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by PaulRobinson 603 days ago
Wow, are you still using your original 386DX board, with minor upgrades along the way? /s

I actually think Apple's way of managing upgrades isn't as harsh as many people think.

The first thing to get to sustainability is to use less. If you don't need the hardware to make hardware easily upgradable, you simplify the hardware and use less of it. This is one of the reasons Apple do it.

Secondly, they're using a lot of recycled material in this thing. Their lede line on it is that its carbon neutral. Show me another desktop PC like this that can make that claim.

Thirdly, the "half-life" of a Mac is kind of insane. When I was buying Thinkpads, Dells, and the like, I'd get 2-3 years down the line and I'd "need" to upgrade the whole thing. I've got a 2017 Mac Mini, and an 2015 MBP in regular use. I have a G4 iBook that was in active use by my parents from 2004 until _this Spring_ - they only gave it up because they couldn't upgrade Chrome on it any more, so it's about to become a retro Linux term for me, because the hardware is still sound (albeit too under-powered for anything modern).

And lastly, they take old hardware in and recycle it back into the new stuff in the first step. They give relatively decent trade-in prices, and are one of the few consumer brands doing that.

Given that they're shipping it with 16GB of RAM, which is fine for my needs, I think I'm confident in saying I could buy one, use it for 5-8 years, and then get it recycled when I upgrade at that point, while most PCs with upgradable RAM being sold today are going to landfill within 4 years, perhaps.

2 comments

I think you’re giving PCs way too little credit compared to Macs. AM4 motherboards from 2017 can have 5800x3d or 5700x3d CPU installed, the former of which is still #2 in the majority of gaming benchmarks beating anything Intel can offer for a fraction of price and power consumed.
A 2004 G4 iBook has been unsupported for any software for decades, let alone Chrome who was first released in 2008. I don't know if they actually ever made an official PPC version of Chrome but I doubt it.

You are a liar but a bad one.

You can like Macs, you can prefer it, you can rationalise the added cost any way you want. But the fact is, Macs do not have any more useful life than PCs if your price matches them. You play the role of the typical Apple fanboy who compares a 1.5k MacBook to a random crappy Lenovo that was on sale for less than 500. The Mac is better/longer lasting. It's almost as if price convey some sort of information on quality...