Why? What's the purpose of artificially limiting performance when one doesn't need the upgradability?
I've, personally, never upgraded the RAM on any system I've built or carried it to a new motherboard with a new socket. I'm absolutely the target audience for this. I would love this increased performance, as long as it wasn't some surprise. Having the extra plastic on the motherboard is literally e-waste for me. Don't touch my PCI-e slots though.
Used to be I'd upgrade my MBP memory and hard drive to eek out one more year between upgrades. The drive could always come back and be reused as a portable drive, and the best memory for an old machine typically was cheap enough by then that it wasn't that big of a deal.
The best present is receiving something you never knew you needed until you get it, so I love giving RAM (and SSD) for birthdays! That you can keep the same computer but that it simply becomes faster is a nice surprise for many.
I suggest you look up "integrated circuits" and "system on a chip", which is where all of our performance/power improvements have come from. You're in for a shock when it comes to repairability!
Not sure why you're being downvoted, it's completely true!
If the SSD in my computer dies, I can just buy another one for cheap (500GB for what, 80 dollars?).
If the SSD in my Macbook/Mac Mini dies, either I can buy a new motherboard, or more likely, a new device. It is not economical nor ecological.
Also, paying 200 dollars for additional 256GB of storage? WTF.
Only if you use dimms. If you use the LPDDR4x-4266 each chip has 2 channels x 16 bits. So the M1 has 4 chips and a total of eight 16 bit wide channels.
My understanding is that the LPDDR4x chips cost less per GB than the random chips you find in the common dimms. There's also costs (board space, part cost, motherboard layers, and layout complexity) for dimm slots.
Sure manufacturers might try to charge significantly more than market price for on the motherboard RAM, but it's an opportunity to increase their profit margin and ASP. Random 2x16GB dimms on newegg cost $150 per 32GB. Apparently LPDDR are easier to route to, require less power, and cost less for the same amount of ram. I'd happy pay $500 for a motherboard with 64GB of LPDDR4x-4266. Seems like Asus, Gigabyte, Tyan, Supermicro and friends would MUCH rather sell a $500 motherboard with ram than a $150 motherboard without.
Normal rate ( Not Contract Price ) for LPDDR4 / LPDDR4X and LPDDR5 is roughly double the cost of DRAM per GB. Depending on Channels and package, the one used in M1 is likely even more expensive as they fit 4 channel per chip. DIMM and Board Space adds very little to the Total BOM.
Apple's (and everyone elses') anti-repair stance (both in terms of design and in policy) is harming the environment and generating tons of e-waste. Whats wrong with expressing a view that helps the planet?
Because it’s just virtue signalling, not actual environmentalism. What matters environmentally is aggregate device lifetime, so you get the most use out of the materials. Apple devices use a minimum of materials and have industry leading usable lifetimes. They are also designed to be highly recyclable.
Greenpeace rated Apple the number 1 most environmentally friendly of the big technology companies.
Apple devices use a minimum of materials and have industry leading usable lifetimes.
Their phones have far longer lifetimes for sure, their laptops? I would like to see evidence of that. Outside of the mostly cheaply made laptops, most laptop/desktop computers can have very long secondary lives. Linux/Windows can run one some very old (multiple decades) machines.
Promoting reuse and repair is environmentalism. Preventing repair (as Apple does) generates more e-waste. There really is no way around that fact.
>What matters environmentally is aggregate device lifetime, so you get the most use out of the materials. Apple devices use a minimum of materials and have industry leading usable lifetimes. They are also designed to be highly recyclable.
Reuse and repair is FAR superior to recycle - which actually wastes a lot of energy, in addition to generating e-waste for the parts which are not recycled.
>Greenpeace rated Apple the number 1 most environmentally friendly of the big technology companies.
What good does it do? They are still harming the environment.
> Preventing repair (as Apple does) generates more e-waste. There really is no way around that fact.
There are plenty of ways around that fact.
Preventing repair while changing nothing else generates more e-waste. But that's not what Apple does.
If you prevent repair in order to also do any or all of the following things at the same time enough, the result is less e-waste than if you didn't prevent repair:
- Use less environmentally harmful materials (e.g. on-board sockets, larger PCBs etc)
- Make the device last longer before it needs repair (reliability, longevity)
- Make the device easier to recycle
> Reuse and repair is FAR superior to recycle
It's a good goal, but it's only superior for sure if everything else is able to be kept the same to make it possible.
Some things really are better for the environment melted down and ground down and then rebuilt from scratch. I'm guessing big old servers running 24x7 are in this category: Recycling the materials into new computers takes a lot of energy, but just running the old server takes a huge amount of energy over its life compared with the newer, faster, more efficient ones you could make from the same materials. I would be surprised if not recycling was less harmful than recycling.
> What good does it do? They are still harming the environment.
When saying Apple should change they way they manufacture to be more like other manufacturers for environmental benefit, Apple being rated number 1 tells you that the advice is probably incorrect, as following it would probably cause more environmental harm not less.
>- Make the device last longer before it needs repair (reliability, longevity)
If Apple makes devices that last so long, then how come Apple's own extended warranty program generates billions of dollars of revenue? Note that this doesn't include third party repair shops. To me, this indicates a large industry dedicated to repairing Apple products - hardly a niche industry. To me, this indicates that a large amount of Apple devices need repair, something that Apple is hostile to.
Also while AppleCare is easy and convenient for the customer, Apple's "geniuses" do not do board-repair, they simply replace and throw away broken logic boards (which sometimes all they might need is a simple 10 cent capacitor). If that wasn't as bad, they actively prevent other businesses from performing component level repair by blocking access to spare parts.
> I'm guessing big old servers running 24x7 are in this category: Recycling the materials into new computers takes a lot of energy, but just running the old server takes a huge amount of energy over its life compared with the newer, faster, more efficient ones you could make from the same materials. I would be surprised if not recycling was less harmful than recycling.
If that was the case, then of course, we should recycle. Maybe we should have a case-by-case approach depending on specific products? I'm totally willing to go wherever the evidence leads us. As of now pretty much every single environmental organization promotes reuse over recycling for electronics.
>When saying Apple should change they way they manufacture to be more like other manufacturers for environmental benefit, Apple being rated number 1 tells you that the advice is probably incorrect,
I merely accepted the "number one" in good faith at face value. Digging further with a cursory Google search, things seem a lot more nuanced. That being said, I have no idea what "number one" even means without context.
I don't want to back the idea that Apple does make reliable or long-lived devices, although I'm very happy with my 2013 MBP still. I honestly don't know how reliable they are in practice, although they do seem to keep market value for longer than similar non-Apple devices, and they have supported them with software for a long time (my 2013 is still getting updates).
And I would love to be able to add more RAM to my 2013 MBP, which has soldered-in RAM; and I would love if it were easier to replace the battery, and if the SSD were a standard fast kind that was cheap to get replacements for, and if I could have replaced the screen due to the stuck pixel it has due to a screen coating flaw. So I'm not uncritical of the limitations that come with the device.
I'm only disputing your assertion that preventing repair and reuse of parts inevitably generates more e-waste. It's more nuanced than that.
Of course wherever and in whatever ways we can find to repair, reuse and recycle we should.
But there will always be some situations, especially with high-end technology, where repair and reuse needs more extra materials, components, embodied energy and complexity (and subtle consequences like extra weight adding to shipping costs) resulting in a net loss for the environment.
An extreme example but one that's so small we don't think of it is silicon chips. There is no benefit at all in trying to make "reusable" parts of silicon chips. The whole slab is printed in one complex, dense process. As things like dense 3D printing and processes similar to silicon manufacture but for larger object components come online, we're going to find the same factors apply to those larger objects: It's cheaper (environmentally) to grind down the old object and re-print a new one, than to print a more complex but "repairable" version of the object in the first place.
My last 2013 MBP is still alive only because I was able to source third party battery / power connector...
Though, somehow, if I trust some argument made here, it would be better for the environment to buy a whole new laptop rather than fix the existing one... Though, I'm not doing it for the environment, I'm just cheap as f*ck.
> if I trust some argument made here, it would be better for the environment to buy a whole new laptop rather than fix the existing one
No, I don't think that argument is being made by anyone.
The argument being made is that to make the laptop more able to have replaceable components could potentially require more environmental costs up front in making that laptop.
I doubt that argument works for the power connector. I suspect that's more to do with making sure Magsafe is really solid, but it might for the battery due to the pouch design instead of extra battery casing, I'm not sure.
There's no question that if you can repair it afterwards you probably should.
By the way, literally all my other laptops either died due to the power connector failing, or I repaired the failing power connector. Sometimes I had to replace the motherboard to sort out the power connector properly, which seems like poor design.
The Apple has been the only one that hasn't failed in that way, which from my anecdote of about 5 laptops says Apple's approach has worked best from that point of view so far. Of course Apple power supply cables keep fraying and needing to be replaced, so it balances out :-)
For a manufacturer on the whole it’s a negligible issue. It’s simply a fact that Apple devices have longer average lifetimes and lower overall environmental impact than any of the other manufacturers. Hence the Greenpeace rating. If you actually care about the environment, as you claim, the choice is clear.
What you are doing is picking a single marginal factor that can make a difference in rare cases, but is next to irrelevant in practice, and raising that above the total environmental impact of the whole range of devices. That’s just absurd.
> It’s simply a fact that Apple devices have longer average lifetimes
I've used the same desktop for the 8 to 6 years, upgrading with STANDARDIZED components over the years, and my laptop from that era still works. Heck, I've got a 18 years old thinpad still working fine.
In the mean time, two MBP died on me. Try again...
Do you care about the overall ecological footprint of Apple, as Greenpeace does, or only a few specific devices in particular? How do you evaluate likely future device lifetimes and ecological footprint, cherry picked statistics or manufacturer track record?
Should I take your evaluation in thus, or trust a detailed whole enterprise evaluation by Greenpeace?
Apple's view uses less material over all. For the vast majority of the machines that A) don't fail and B) are never upgraded in any case, the Apple method of getting rid of sockets reduces the e-waste burden.
Hermes handbags also have high resale value. That tells us nothing. Apple's anti-repair approach absolutely harms the environment. Certainly they are not alone in this, many/most electronics these days are irreparable. But Apple is actively hostile to the repair industry, which makes them more deserving of criticism.
The repair industry in this case is hostile to the environment. They are incentivized to want computers to break so that they can sell repair services.
It turns out that soldering parts in place makes them less likely to break than a socket whose connections can oxidize or come loose.
The tiny number of devices that can’t be repaired because of soldered components, is dwarfed by the number of devices that never broke in the first place because of soldered components.
I always see people complaining about updates, but I haven't been forced to update for months. Is this some machine-specific configuration or is Windows Insiders' update model different?
Just an FYI - Subsonic (and forks such as Airsonic) would fit your wish of streaming & caching your own music to any device. There's clients for every device you care to name, even (surprisingly enough) a functioning client for my old BlackBerry Q10, with it's excellent speakers :)
It is self-hosted, but that's more a question of desire than ability I'd imagine
I've heard of Ionic/Cordova which gives JS apps the ability to access native APIs, but haven't used it to see if it's truly capable of all functionality
One of the issues I find is the lack of compatibility across the various mobile browsers.
As I'm building a PWA, I'm finding certain Web APIs that were intended for PWAs to be incompatible on Firefox/Safari, which defeats the purpose of "write it once/works everywhere on the web". For example, the Web Share Target and install prompt APIs have regressed from a W3 standard to a Chrome-specific standard.
I'm looking into Capacitor/Cordova as an alternative in the meantime.
