6 ms·

Forgive me my specific view: The M2 itself is marvelous. But the highly integraded path apple chose with all its hardware ruins it for me. For me, its envirome

Forgive me my specific view: The M2 itself is marvelous. But the highly integraded path apple chose with all its hardware ruins it for me. For me, its enviromentally insane to buy such a device that is nearly unrepairable. In context, my Macbook air just died yesterday ... the one from 2014. Luckily, its the replaceble SSD that went dead. And due to OpenCore, it still runs the latest MacOS. If I would by the new M2 with the new MacBook Air: Same problem would doom the complete hardware. And I would have been stuck with the OS that Apple deems I can have. Maybe this comes with age, but I see buzzwords + glitz + speedups ... but little to none envirmental progress. Which is a shame.

kansface 4y ago
You can't make that form factor and a repairable laptop, no?
- sam0x17 4y ago
  Well, the framework laptop is really going places for one. They just need to hit that slightly higher high end with an i9 and an OLED imo
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  I don't see why not. With M.2 SSDs and DIMM sticks you've got quite a thin minimum footprint. Apple has decided that soldering everything onto the PCB is worth the cost of making the device unrepairable, and that's their business decision (and yours if you decide to buy such devices). There are downsides to normal solutions (i.e. higher latency, needing to design places for screws to go) but it's not nearly as impossible as modern tech companies would like you to believe. Framework has designed a laptop with some excellent repairability and they're just a small team with extremely limited funds. Tech giants like Apple should have no trouble coming up with similar devices if they actually cared to do so.
  - nojito 4y ago
    Idk where this idea of repairability = good for the environment came from. You’ll be hard pressed to find a laptop that is built with more recycled material than a MacBook.
    - kappuchino 4y ago
      Are you open to ideas? Repairability = good for the environment comes from replacing a small piece of a larger hardware item so the whole hardware does not have to be recycled in the first place. Now what happens when the MacBook has a defect processor or ram or ssd or screen? The whole thing is trash. And thats much more footprint than any smolten copper/gold/... that was put into it. The only reusability is shredding - most of the time! - and smelting/separating the metals, which causes a lot of enviromental issues.
    - spiffytech 4y ago
      The old slogan "reduce, reuse, recycle" is written in priority order: buying recycled products is good, but extending life and avoiding consumption are better.
      - nojito 4y ago
        Apple forces people to buy base configs, they support their devices longer than others, and their laptops are built from more recyclable parts than the competitors.
        kappuchino 4y ago
        "they support their devices longer than others" - true. its just after that time apple keeps the key to the device so they become insecure electronic ... paperweights? I mean, whats the use of an old phone / ipad / ... that you can infect with a single message, yet you can't run an alternate os on it. This is the point of the critcism: Unrepairable Hardware + Lockdown = Paperweights over time = less ecological than a modular, repairable and unlocked laptop, computer or phone.
        JohnTHaller 4y ago
  - PragmaticPulp 4y ago
    > I don't see why not. With M.2 SSDs and DIMM sticks you've got quite a thin minimum footprint. The memory used in Apple laptops is not the same type of memory that you find on a DIMM. The architecture is more like a GPU, with high-speed memory placed as close as possible to the CPU. Nobody complains that they can't upgrade the RAM on their GPU because we all understand the benefits of putting it on the same PCB. Apple did the same with CPUs. > Framework has designed a laptop with some excellent repairability and they're just a small team with extremely limited funds. Tech giants like Apple should have no trouble coming up with similar devices if they actually cared to do so. 99.9% of consumers do not care about upgrading. They wouldn't be opening their laptops and trying to swap out components even if they could. It's not reasonable to expect Apple to compromise the design of their system to cater to the vanishingly small minority of customers who demand such features. For that minority of users, companies like Framework exist to fill the void. However, let's not pretend like the Framework laptop is on par with an M1/M2 Apple laptop in terms of speed, size, power, battery life, or really any other metric beyond ability to swap out parts. They're cool laptops, but Apple's highly integrated products are on a different level entirely.
    - thefz 4y ago
      > The memory used in Apple laptops is not the same type of memory that you find on a DIMM. The architecture is more like a GPU, with high-speed memory placed as close as possible to the CPU. That was a design decision too. It's not that they bought a chip, they made it themselves. > It's not reasonable to expect Apple to compromise the design of their system to cater to the vanishingly small minority of customers who demand such features. I repaired an upgraded dozens of laptops for friends and family, extending their service life for years. Less rare earth in a landfill and more money in the pockets of my acquaintances. The "small minority" is "vanishing" because people are being trated more and more like consumers that throw away the current toy to buy a new one. Companies like Apple are the root cause to this. They want this.
      - throw457 4y ago
        They build upon an architecture they knew from their phone socs and arm mobile socs never had dimmable ram. I get your viewpoint but your arguments are null if you look back on how their silicone came to be.
- kappuchino 4y ago
  You are right. But instead of making things smaller all the time, a company could chose to make things better repairable - like the framework laptop. Would Apple do that? No, why should they, since most if its hardware buyers are oblivious to the implications of bad repairability. It least thats what I think, but what do I know ...
- thefz 4y ago
  Check out the service manual for a Lenovo X1 Yoga. You can replace/repair almost everything and it's one of the thinnest devices. Apple goes for the soldered internals to spill you even more money since thy are the only ones able to repair it. https://download.lenovo.com/pccbbs/mobiles_pdf/tp_x1_carbon_gen9_x1_yoga_gen6_hmm_en.pdf https://download.lenovo.com/pccbbs/mobiles_pdf/tp_x1_carbon_...
- AshamedCaptain 4y ago
  I have smaller x86 tablets that are more repairable.
jeroenhd 4y ago
It's a real shame, but the people working on Ahasi Linux seem to be making steady progress. With a bit of luck, the device will remain usable when Apple eventually drops support for this machine, assuming the non-user-replaceable parts like the storage or the RAM don't wear out.
lotsofpulp 4y ago
> Maybe this comes with age, but I see buzzwords + glitz + speedups ... but little to none envirmental progress. They are doing plenty of environmental progress considering MacBook Airs have no competition in terms of price to longevity and power usage relative to the performance and utility one can get out of them.
- kappuchino 4y ago
  I think you did not misunderunderstand me on purpose, but the modularity/repairablity is abysmal, period. One example: Internal ssd dead - system cannot be used. And since its soldered in, thats it. Am I wrong?
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    Sure, but they are making tradeoffs, whether it be portability or profit. Either way, their machines and product tend to last very long relative to the competition, and they seem to be doing the most to drive down power consumption. Little to no environmental progress seems overboard from my perspective.
  - least 4y ago
    I think their point is there multiple ways that you can tackle the environmental impact of the devices you use and Apple is approaching that in multiple ways, just not in terms of easier repairability. That doesn't mean you can't be critical of what they're doing here, of course.
  - lancesells 4y ago
    You are not wrong and it's a really terrible thing they are doing with all their devices outside of the Mac Pro and maybe Mac Studio.
dzhiurgis 4y ago
Maybe it failed because it was repairable... Sealing everything into one blob is going to be way more reliable than thousands of crusty connections.
- kappuchino 4y ago
  Thats an interesting opinion. I wonder if there are statistics on failures of ssds that are soldered and that are modular ... ;-) You would be amazed how similar they are.
  - dzhiurgis 4y ago
    I’m sure Apple has data. Ultimately user xp is better when device doesn’t fail instead of easy repair when it does.
    - makapuf 4y ago
      Replacing cheaply the ssd with 4 times the capacity / speed a few years later sure seems good xp for me.
      - dzhiurgis 4y ago
        Seems you need different hardware then. Most people don’t care. We are literally on a thread where new CPU is made every year and you say people want to replace ssd…
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      Huh, that's a new one. > Citation needed? > I’m sure Apple has data.
onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
At least in the US - the cost to repair a laptop is quite high & cumbersome - and the depreciation is quite fast - such that there aren't a lot of cases where it financially makes sense to repair. This is a problem not unique to laptops. I don't know how to feel about it.
tristor 4y ago
> For me, its enviromentally insane to buy such a device that is nearly unrepairable. I would generally feel the same, the only reason I don't is that Apple laptops tend to last a very long time for me and get replaced due to becoming obsolete, not due to becoming nonfunctioning. My 2011 MBA was in use until 2016, my 2015 MBP is still in use and due to be replaced soon. The lifespan of one of these devices is roughly 5 years in my use case, and I usually hand them down to someone else that needs a decent computer but where my use cases have outgrown it. I know one I handed off is still being used 10 years after it was purchased and it still works "fine" for some value of fine. That's not an argument against repairability, but to say that a well-made product often has a longer lifespan than a useful lifespan for its original owner.
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
  A large number of Macbook Pros from around 2013-2015 have had failed SSDs. Mine failed 4 years ago. Because I was able to put in a new SSD - one twice the size and about twice the speed, I might add - I was able to keep using the system, and still am. I had to use an adapter, because Apple tried to discourage SSD replacement by using a proprietary pinout on the NVMe connector. If the soldered-on SSD in an M1 mac fails, you can't even boot the system. You can't send the system off to have someone do a board-level replacement, because apparently they do some bullshit to "pair" the flash chips with the flash controller. Apple has gone out of their way to take systems that used to be incredibly durable and long-lasting, and give them a very finite lifespan.
Zanneth 4y ago
> If I would by the new M2 with the new MacBook Air: Same problem would doom the complete hardware. And I would have been stuck with the OS that Apple deems I can have. There is nothing preventing you from installing an alternate OS on AppleSilicon Macs. Apple supports this officially via something called Apple Secure MultiBoot.
- TheMode 4y ago
  What alternate OS? The one where developers are still in the process of reverse engineering Apple's SoC?
  - nobodywasishere 4y ago
    Asahi Linux
    - TheMode 4y ago
      That would fit the second part of my message.
      - solarkraft 4y ago
        It's usable (like right now) and certainly will be when Apple drops macOS support for it.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  This was not an option until MacOS 12.2, and AFAIK is not "officially supported" or even documented by Apple. Can you link to somewhere where they describe supporting this?
collias 4y ago
Repairability is certainly something that could be improved, and extending the life of your machine is great for the environment. However, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a machine with a better power-performance curve than the M1 (or now M2) machines. Reducing the electrical power needed for the same amount of processing power is absolutely helpful for the environment; the new chips are doing much more for much less. Additionally, Apple tends to support old hardware far longer than competitors. My personal machine is still a 2012 MBP and it's just now starting to not receive the latest OS updates.
- alpaca128 4y ago
  > Reducing the electrical power needed for the same amount of processing power is absolutely helpful for the environment Just not buying a new device is likely still better for the environment, though a jump to the ARM architecture makes a bit more sense in that regard. There are many lower hanging fruits than the energy consumption of laptops.

kansface 4y ago

You can't make that form factor and a repairable laptop, no?

sam0x17 4y ago
Well, the framework laptop is really going places for one. They just need to hit that slightly higher high end with an i9 and an OLED imo
jeroenhd 4y ago
I don't see why not. With M.2 SSDs and DIMM sticks you've got quite a thin minimum footprint. Apple has decided that soldering everything onto the PCB is worth the cost of making the device unrepairable, and that's their business decision (and yours if you decide to buy such devices). There are downsides to normal solutions (i.e. higher latency, needing to design places for screws to go) but it's not nearly as impossible as modern tech companies would like you to believe. Framework has designed a laptop with some excellent repairability and they're just a small team with extremely limited funds. Tech giants like Apple should have no trouble coming up with similar devices if they actually cared to do so.
- nojito 4y ago
  Idk where this idea of repairability = good for the environment came from. You’ll be hard pressed to find a laptop that is built with more recycled material than a MacBook.
  - kappuchino 4y ago
    Are you open to ideas? Repairability = good for the environment comes from replacing a small piece of a larger hardware item so the whole hardware does not have to be recycled in the first place. Now what happens when the MacBook has a defect processor or ram or ssd or screen? The whole thing is trash. And thats much more footprint than any smolten copper/gold/... that was put into it. The only reusability is shredding - most of the time! - and smelting/separating the metals, which causes a lot of enviromental issues.
  - spiffytech 4y ago
    The old slogan "reduce, reuse, recycle" is written in priority order: buying recycled products is good, but extending life and avoiding consumption are better.
    - nojito 4y ago
      Apple forces people to buy base configs, they support their devices longer than others, and their laptops are built from more recyclable parts than the competitors.
      - kappuchino 4y ago
        "they support their devices longer than others" - true. its just after that time apple keeps the key to the device so they become insecure electronic ... paperweights? I mean, whats the use of an old phone / ipad / ... that you can infect with a single message, yet you can't run an alternate os on it. This is the point of the critcism: Unrepairable Hardware + Lockdown = Paperweights over time = less ecological than a modular, repairable and unlocked laptop, computer or phone.
      - JohnTHaller 4y ago
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  > I don't see why not. With M.2 SSDs and DIMM sticks you've got quite a thin minimum footprint. The memory used in Apple laptops is not the same type of memory that you find on a DIMM. The architecture is more like a GPU, with high-speed memory placed as close as possible to the CPU. Nobody complains that they can't upgrade the RAM on their GPU because we all understand the benefits of putting it on the same PCB. Apple did the same with CPUs. > Framework has designed a laptop with some excellent repairability and they're just a small team with extremely limited funds. Tech giants like Apple should have no trouble coming up with similar devices if they actually cared to do so. 99.9% of consumers do not care about upgrading. They wouldn't be opening their laptops and trying to swap out components even if they could. It's not reasonable to expect Apple to compromise the design of their system to cater to the vanishingly small minority of customers who demand such features. For that minority of users, companies like Framework exist to fill the void. However, let's not pretend like the Framework laptop is on par with an M1/M2 Apple laptop in terms of speed, size, power, battery life, or really any other metric beyond ability to swap out parts. They're cool laptops, but Apple's highly integrated products are on a different level entirely.
  - thefz 4y ago
    > The memory used in Apple laptops is not the same type of memory that you find on a DIMM. The architecture is more like a GPU, with high-speed memory placed as close as possible to the CPU. That was a design decision too. It's not that they bought a chip, they made it themselves. > It's not reasonable to expect Apple to compromise the design of their system to cater to the vanishingly small minority of customers who demand such features. I repaired an upgraded dozens of laptops for friends and family, extending their service life for years. Less rare earth in a landfill and more money in the pockets of my acquaintances. The "small minority" is "vanishing" because people are being trated more and more like consumers that throw away the current toy to buy a new one. Companies like Apple are the root cause to this. They want this.
    - throw457 4y ago
      They build upon an architecture they knew from their phone socs and arm mobile socs never had dimmable ram. I get your viewpoint but your arguments are null if you look back on how their silicone came to be.
kappuchino 4y ago
You are right. But instead of making things smaller all the time, a company could chose to make things better repairable - like the framework laptop. Would Apple do that? No, why should they, since most if its hardware buyers are oblivious to the implications of bad repairability. It least thats what I think, but what do I know ...
thefz 4y ago
Check out the service manual for a Lenovo X1 Yoga. You can replace/repair almost everything and it's one of the thinnest devices. Apple goes for the soldered internals to spill you even more money since thy are the only ones able to repair it. https://download.lenovo.com/pccbbs/mobiles_pdf/tp_x1_carbon_gen9_x1_yoga_gen6_hmm_en.pdf https://download.lenovo.com/pccbbs/mobiles_pdf/tp_x1_carbon_...
AshamedCaptain 4y ago
I have smaller x86 tablets that are more repairable.

jeroenhd 4y ago

It's a real shame, but the people working on Ahasi Linux seem to be making steady progress. With a bit of luck, the device will remain usable when Apple eventually drops support for this machine, assuming the non-user-replaceable parts like the storage or the RAM don't wear out.

lotsofpulp 4y ago

> Maybe this comes with age, but I see buzzwords + glitz + speedups ... but little to none envirmental progress. They are doing plenty of environmental progress considering MacBook Airs have no competition in terms of price to longevity and power usage relative to the performance and utility one can get out of them.

kappuchino 4y ago
I think you did not misunderunderstand me on purpose, but the modularity/repairablity is abysmal, period. One example: Internal ssd dead - system cannot be used. And since its soldered in, thats it. Am I wrong?
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  Sure, but they are making tradeoffs, whether it be portability or profit. Either way, their machines and product tend to last very long relative to the competition, and they seem to be doing the most to drive down power consumption. Little to no environmental progress seems overboard from my perspective.
- least 4y ago
  I think their point is there multiple ways that you can tackle the environmental impact of the devices you use and Apple is approaching that in multiple ways, just not in terms of easier repairability. That doesn't mean you can't be critical of what they're doing here, of course.
- lancesells 4y ago
  You are not wrong and it's a really terrible thing they are doing with all their devices outside of the Mac Pro and maybe Mac Studio.

dzhiurgis 4y ago

Maybe it failed because it was repairable... Sealing everything into one blob is going to be way more reliable than thousands of crusty connections.

kappuchino 4y ago
Thats an interesting opinion. I wonder if there are statistics on failures of ssds that are soldered and that are modular ... ;-) You would be amazed how similar they are.
- dzhiurgis 4y ago
  I’m sure Apple has data. Ultimately user xp is better when device doesn’t fail instead of easy repair when it does.
  - makapuf 4y ago
    Replacing cheaply the ssd with 4 times the capacity / speed a few years later sure seems good xp for me.
    - dzhiurgis 4y ago
      Seems you need different hardware then. Most people don’t care. We are literally on a thread where new CPU is made every year and you say people want to replace ssd…
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    Huh, that's a new one. > Citation needed? > I’m sure Apple has data.

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago

At least in the US - the cost to repair a laptop is quite high & cumbersome - and the depreciation is quite fast - such that there aren't a lot of cases where it financially makes sense to repair. This is a problem not unique to laptops. I don't know how to feel about it.

tristor 4y ago

> For me, its enviromentally insane to buy such a device that is nearly unrepairable. I would generally feel the same, the only reason I don't is that Apple laptops tend to last a very long time for me and get replaced due to becoming obsolete, not due to becoming nonfunctioning. My 2011 MBA was in use until 2016, my 2015 MBP is still in use and due to be replaced soon. The lifespan of one of these devices is roughly 5 years in my use case, and I usually hand them down to someone else that needs a decent computer but where my use cases have outgrown it. I know one I handed off is still being used 10 years after it was purchased and it still works "fine" for some value of fine. That's not an argument against repairability, but to say that a well-made product often has a longer lifespan than a useful lifespan for its original owner.

KennyBlanken 4y ago
A large number of Macbook Pros from around 2013-2015 have had failed SSDs. Mine failed 4 years ago. Because I was able to put in a new SSD - one twice the size and about twice the speed, I might add - I was able to keep using the system, and still am. I had to use an adapter, because Apple tried to discourage SSD replacement by using a proprietary pinout on the NVMe connector. If the soldered-on SSD in an M1 mac fails, you can't even boot the system. You can't send the system off to have someone do a board-level replacement, because apparently they do some bullshit to "pair" the flash chips with the flash controller. Apple has gone out of their way to take systems that used to be incredibly durable and long-lasting, and give them a very finite lifespan.

Zanneth 4y ago

> If I would by the new M2 with the new MacBook Air: Same problem would doom the complete hardware. And I would have been stuck with the OS that Apple deems I can have. There is nothing preventing you from installing an alternate OS on AppleSilicon Macs. Apple supports this officially via something called Apple Secure MultiBoot.

TheMode 4y ago
What alternate OS? The one where developers are still in the process of reverse engineering Apple's SoC?
- nobodywasishere 4y ago
  Asahi Linux
  - TheMode 4y ago
    That would fit the second part of my message.
    - solarkraft 4y ago
      It's usable (like right now) and certainly will be when Apple drops macOS support for it.
smoldesu 4y ago
This was not an option until MacOS 12.2, and AFAIK is not "officially supported" or even documented by Apple. Can you link to somewhere where they describe supporting this?

collias 4y ago

Repairability is certainly something that could be improved, and extending the life of your machine is great for the environment. However, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a machine with a better power-performance curve than the M1 (or now M2) machines. Reducing the electrical power needed for the same amount of processing power is absolutely helpful for the environment; the new chips are doing much more for much less. Additionally, Apple tends to support old hardware far longer than competitors. My personal machine is still a 2012 MBP and it's just now starting to not receive the latest OS updates.

alpaca128 4y ago
> Reducing the electrical power needed for the same amount of processing power is absolutely helpful for the environment Just not buying a new device is likely still better for the environment, though a jump to the ARM architecture makes a bit more sense in that regard. There are many lower hanging fruits than the energy consumption of laptops.