Only a tiny percentage of laptops are ever upgraded. If making the device upgradable and accessible adds the same percentage in materials then it's pretty much a wash.
Also Apple devices on average have much longer service lives than devices from most other manufacturers. On average they stay usable longer, and even when they are replaced they're more likely to be handed on and keep in use even without upgradability. This is why they retain more of their second hand value. That factor alone is dramatically more significant from a whole lifecycle impact point of view.
> Only a tiny percentage of laptops are ever upgraded.
A larger percentage however needs repairs (apple care sells well for a reason). A 1/10 score means that a "repair" will basically be throwing (large parts of) the laptop away and exchanging it for a new one.
Similarly recycling is made much harder by this design.
> This is why they retain more of their second hand value.
And because there is large base of people paying that much for them. A high-priced sony vaio, elitebook, thinkpad etc. stays usable just as long and there is large interest in the secondary market (e.g. see reddit's /r/thinkpad) but at much lower prices. Macbook buyers instead treat them as design objects first (which keep value) and computers second.
Upgrading a laptop might increase its useful service life, but if bought well-specced, this isn't the biggest problem.
The elephant in the room are repairs. Due to the design, too many repairs are not economic, so machines get thrown away early. Repairs, which should cost way less with a design that at least allows repairability.
Exactly.
When I had some sticky keys on a 2015 MacBook Pro, the Genius told me that the only way to fix that was to replace the whole top case and it wouldn't have been cheap.
I just went home, searched a bit on YouTube, removed the keycaps and cleaned them.
It's the same for batteries: they want you to replace the whole top case for a stupid battery that they could have made much easier to remove (it's still possible to do it BTW)
I feel like much of these claims are only in the past. I used my 2009 Macbook for 5 or so years, and it only lasted that long because I was able to upgrade it. It came with a comical 2GB of ram, and that would have been a trash—as in worthless to me—if it couldn't be upgraded. I was able to sell it, only because they're desirable, and they used to be more reliable. The latter quality is not so evident any more. Many naive customers are duped into buying the bottom of the line MBP or Air, and then are dumbfounded when their thing runs out of resources. I blame apple for making less reliable products for higher margins and offering their customers less agency over their devices. Their marketing pitch is usually that you should have to know the details, but you do, because they're trying to screw you. The people with money to blow I'm not so concerned about, it's more the person who buys a 13" MBP for 2k that has 4GB of ram and 128gb ssd, and can't ever upgrade the thing.
>I feel like much of these claims are only in the past.
It's not actually possible to buy a new Mac with less than 8GB RAM these days, and that seems likely to be plenty for a typical user for the lifetime of a machine bought today. 128 GB SSD is a bit tight, but flash drives are cheap. I see it the opposite way, in the past minimum Mac specs always seemed miserly, but nowadays they're pretty capable.
On the other hand, my 2014 15" MBP didn't come with less than 16Gb and still packs a quad-core 45w CPU, a decently fast SSD, a crazy good chassis and trackpad and a bright hi-dpi display.
I think it's still better than most of the 800-900€ 15" new laptops offered today, but it's not upgradable.
My only issue with it is the battery which will fail sooner or later, but it shouln't be too hard to remove it.
I was quite fond of my 13" from late 2013. One of the major differences that I find quite distressing is the soldered on SSD in most if not all new models. Good luck with data recovery if necessary.
This is true, but increasing RAM or disk capacity over time could extend that even more. Maybe not so much visible right now with those machines that are sold today and look awesome, but I have a few examples of 2006/2009 MBPs that had hard drives being replaced with SSDs, and extended their lifetime many more years! In my today's 5-year-old MBP, I would enjoy doubling the RAM for example.
> Only a tiny percentage of laptops are ever upgraded.
What about batteries, they're basically consumables.
I still remember a friend of mine breaking a single usb port on his macbook, he had to change half the components, the bill was something like $1.5k for a $2k macbook.
Yes, batteries are probably the biggest issue, because they deteriorate.
On all the retinas you have to separate them from the chassis using a thread (something like a fishing line). It's not too hard to do, but it's not fun neither.
>> If making the device upgradable and accessible adds the same percentage in materials then it's pretty much a wash.
In the case of Apple products, it can save you a pile of money.
The last Mac I bought was the early 2011 MBP (yeah, -that- lemon), and Apple's prices for RAM and storage were ridiculously above market prices.
I was able to max out the specs of my MBP more cheaply by buying my own parts, and upgrading to larger faster storage at my own timeline. Heck, you could even get a cage to replace the optical drive on those MBPs and put in another 2.5" drive (which I did, and it was a very bad decision, especially for battery life).
> Only a tiny percentage of laptops are ever upgraded.
Probably yes and that is also probably because behaviors like this. Manufacturers have trained consumers for years that upgrading of fixing stuff is not worth it. Personally, I have upgraded every laptop I have ever owned. This isn't possible with todays Macbooks.
> Also Apple devices on average have much longer service lives than devices from most other manufacturers
Bullshit, if anything I believe the opposite is true. What is your source for this?
> Bullshit, if anything I believe the opposite is true. What is your source for this?
In my experience this is true, but not for technical reasons.
It just seems to me that there a lot of people happily using almost 10 years old macbooks just because they want a macbook, but probably can't afford a new one.
Just try to sell a 6/7 years old mac and then try doing the same with a Windows laptop from the same year: you'll sell the mac much more quickly, for a higher price.
I think that old macbooks still have a market, most old laptops don't, but this is just my impression.
This comment is randomly bashing Apple for not acting ecologically while suggesting that alternatives are somehow better. Apple can and should be criticized for shitty environmental behavior when you can actually back up your claim.
Not that there would be any proof in the comment, no. For example, how do Lenovo, Samsung or Dell handle this stuff and can you explain why their approaches produce less waste? Of course not, but let's put some hate into the HN comment section!
A centrally managed maintenance process where Apple hardware is managed and its waste properly disposed off (recycling, proper sorting of waste, secure handling of toxic materials...) vs. risks like customers putting Li-Ion batteries into their home trash causing landfill fires. And throw the left-over SSDs and RAM right into the mix as well.
No, it's just about hating on Apple without any evidence or data to back it up. Mimimi Apple ecologically bad but I won't tell you why or how others are evidently making it better!
Microsoft just released Surface X with a door on the back for replacing the drive. The device is 0.28 inches thick.
Thinkpad X1 Carbon and Dell XPS both have replaceable drives. From opening the case. If anything I'm struggling to find another laptop maker who solders the drives to the boards like Apple does...
Drive failure isn't a possibility, it's a certainty and soldering them to the board creates a hard deadline when the laptop turns from a computer to a brick.
Moreover, XPSs have a screwed-in battery and replaceable keyboard, which would make restoring and reusing the laptop much more viable. With macbook, if you keyboard is broken, you trash half of the laptop, including the battery.
Nothing in the XPS 15 is glued in place. I'm literally using a laptop that has a screen from 9550 (4 years old), battery from 9560 (3 years old), motherboard from 9570 (2 years old) and other parts that I've accumulated randomly while upgrading my laptop from 9550 to 9560 to 9570.
And the parts that I wasn't using after the upgrade I've all sold to other people who had their mobo or battery fail. Nothing was wasted.
All this and I've got a pretty slick looking powerful laptop!
HP, Dell, LG, Acer and even Samsung manages to do a lot better. Lenovo is also very simple to at least change battery, ram and disk. I know this since I own one and have added memory and disk.
On the Thinkpad versions the battery is located outside and can be switched without even having to open the machine at all.
> can you explain why their approaches produce less waste?
Yes, by letting me as a consumer change parts myself for the only cost of purchasing the actual part that needs changing or upgrading, the increase the service life of the machine I purchased.
Also, by not participating in this anti-consumer behavior, I can take said machine into a third party service shop and get it repaired there. I don't have to wait weeks for the proper parts to arrive and so on and I can get it fixed the same day.
I am not hating, I am stating a fact. By indirectly forcing people to buy new machines instead of repairing their old ones that often work perfectly well, except for maybe 1 thing that is broken or needs an update, they increase their environmental impact for no other reason than profit on their part.
Apple can do better and Apple have done better in the past.
From the article: "we can't help but feel that Apple can do better—especially after seeing Microsoft perform some real engineering magic to make its latest laptops more repairable"
If Microsoft can do it, Apple could do it too and even improve upon it.
Also I can't see why the original comment is about "hating on Apple". All I see is legitimate criticism about some issues with Apple products, that apparently many other people have too. Your comment on the other side is very emotional and full of snide remarks.
I don't understand this comment. So something is difficult to fix; how does this make the components any less recyclable, less free of harmful toxins?
Apple has a fairly comprehensive recycling system, to strip their own systems apart and reclaim reusable components. Are you suggesting when people take their MacBooks to get replaced that Apple are just throwing them in a landfill or something?
Repairing a device by replacing a small part (preferably only the broken component) uses far less resources than recycling.
For most other laptops, repair or replacement of common components doesn't depend so much on the manufacturer. The skill and equipment required to do the repair is significantly reduced. All else being equal, this makes it more likely that the laptop will be repaired rather than discarded.
Not trying to be cynical here because I also would prefer a MBP that was more serviceable/repairable, but all these discussions about how repairability impacts the environmental cost of these devices are IMO extremely contrived.
How many (in percentage terms) of laptops will ever need repairs, how many of those will actually be repaired (as opposed to consumers just deciding to buy something new, even if repair would be relatively easy and cheap), and then finally, what percentage of these defective laptops will actually been thrown away without any form of recycling? I'm pretty sure that if you do the math, in the grand scheme of things, these numbers will be utterly irrelevant except for HN talking points.
I would recommend spending public outrage about environmental concerns on areas where it really matters instead, such as e.g. food waste, plastic bags, energy efficiency etc. I'm pretty sure that even a tiny, tiny fraction improvement there would offset the environmental impact of the worldwide total of laptops that cannot or will not be repaired after they break down.
> How many (in percentage terms) of laptops will ever need repairs, how many of those will actually be repaired (as opposed to consumers just deciding to buy something new, even if repair would be relatively easy and cheap)
Whether end-users try to repair their laptops depends in part on their expectations; and their expectations depend a lot on how repair-able laptops are in general. My second-to-last laptop, a Dell, lasted me nearly a decade. I upgraded the hard disk, upgraded the memory, and replaced the inverter in the display twice. I mainly replaced it because it was about 4x the weight of newer laptops, and had started eating batteries. There's no reason more laptops couldn't last as long.
On average, a sealed no-moving-parts laptop like the MacBook(Pro/Air) line lasts 10 years due to resistance to the elements, excellent thermals/fans, and forward-looking connectivity compatibility. Every day people buy 2011 Macs online for the same $400 price as new non-Macs with similar specs.
Yes I get it, that's what I try to do as well. Just recently I went through the hassle of repairing my moms 5-year old Asus Zenbook, which had a broken SSD that was also a lot more effort to repair than necessary because of the non-standard M2 slot Asus used for the sole purpose of discouraging home repair (there literally is no other explanation for this slot besides trying to get you to pay Asus for the repair or -even better- a new device). She was already planning to throw it a way and get a new one.
The point is, that if it weren't for the fact that I explicitly asked her to let me have a look to see if I could repair it, she would have thrown it out even though it was perfectly possible to repair it (it's working 100% fine again now). My mother is not the exception, she's the rule. I would guess over 90% of people don't bother to repair 5-year old laptops, under any circumstance. They just write it off and get a new one.
That's why I was saying all these discussions about how repairability of laptops impacts the environment are largely moot. Probably better incentives to promote proper recycling (e.g. a tax on electronics that gets re-imbursed when you properly dispose them) would have much more positive effect compared to improved repairability.
Laptops that are decided by their owners are beyond economic repair when something fails don't just get whisked away to landfill, but actually (in many geographic locations) go through actual computer recycling centres, where they are triaged, repaired where possible and re-used in lower socio-economic areas such as low income area training projects etc. Often people "throw away" a laptop just because it's "slow" which usually means malware infested and low tier spinning rust drive, low end CPU, not enough RAM. The CPU has generally been soldered since 5th gen intel core series but upgrades and repairs to the rest can yield perfectly usable machines for some considerable more time. In my region there are numerous recycling projects that do this and one of their sources is the local municipal recycling centre (aka the dump or tip to the locals) where E-Waste is specifically segregated for licenced recyclers to handle.
If you have devices that have "simple" faults (bad RAM,storage,wifi card etc) that would normally be a simple swap out, but now can only be repaired with a high degree of skill (micro soldering) and access to a parts supply which is intentionally restricted and knowledge which intentionally obfuscated (take you pick of Louis Rossman repair videos on youtube)then those products will skip this second life and head straight to material recovery rather than re-use.
so
>How many (in percentage terms) of laptops will ever need repairs
as long as it's non zero then it's irrelevant
>how many of those will actually be repaired
For apple products this is rapidly approaching actual zero while for others it's non-zero
That reuse used to be through but nowadays we are absolutely drowning in computing hardware. Look at all the dealers in old used business computers, selling $200 machines. That's paying for the time of the person turning over the machine, with no premium for scarcity. Shipping and handling costs more than the non-consumable portion of old computer hardware.
I would counter that the reason laptops don't get repaired has a lot to do with mindsets and habits. It feels easier to just get a new one. I'd say the availability of repairable laptops is a prerequisite to change.
Basically Apple need to want this change. They need to... be brave? To... think different?
> I don't understand this comment. So something is difficult to fix; how does this make the components any less recyclable, less free of harmful toxins?
The next best thing to recycling (from an environmental standpoint) is being able to repair and continue usage. However Apple's hardware becomes more and more unfix-able (actually impossible, because parts are basically tailored to a single device, thus there can't be secondary parts, and Apple doesn't provide them at all). Go down the rabbit hole yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTpHa70DDX0
Soldering it down doesn't provide any quantifiable performance improvements. It probably allows them to make it smaller / thinner, and less expensive to manufacture. However, now if any one component (memory, CPU, SSD drive) goes bad the entire set must be tossed! When this happens, it will be expensive for the unlucky customer. All so Apple could avoid including a bit more plastic for the component sockets.
Also, SSD drives have a limited number of write cyclew before they stop working, usually some 10's of TBW (terabytes written). For normal users, it will take them a very long time to wear out the drive. Conversely, developers and power user types may find their setups doing 50GB or more of writes per day. So for example, if a drive is rated for 75TBW, a power user could wear it out after only a couple of years.
I have some Samsung SSDs at home where I regularly track and monitor the write usage, and I'm always surprised at how many writes occur on my [often idle] Windows machine. Background OS and application activity is my hypothesis for the cause. The primary windows partition drive will probably need replacing within a year, and will have lasted three or four years.
I am one of those up to 100GB/day developers. Reason: handling huge codebases (Chromium, among others) and working with VMs, which also extensively increases the write volume. My top day saw multiple TB written on a single day.
But even I don't seriously fear my MacBook pro SSD will die because of write load. I've done the math, and I should be good for way longer than the projected use of the laptop.
My actual annoyance is the inability to upgrade. I would love to make use of the currently laughable prices for m.2 SSDs and upgrade the 1TB internal storage to 2TB or more. But I can't, thanks to soldered storage.
There are perfectly fast m.2 modules, that would mean only minor differences in peformance, if any at all. My iMac actually runs perfectly fine on a SATA SSD, though this is definitely slower than the soldered-on SSD of my MB Pro.
I’ve never known anyone to throw away a Mac. They get used until the temptation to upgrade becomes too big, then sold onto someone with different needs.
I don’t have a Mac, and I think they should be more repairable, but I still think they’re ahead of most the rest.
Even within my very small social circle, I knew of three 2011 15" MBPs (including my own). Of those 3, all of them had to get the recall service, and since then, 2 of those MBPs have become bricks/e-waste.
I've gone through a lot of laptops (PC and Mac, my first was a Powerbook 170), and the only one to ever crap out on me was that 2011 MBP.
When it was working, it was one of the best laptops I ever had. When it had issues, I felt like Apple couldn't care less about the issue. It's pretty well documented that Apple pretended the problem didn't exist for quite some time.
The first logic board replacement (during AppleCare) had the exact same defect as the original board. It displayed the same symptoms within a couple of months, and then it totally crapped out right after AppleCare ended, and there was no way I was going to pay $500+ CAD to replace the logic board with yet another defective board.
I was lucky that the recall was announced before I recycled it (I ended up having to buy a new laptop in the meantime). The recall board has since died as well. The saddest thing is that computer (quad core i7 with 16gb ram) would still be more than usable today if it still worked.
I was completely locked into the Apple ecosystem prior to my 2011 MBP experience. And while I realize that the 2011 MBP is an outlier in terms of Apple product quality, the experience pretty much guaranteed that I'll never buy an Apple product again. There were so many ways they could have made me whole, but instead, they just kept providing a fix to a design defect with another defective part.
Please stop with the apologetic fanboy rhethoric. It's not helping. I have thrown away several macbooks and I know several people that has too.
I used to have Macbooks, I upgraded them with new disks and memory. Today that would not have been possible which is one big reason I would never buy a macbook to begin with.
This behavior is bad for all consumers of their products and should not be defended with anecdotal stuff like "people don't throw away their macbooks" which is easily refuted by going to a garbage site.
“Fanboy rhetoric”? How does this add to the conversation?
Anecdotally (which is all your point boils down to) I know that businesses rarely upgrade machines. Home users rarely do either. Gamers and enthusiasts are the people that tend repair or upgrade. These people are a vanishingly small number. I have no problem with Apple, or anyone else, replacing broken or damaged items with new/refurbished ones, so long as they are responsible with the disposal or reuse of the damaged article. Apple demonstrably are.
Apple offer free recycling[0] and it’s available in most countries, if not all. It is reasonably well publicised and easily searchable. If an individual chooses to dispose of a device in an inappropriate way, that’s on them, not the manufacturer of the device.
My car dealer offers free recycling too. They even pay me for it. Of course Apple wants people to remove competing used hardware from the market, to remove alternatives to it's high margin new manufacturing. The "recycling" part is a side note.
The only reason I added an anecdote was because the entirety of your argument was anecdotal. How you can't see the irony here is beyond me.
> I’ve never known anyone to throw away a Mac
I'm just telling you that there are people who do that. What are your sources for that business don't upgrade machines? In my experience, business are often the kind of places that actually do upgrade their machines but of course not if it is macs since they cannot be upgraded.
I have never said anything negative about their recycling program. But it still is more resource heavy and more polluting than simply continued use of a product when you upgrade parts.
>I have thrown away several macbooks and I know several people that has too
This seems like its explicitly your problem given that apple will take and recycle your old macbooks for free if they are worthless and if they arent they will take them for a credit.
iFixit, the site that did the teardown, measures the repairability of equipment according to objective criteria and rates it. Apple does not typically score well at all.
Except the huge part that you're missing is that, when they do a swap or a replacement at an Apple store, they don't just throw away the hardware. They send it back to be disassembled, tested, and remanufactured. They re-use a vast amount of these components and all of their warranty devices are remanufactured from good, tested components that were pieced out of larger components. Just because they don't do individual component repairs at the stores doesn't mean it's unfixable hardware.
Ok, you got a replaceable battery. Now when you replace it you not only have old battery but also the hard shell for that battery to throw out. The same goes for storage. You don't have soldered storage, you have cased SDD. How is this any better than Apples solution?
i don't get it. what does one thing have to do with the other?
i assume no-one's going to throw their macbook in the trashcan anytime soon, so i don't see the connection between the ability to repair the device and how bad that device is for the environment.
After Apple care expires, many repairs are so expensive that you have to consider the MB totalled, that means, you are throwing away a device that should be repairable. A keyboard exchange should cost between $100 and $200, not in excess of $600.
That depends on Apple. If they are willing to repair a keyboard for like $150 and a broken SSD for what the SSD prices are going for at that time, at least the customers wouldn't be harmed by these design decisions. If Apple then would reuse the additional changed parts, then even the environment would benefit. But right now, all the burdon is on the customer and the environment.
it all depends on second hand mac component prices.
from my knowledge apple changes the casing and motherboard for almost every mac hardware update. thus making components more expensive (lower runs) and the re-sell value high.
so for apple to allow replacing parts the backlash from a reduced re-sell price would need to be lower than the potential new avenues of 3rd party components and repairs.
No, the resale value isn't high because they are difficult to repair. It would be the other way around.
Currently, I wouldn't pay much for any Mac with a butterfly keyboard, as Apple only warrants it for 4 years and after that the machine is totalled.
Great job, really awesome for the environment Apple.