9 ms·

"Apple’s Commitment to the Environment" > Today, Apple is carbon neutral for global corporate operations, and by 2030, plans to have net-zero climate impact ac

by lisper 5y ago

"Apple’s Commitment to the Environment" > Today, Apple is carbon neutral for global corporate operations, and by 2030, plans to have net-zero climate impact across the entire business, which includes manufacturing supply chains and all product life cycles. This also means that every chip Apple creates, from design to manufacturing, will be 100 percent carbon neutral. But what they won't do is put the chip in an expandable and repairable system so that you don't have to discard and replace it every few years. This renders the carbon-neutrality of the chips meaningless. It's not the chip, it's the packaging that is massively unfriendly to the environment, stupid.

sktrdie 5y ago
Won't that make the chip bigger and/or slower? I think the compactness where the main components are so close together and finely tuned that makes the difference. Making it composable probably means also making it bigger (hence won't fit in as small spaces) and probably slower than what it is. Just my two cents though am not a chip designer.
- Tuna-Fish 5y ago
  Just making the SSD (the only part that wears) replaceable would greatly increase the lifespan of these systems, and while supporting M.2 would take up more space in the chassis, it would not meaninfully change performance or power.
threeseed 5y ago
I just used Apple's trade-in service for my 2014 MacBook Pro and received $430. So there is another, quite lucrative, option besides discarding it.
- grvdrm 5y ago
  Good to know and thanks! Looking forward to doing the same as I have a 2014 MBP that works and is in good condition.
oblio 5y ago
Yeah, but one of them doesn't cost a ton to implement (what they're doing) and the other one would cost them a ton through lost sales (what you're asking for). Always follow the money :-)
- grenoire 5y ago
  Erhh... I think OP gets it, he's just calling out the greenwashing.
savanaly 5y ago
Is there an estimate of what the externality cost is for the packaging per unit? Would be useful to compare to other things that harm the environment like eating meat, taking car rides, to know how much I should think about this. E.g. if my iphone packaging is equivalent to one car ride I probably won't concern myself that much, but if it's equivalent to 1000 then yeah maybe I should. Right now I really couldn't tell you which of those two the true number is closer to. I don't expect we would be able to know a precise value but just knowing which order of magnitude it is estimated to be would help.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
nojito 5y ago
>But what they won't do is put the chip in an expandable and repairable system so that you don't have to discard and replace it every few years. This renders the carbon-neutrality of the chips meaningless. It's not the chip, it's the packaging that is massively unfriendly to the environment, stupid. Mac computers last way longer than their PC counterparts.
- gruez 5y ago
  Is apple's halo effect affecting your perception of the mac vs PC market? iPhones last longer because they have much longer software updates, and are more powerful to start with. None of these factors apply to macs vs PCs.
schleck8 5y ago
Apple, the company that requires the entire panel to be replaced by design when a 6 dollar display cable malfunctions, is proud to announce its latest marketing slogan for a better environment.
- rubyist5eva 5y ago
  Obsession with emissions has really made people start to miss the forest from the trees.
  - castis 5y ago
    Could you elaborate on what you mean by this?
    - supertrope 5y ago
      I'm guessing they mean greenwashing statements about lower CO2 emissions glosses over more "traditional" pollution as heavy metals, organic solvents, SO2, NOx. Taming overconsumption is greener than finding ways to marginally reduce per unit emissions on ever more industrial production.
    - 8ytecoder 5y ago
      Not OP. Personally, I've had Dell, HP and Sony laptops. But the macs have been the longest lasting of them all. My personal pro is from 2015. It has also come to a point where none of the extensions makes sense for me. 512GB is plenty. RAM might be an issue - but I honestly don't have enough data on that. The last time I had more than 16GB RAM was in 2008 on my hand built desktop. As long as the battery can be replaced/fixed - even if it's not user serviceable, I'm okay with that. I'd guess I'm not in the minority here. Most people buy a computer and then take it to the store even if there's a minor issue. And Apple actually shines here. I have gotten my other laptop serviced - but only in unauthorized locations with questionable spare parts. With Apple, every non-tech savvy person I know has been able to take to an Apple store at some point and thereby extend the life. That's why I believe having easily accessible service locations does more to device longevity than being user-serviceable. (In comparison, HTC wanted 4 weeks to fix my phone plus 1wk either way in shipping time and me paying shipping costs in addition to the cost of repair. Of course, I abandoned the phone entirely than paying to fix it.) We could actually test this hypothesis - if we could ask an electronics recycler on the average age of the devices they get by brand, we should get a clear idea on what brands actually last longer.
Grustaf 5y ago
This only makes sense if you presume people throw away their laptops when they replace them after "a few years". Given the incredibly high second hand value of macbooks, I think most people sell them or hand them down.
- the_jeremy 5y ago
  My F500 company has a 5 year tech refresh policy, and old laptops are trashed, not donated or resold.
  - azinman2 5y ago
    I cannot imagine that represents the majority of the market.
  - saiya-jin 5y ago
    Exactly, corporate never risks them getting into wrong hands, no matter how theoretical risk that might be. Same for phones
    - lizknope 5y ago
      We used to remove the hard drives which takes about 20 seconds on a desktop that has a "tool-less" case. Then donate the computer to anybody including the employees if they want it. It takes a few minutes to do that on a laptop but it's not that long.
      - oneplane 5y ago
        Seems like FDE would solve that and make it a hardware non-issue.
        fomine3 5y ago
        Work if you trust FDE. Some FDE are broken, like this: https://www.zdnet.com/article/flaws-in-self-encrypting-ssds-let-attackers-bypass-disk-encryption/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/flaws-in-self-encrypting-ssds-...
sudhirj 5y ago
All of my Apple laptops (maybe even all their products) see about 5 to 8 years of service. Sometimes with me, sometimes as hand-me-downs. So they’ve been pretty excellent at not winding up in the trash. Even software updates often stretch as far back as 5 year old models, so they’re pretty good with this.
- dntrkv 5y ago
  Big Sur is officially supported by 2013 Mac models (8 years). iOS 15 is supported by the 6s, which was 2015. So 6 years. And I still know people using devices from these eras. Apple may not be repair friendly, but at the end of the day, their devices are the least likely to end up in the trash.
- patall 5y ago
  And here I am sitting at my 2011 Dell Latitude wondering what is so special about that. My sis had my 2013 Sony Duo but that's now become unusable with its broken, built-in battery. Yes, 5 to 8 years of service is nice, but not great or out of norm for a $1000+ laptop.
  - jbverschoor 5y ago
    Because they run windows. If you look at android phones, you're looking at a few years only. Because of software
    - patall 5y ago
      Parent is talking about laptops, I am talking about laptops, why are you talking about smartphones? Though I also had my Samsung S2plus from 2013 to 2019 in use, and that was fairly cheap. I do not know any IPhone users that had theirs for longer.
      - lamnk 5y ago
        My iphone 2G from 2007 still works well into 2013-2014.
ravi-delia 5y ago
It absolutely doesn't render the carbon-neutrality of the chip useless. Concern about waste and concern about climate change are bound by a political movement and not a whole lot else. It's not wrong to care about waste more, but honestly its emissions that I care about more.
- Mikeb85 5y ago
  > It's not wrong to care about waste more, but honestly its emissions that I care about more. Waste creates more emissions. Instead of producing something once, you produce it twice. That's why waste is bad, it's not just about disposing of the wasted product.
  - ravi-delia 5y ago
    Not if the company that produces them is carbon neutral, which is theoretically the argument here. In general you're obviously correct, but I'd expect most emissions aren't incurred from waste.
moralestapia 5y ago
>This renders the carbon-neutrality of the chips meaningless. You have a point but if they were actually truly neutral it wouldn't matter if you make 100,000 of them and throw them away.
itsangaris 5y ago
As others have said, the option to easily configure the computer post-purchase would make a massive difference in terms of its footprint
remir 5y ago
Isn’t most of the components in MacBooks recyclable? If I remember correctly, Apple has a recycling program for old Macs so it’s not like these machines goes to landfill when their past their time or broken.
- peatmoss 5y ago
  I believe Apple tries to use mostly recyclable components. And they do have a fairly comprehensive set of recycling / trade-in programs around the globe: https://www.apple.com/recycling/nationalservices/ https://www.apple.com/recycling/nationalservices/ That being said, I haven’t read any third-party audits to know if this is more than Apple marketing. Would be curious if they live up to their own marketing.
  - smoofles 5y ago
    > Would be curious if they live up to their own marketing. Do people really think that companies like Apple et al (who have a huge number of people following them eager to rip into them at ever opportunity) could get away with a "marketing story" like that? Like, really, Apple just making all that up and _not one single person_ whistleblowing on it if it were a lie?
- iSnow 5y ago
  AFAIK their recycling is shredding everything, no matter if it still works and separating gold and some other metals.
  - threeseed 5y ago
    When you trade-in your Mac you are asked if the enclosure is free of dents, turns-on, battery holds charge etc. Strange that they would ask these questions if they were simply going to shred the device.
    - neop1x 5y ago
      >> Strange that they would ask these questions if they were simply going to shred the device. Why not? It does sound micer that way and some customers may actually think they resell them just because of this...
mlindner 5y ago
This isn't relevant to the chips. Take this to the other thread.
soheil 5y ago
They would make less money if they made the chip repairable. This doesn't have to make them evil. Apple being more profitable also means they can lower the cost and push the technological advancement envelop forward faster. Every year we will get that much faster chips. This is good for everyone. This doesn't mean Apple's carbon footprint has to suffer. If Apple does a better job recycling old Macbooks than your average repair guy who takes an old CPU and puts in a new one in a repairable laptop then Apple's carbon footprint could be reduced. I remember the days when I would replace every component in my desktop once a year, I barely thought about recycling the old chips or even selling them to someone else. They were simply too low value to an average person to bother with recycling them properly or reselling them.
- google234123 5y ago
  Chips aren't made out of vacuum tubes any more, you can't "fix" a transistor
- theshrike79 5y ago
  > They would make less money if they made the chip repairable How would a 5 nanometer chip be "repairable"? Who would be able to repair such a chip and what would the tool cost be?
simonh 5y ago
>so that you don't have to discard and replace it every few years Except you and I surely must know that's not true, that their machines have industry leading service lifetimes, and correspondingly high resale values as a result. Yes some pro users replace their machines regularly but those machines generally go on to have long productive lifetimes. Many of these models are also designed to be highly recyclable when the end comes. It's just not as simple as you're making out.
- cududa 5y ago
  Right. Im not speaking to iPhones or iPads here, but the non-serviceability creates a robustness pretty unmatched by Windows laptops in terms of durability. Was resting my 2010 MBP on the railing of a second story balcony during a film shoot and it dropped onto the marble floor below. Got pretty dented, but all that didn't work was the ethernet port. Got the 2015 one and it was my favorite machine ever - until it got stolen. 2017 one (typing on now) is the worst thing I've ever owned and I'm looking forward to getting one of the new ones. 2017 one: -Fries any low voltage USB device I plug in (according to some internal Facebook forms they returned 2-5k of this batch for that reason) -When it fried an external drive plugged in on the right, also blew out the right speaker. -Every time I try and charge it I get to guess which USB-C port is going to work for charging. If I pick wrong I have to power cycle to power brick (this is super fun when the laptops dead and there's no power indicator, as there is on the revived magsafe) -Half-dime shaped bit of glass popped out of the bottom of the screen when it was under load - this has happened to others in the same spot but user error.. Pissed Apple wouldn't replace it given how many other users have had the same issues, but this thing has taken a beating as have my past laptops. I'll still give them money if the new one proves to be as good as it seems.
- ohgodplsno 5y ago
  > their machines have industry leading service lifetimes Please stop copying marketing content, it really doesn't help your argument. Additionally, macbooks have high failure rates, especially with keyboards in the previous generations, but also overheating because of their dreadful airflow. Time will tell what happens to the M1, but Apple's hardware is just as (un)reliable as say, Dell's. No, personal experience isn't data.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
merpnderp 5y ago
My family has 3 MBP's. 2 of them are 10 years old, 1 of them is 8. When your laptops last that long, they're good for the environment.
coryfklein 5y ago
> it's the packaging that is massively unfriendly to the environment, stupid. Of all the garbage my family produces over the course of time, my Apple products probably take less than 0.1% of my family's share of the landfill. Do you find this to be different for you? Or am I speaking past the point you're trying to make here?
jjcm 5y ago
> what they wont do is put the chip in an expandable and repairable system Because that degrades the performance overall. SoC has proven itself to simply be more performant than a fully hotswappable architecture. Look at the GPU improvements they're mentioning - PCIe 5.0 (yet unreleased) maxes out at 128GB/s, whereas the SoC Apple has announced today is transferring between the CPU/GPU at 400GB/s. In the end, performance will always trump interchangability for mobile devices.
- andrekandre 5y ago
  yep, thats definitely true but it would be nice if the soc itself would be a module that you could upgrade and keep the case/display, it would also cut down on environmental impact probably as well...
- fomine3 5y ago
  Comparing memory interface vs PCIe isn't valid. Comparing LPDDR5 vs DDR5 latency, throughput, and power consumption would be good.
  - jjcm 5y ago
    In this case I'd argue it is, because to communicate between the CPU and GPU on a non-SoC computer, you need to send that data through the PCIe interface. On the M1 SoC, you don't. They operate differently, and thats the main point here. You have to add those extra comparison points.
ink404 5y ago
agree with your point, but one could also look at the performance/power savings and use that in an argument for environmentally friendliness
clajiness 5y ago
> It's not the chip, it's the packaging that is massively unfriendly to the environment, stupid. Who are you calling stupid? If you're going to call someone or something stupid, don't do it in a stupid way.
- lisper 5y ago
  It's an allusion to Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign slogan: "It's the economy, stupid." See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_the_economy,_stupid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_the_economy,_stupid
davedx 5y ago
What the hell does this have to do with the chips?
randomopining 5y ago
Yeah but some Android stuff and windows stuff is so low-end that it only lasts for like 2 years and then it's functionally obsolete because of software. All the mac stuff from 10 years ago seems to still be able to work and has security updates.
aagha 5y ago
You can always put your money where your mouth is and support someone that is doing all of the above: https://frame.work/ https://frame.work/
- lisper 5y ago
  Yes, I have one on order! :-)

by lisper 5y ago

sktrdie 5y ago

Won't that make the chip bigger and/or slower? I think the compactness where the main components are so close together and finely tuned that makes the difference. Making it composable probably means also making it bigger (hence won't fit in as small spaces) and probably slower than what it is. Just my two cents though am not a chip designer.

Tuna-Fish 5y ago
Just making the SSD (the only part that wears) replaceable would greatly increase the lifespan of these systems, and while supporting M.2 would take up more space in the chassis, it would not meaninfully change performance or power.

threeseed 5y ago

I just used Apple's trade-in service for my 2014 MacBook Pro and received $430. So there is another, quite lucrative, option besides discarding it.

grvdrm 5y ago
Good to know and thanks! Looking forward to doing the same as I have a 2014 MBP that works and is in good condition.

oblio 5y ago

Yeah, but one of them doesn't cost a ton to implement (what they're doing) and the other one would cost them a ton through lost sales (what you're asking for). Always follow the money :-)

grenoire 5y ago
Erhh... I think OP gets it, he's just calling out the greenwashing.

savanaly 5y ago

Is there an estimate of what the externality cost is for the packaging per unit? Would be useful to compare to other things that harm the environment like eating meat, taking car rides, to know how much I should think about this. E.g. if my iphone packaging is equivalent to one car ride I probably won't concern myself that much, but if it's equivalent to 1000 then yeah maybe I should. Right now I really couldn't tell you which of those two the true number is closer to. I don't expect we would be able to know a precise value but just knowing which order of magnitude it is estimated to be would help.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

nojito 5y ago

>But what they won't do is put the chip in an expandable and repairable system so that you don't have to discard and replace it every few years. This renders the carbon-neutrality of the chips meaningless. It's not the chip, it's the packaging that is massively unfriendly to the environment, stupid. Mac computers last way longer than their PC counterparts.

gruez 5y ago
Is apple's halo effect affecting your perception of the mac vs PC market? iPhones last longer because they have much longer software updates, and are more powerful to start with. None of these factors apply to macs vs PCs.

schleck8 5y ago

Apple, the company that requires the entire panel to be replaced by design when a 6 dollar display cable malfunctions, is proud to announce its latest marketing slogan for a better environment.

rubyist5eva 5y ago
Obsession with emissions has really made people start to miss the forest from the trees.
- castis 5y ago
  Could you elaborate on what you mean by this?
  - supertrope 5y ago
    I'm guessing they mean greenwashing statements about lower CO2 emissions glosses over more "traditional" pollution as heavy metals, organic solvents, SO2, NOx. Taming overconsumption is greener than finding ways to marginally reduce per unit emissions on ever more industrial production.
  - 8ytecoder 5y ago
    Not OP. Personally, I've had Dell, HP and Sony laptops. But the macs have been the longest lasting of them all. My personal pro is from 2015. It has also come to a point where none of the extensions makes sense for me. 512GB is plenty. RAM might be an issue - but I honestly don't have enough data on that. The last time I had more than 16GB RAM was in 2008 on my hand built desktop. As long as the battery can be replaced/fixed - even if it's not user serviceable, I'm okay with that. I'd guess I'm not in the minority here. Most people buy a computer and then take it to the store even if there's a minor issue. And Apple actually shines here. I have gotten my other laptop serviced - but only in unauthorized locations with questionable spare parts. With Apple, every non-tech savvy person I know has been able to take to an Apple store at some point and thereby extend the life. That's why I believe having easily accessible service locations does more to device longevity than being user-serviceable. (In comparison, HTC wanted 4 weeks to fix my phone plus 1wk either way in shipping time and me paying shipping costs in addition to the cost of repair. Of course, I abandoned the phone entirely than paying to fix it.) We could actually test this hypothesis - if we could ask an electronics recycler on the average age of the devices they get by brand, we should get a clear idea on what brands actually last longer.

Grustaf 5y ago

This only makes sense if you presume people throw away their laptops when they replace them after "a few years". Given the incredibly high second hand value of macbooks, I think most people sell them or hand them down.

the_jeremy 5y ago
My F500 company has a 5 year tech refresh policy, and old laptops are trashed, not donated or resold.
- azinman2 5y ago
  I cannot imagine that represents the majority of the market.
- saiya-jin 5y ago
  Exactly, corporate never risks them getting into wrong hands, no matter how theoretical risk that might be. Same for phones
  - lizknope 5y ago
    We used to remove the hard drives which takes about 20 seconds on a desktop that has a "tool-less" case. Then donate the computer to anybody including the employees if they want it. It takes a few minutes to do that on a laptop but it's not that long.
    - oneplane 5y ago
      Seems like FDE would solve that and make it a hardware non-issue.
      - fomine3 5y ago
        Work if you trust FDE. Some FDE are broken, like this: https://www.zdnet.com/article/flaws-in-self-encrypting-ssds-let-attackers-bypass-disk-encryption/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/flaws-in-self-encrypting-ssds-...

sudhirj 5y ago

All of my Apple laptops (maybe even all their products) see about 5 to 8 years of service. Sometimes with me, sometimes as hand-me-downs. So they’ve been pretty excellent at not winding up in the trash. Even software updates often stretch as far back as 5 year old models, so they’re pretty good with this.

dntrkv 5y ago
Big Sur is officially supported by 2013 Mac models (8 years). iOS 15 is supported by the 6s, which was 2015. So 6 years. And I still know people using devices from these eras. Apple may not be repair friendly, but at the end of the day, their devices are the least likely to end up in the trash.
patall 5y ago
And here I am sitting at my 2011 Dell Latitude wondering what is so special about that. My sis had my 2013 Sony Duo but that's now become unusable with its broken, built-in battery. Yes, 5 to 8 years of service is nice, but not great or out of norm for a $1000+ laptop.
- jbverschoor 5y ago
  Because they run windows. If you look at android phones, you're looking at a few years only. Because of software
  - patall 5y ago
    Parent is talking about laptops, I am talking about laptops, why are you talking about smartphones? Though I also had my Samsung S2plus from 2013 to 2019 in use, and that was fairly cheap. I do not know any IPhone users that had theirs for longer.
    - lamnk 5y ago
      My iphone 2G from 2007 still works well into 2013-2014.

ravi-delia 5y ago

It absolutely doesn't render the carbon-neutrality of the chip useless. Concern about waste and concern about climate change are bound by a political movement and not a whole lot else. It's not wrong to care about waste more, but honestly its emissions that I care about more.

Mikeb85 5y ago
> It's not wrong to care about waste more, but honestly its emissions that I care about more. Waste creates more emissions. Instead of producing something once, you produce it twice. That's why waste is bad, it's not just about disposing of the wasted product.
- ravi-delia 5y ago
  Not if the company that produces them is carbon neutral, which is theoretically the argument here. In general you're obviously correct, but I'd expect most emissions aren't incurred from waste.

moralestapia 5y ago

>This renders the carbon-neutrality of the chips meaningless. You have a point but if they were actually truly neutral it wouldn't matter if you make 100,000 of them and throw them away.

itsangaris 5y ago

As others have said, the option to easily configure the computer post-purchase would make a massive difference in terms of its footprint

remir 5y ago

Isn’t most of the components in MacBooks recyclable? If I remember correctly, Apple has a recycling program for old Macs so it’s not like these machines goes to landfill when their past their time or broken.

peatmoss 5y ago
I believe Apple tries to use mostly recyclable components. And they do have a fairly comprehensive set of recycling / trade-in programs around the globe: https://www.apple.com/recycling/nationalservices/ https://www.apple.com/recycling/nationalservices/ That being said, I haven’t read any third-party audits to know if this is more than Apple marketing. Would be curious if they live up to their own marketing.
- smoofles 5y ago
  > Would be curious if they live up to their own marketing. Do people really think that companies like Apple et al (who have a huge number of people following them eager to rip into them at ever opportunity) could get away with a "marketing story" like that? Like, really, Apple just making all that up and _not one single person_ whistleblowing on it if it were a lie?
iSnow 5y ago
AFAIK their recycling is shredding everything, no matter if it still works and separating gold and some other metals.
- threeseed 5y ago
  When you trade-in your Mac you are asked if the enclosure is free of dents, turns-on, battery holds charge etc. Strange that they would ask these questions if they were simply going to shred the device.
  - neop1x 5y ago
    >> Strange that they would ask these questions if they were simply going to shred the device. Why not? It does sound micer that way and some customers may actually think they resell them just because of this...

mlindner 5y ago

This isn't relevant to the chips. Take this to the other thread.

soheil 5y ago

They would make less money if they made the chip repairable. This doesn't have to make them evil. Apple being more profitable also means they can lower the cost and push the technological advancement envelop forward faster. Every year we will get that much faster chips. This is good for everyone. This doesn't mean Apple's carbon footprint has to suffer. If Apple does a better job recycling old Macbooks than your average repair guy who takes an old CPU and puts in a new one in a repairable laptop then Apple's carbon footprint could be reduced. I remember the days when I would replace every component in my desktop once a year, I barely thought about recycling the old chips or even selling them to someone else. They were simply too low value to an average person to bother with recycling them properly or reselling them.

google234123 5y ago
Chips aren't made out of vacuum tubes any more, you can't "fix" a transistor
theshrike79 5y ago
> They would make less money if they made the chip repairable How would a 5 nanometer chip be "repairable"? Who would be able to repair such a chip and what would the tool cost be?

simonh 5y ago

>so that you don't have to discard and replace it every few years Except you and I surely must know that's not true, that their machines have industry leading service lifetimes, and correspondingly high resale values as a result. Yes some pro users replace their machines regularly but those machines generally go on to have long productive lifetimes. Many of these models are also designed to be highly recyclable when the end comes. It's just not as simple as you're making out.

cududa 5y ago
Right. Im not speaking to iPhones or iPads here, but the non-serviceability creates a robustness pretty unmatched by Windows laptops in terms of durability. Was resting my 2010 MBP on the railing of a second story balcony during a film shoot and it dropped onto the marble floor below. Got pretty dented, but all that didn't work was the ethernet port. Got the 2015 one and it was my favorite machine ever - until it got stolen. 2017 one (typing on now) is the worst thing I've ever owned and I'm looking forward to getting one of the new ones. 2017 one: -Fries any low voltage USB device I plug in (according to some internal Facebook forms they returned 2-5k of this batch for that reason) -When it fried an external drive plugged in on the right, also blew out the right speaker. -Every time I try and charge it I get to guess which USB-C port is going to work for charging. If I pick wrong I have to power cycle to power brick (this is super fun when the laptops dead and there's no power indicator, as there is on the revived magsafe) -Half-dime shaped bit of glass popped out of the bottom of the screen when it was under load - this has happened to others in the same spot but user error.. Pissed Apple wouldn't replace it given how many other users have had the same issues, but this thing has taken a beating as have my past laptops. I'll still give them money if the new one proves to be as good as it seems.
ohgodplsno 5y ago
> their machines have industry leading service lifetimes Please stop copying marketing content, it really doesn't help your argument. Additionally, macbooks have high failure rates, especially with keyboards in the previous generations, but also overheating because of their dreadful airflow. Time will tell what happens to the M1, but Apple's hardware is just as (un)reliable as say, Dell's. No, personal experience isn't data.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

merpnderp 5y ago

My family has 3 MBP's. 2 of them are 10 years old, 1 of them is 8. When your laptops last that long, they're good for the environment.

coryfklein 5y ago

> it's the packaging that is massively unfriendly to the environment, stupid. Of all the garbage my family produces over the course of time, my Apple products probably take less than 0.1% of my family's share of the landfill. Do you find this to be different for you? Or am I speaking past the point you're trying to make here?

jjcm 5y ago

> what they wont do is put the chip in an expandable and repairable system Because that degrades the performance overall. SoC has proven itself to simply be more performant than a fully hotswappable architecture. Look at the GPU improvements they're mentioning - PCIe 5.0 (yet unreleased) maxes out at 128GB/s, whereas the SoC Apple has announced today is transferring between the CPU/GPU at 400GB/s. In the end, performance will always trump interchangability for mobile devices.

andrekandre 5y ago
yep, thats definitely true but it would be nice if the soc itself would be a module that you could upgrade and keep the case/display, it would also cut down on environmental impact probably as well...
fomine3 5y ago
Comparing memory interface vs PCIe isn't valid. Comparing LPDDR5 vs DDR5 latency, throughput, and power consumption would be good.
- jjcm 5y ago
  In this case I'd argue it is, because to communicate between the CPU and GPU on a non-SoC computer, you need to send that data through the PCIe interface. On the M1 SoC, you don't. They operate differently, and thats the main point here. You have to add those extra comparison points.

ink404 5y ago

agree with your point, but one could also look at the performance/power savings and use that in an argument for environmentally friendliness

clajiness 5y ago

> It's not the chip, it's the packaging that is massively unfriendly to the environment, stupid. Who are you calling stupid? If you're going to call someone or something stupid, don't do it in a stupid way.

lisper 5y ago
It's an allusion to Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign slogan: "It's the economy, stupid." See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_the_economy,_stupid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_the_economy,_stupid

davedx 5y ago

What the hell does this have to do with the chips?

randomopining 5y ago

Yeah but some Android stuff and windows stuff is so low-end that it only lasts for like 2 years and then it's functionally obsolete because of software. All the mac stuff from 10 years ago seems to still be able to work and has security updates.

aagha 5y ago

You can always put your money where your mouth is and support someone that is doing all of the above: https://frame.work/ https://frame.work/

lisper 5y ago
Yes, I have one on order! :-)