough ram to browse goddamn web.

[tonyedgecombe]

Personally I prefer reliability over upgradability.