[mschuster91]

> I find the lifecycle of Apple products to be offensively short, also.

Apple is miles ahead of Android when it comes to phones and tablets, most in the Android ecosystem is e-waste four or five years in, while Apple stuff can still be re-sold for actual money at that time assuming you didn't bust your screen.

For laptops, Apple is so far ahead it can't even be described. Most Windows laptops physically break apart before macOS ceases to support any Apple laptop.

Only thing we can maybe talk about is desktop PCs ever since the switch to M that basically made meaningful upgrades impossible, but eh, in my attic there's a 2009 Mac Pro still chugging along as my homelab server + gaming rig.

[chadcmulligan]

I'm using a MacBook Pro 2016 for dev still works great, and its still better than every windows laptop available now. The touchpad itself is still superior - its crazy when you think about it. I know people on their 3rd or 4th windows laptop since I've been using mine. I tried a M4 recently and its battery life is fantastic, and its faster so I'll probably upgrade when this one dies, but it still works well.

Edit: just did a google and it seems I can still sell it for about $600AUD, I don't know how anyone is buying a non apple lap top.

[ost-ing]

The hardware is very good, it can absolutely last 10 years and is miles ahead of competition - which pains me even more that the software degrades. I will eventually install linux on my M1 but I shouldn’t have to.

[TheDong]

> Apple is miles ahead of Android when it comes to phones and tablets, most in the Android ecosystem is e-waste four or five years in

I have a very old android tablet (Nexus 7, 2013). I can install Linux on it and it works just fine. I can convert it into a full screen kiosk mode thing that displays photo albums, put it next to my tv as a song controller, etc etc.

Older iPads no longer get updates, and I can't install linux on them. Apple is wildly behind a lot of other hardware in terms of software-support since I can install linux on a lot of other stuff. Apple devices turn into useless e-waste bricks, other devices can get a second life running linux.

[mschuster91]

> I have a very old android tablet (Nexus 7, 2013).

Yeah, Nexus and being old, that's the thing. Everyone else other than Nexus, you gotta be lucky if you even get kernel sources and device trees that you can compile, but the code quality will usually be so rotten there's no hope of mainstreaming it to the Linux kernel.

> Apple devices turn into useless e-waste bricks

Only the iDevice lineup though. The Intel and M series devices all can be made to run Linux.

[sofixa]

> Most Windows laptops physically break apart before macOS ceases to support any Apple laptop.

If you buy the $199 Windows laptop that can barely run Windows, yes. Anything comparable in price to a MacBook? Not really.

[mschuster91]

I've yet to spot a full aluminum frame in any Windows laptop even matching Apple's price point. And I've yet to come across to a touchpad comparable in size, feel (Apple's is virtually flush with the case, most Windows touchpads are recessed, every one I came across was plastic while Apple's is glass) and gesture behavior either.

> Anything comparable in price to a MacBook?

The current MacBook Air is at ~1100€ here in Germany. That's not that expensive, particularly as even the entry models still blow away the competition for CPU.

[sofixa]

I bought an Asus Zenbook UX303 a decade ago that had a full aluminium body, a dedicated Nvidia GPU, and cost like 800€. A sibling still uses it today. I've upgraded to an Asus ROG Zephyrus that has a fancy plastic body that doesn't leave sweat and fingerprint traces like my work MacBook Pro does.

[brailsafe]

> Apple is miles ahead of Android when it comes to phones and tablets

Eh, I had to use a variety of iPhones for work recently, don't remember which models, from probably the last ~7 years though, and they really felt limited and frustrating on the software side. My already years old Pixel 7 feels miles ahead, and so did my Pixel 4a, even with the worse hardware of the latter. They just feel more capable.

I've been a mac guy for work for at least 15 years though, now with an M4 on Sequoia, and definitely won't be buying anything else (windows for most gaming), but Tahoe is not looking promising.

[everdrive]

>Apple is miles ahead of Android

And Mussolini wasn't nearly as bad as Hitler. A relative measure like this sets an artificially low bar. If these devices had replaceable screens and batteries, they would be good until the mobile standards stopped being supported.

[mschuster91]

> And Mussolini wasn't nearly as bad as Hitler.

Damn, I haven't seen an instance of Godwin's law outside of political threads for years in the wild.

> If these devices had replaceable screens and batteries, they would be good until the mobile standards stopped being supported.

The problem is, even replaceable components don't matter when the OS support drops and the device becomes a bad netizen as a result. And no, there is no viable FOSS competition to Android and iOS, many including giants such as Mozilla learned that lesson the hard way.

And that's before getting into the whole issue with BSPs, horrible code quality (good luck trying to get any SoC BSP upstreamed to u-boot or god forbid the Linux kernel), or the rapid evolution in mobile SoC performance.

[everdrive]

>Godwin's law

I'm not calling anyone Hitler, though, just pointing out the flaws that can come with relative comparisons. A known, extreme example here is useful as it's well known and illustrative.

Anyhow, Apple & Android should just support old hardware for longer.

[mschuster91]

> Anyhow, Apple & Android should just support old hardware for longer.

Apple already does. The iPhone 6s, released 2015, got a security update just a few months ago [1]. That's ten years worth of security updates, I'm amazed that people are still using such old phones.

If we go by the metric of "app developers can still publish app updates", the minimum target version is iOS 18 [2], which means you can still target the iPhone XS from 2018, that's a 7 year old phone.

The true catastrophe is Android, and that's actually not Android's fault. That's the fault of Qualcomm, MTK, Samsung and other more obscure SoC vendors - only in 2023, with the Pixel 8 [3], came the first SoC with seven years of support. As said: most BSPs are utter dogshit, and so are the firmwares for all the tiny chips and IP cores. The Linux kernel is a very fast moving target and it's (by intent) a gargantuan effort to keep forked kernels up to date. And it's made even worse by the embedded industry's trend of continuously "improving" their chips/IP cores without changing model numbers, making it sometimes outright impossible for a kernel module to deal with two different steppings and respective quirks on its own.

Apple in contrast insists on writing everything themselves - that's why they fell out of love with NVIDIA a decade ago, NVIDIA refused to give Apple that level of access. That allows Apple to keep even very outdated stuff supplied at least with critical security fixes.

Google could do something here, say by adding a requirement to the Play Store license that BSPs must be actually accessible open source and vendors have to commit reasonable effort in upstreaming their kernel level drivers, but I guess Google is too afraid of getting hit by anti-trust issues.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone

[2] https://developer.apple.com/news/upcoming-requirements/?id=0...

[3] https://blog.cortado.com/en/7-years-of-software-updates-for-...