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It's not that they actively do bad things, it's that they only dedicate real resources in the direction of self-interest. Tim Cook likes to point to their solar

It's not that they actively do bad things, it's that they only dedicate real resources in the direction of self-interest. Tim Cook likes to point to their solar investments and accessibility as examples of "doing good" when in reality the former is a good long term financial bet and the latter is generally under-resourced (or "cheap" to them). They'd use M.2 SSDs in their Macs instead of soldering flash chips to the board to allow for upgradeability, but that would seriously hurt the average profit margin on their devices and (maybe) take more time to engineer. The areas where their self-interest and the environment overlap are truly awesome, like shipping iPhones without chargers (increased margins) and in smaller paper boxes (more efficient shipping), but I don't wear rose-colored glasses about it. They'll also never let the iPad run macOS, because if people could own one device instead of two, that would be bad for their profits. They'll keep them cleanly differentiated for as long as they can. (I also worked in engineering at Apple!)

2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
You can tell they're full of shit because they can't stop tooting the green horn. It's self evident. If they made their devices repairable, easily resellable, etc. then they wouldn't have to greenwash.
- ben_w 2y ago
  They don't strictly need to greenwash even despite the difficulties with repairing their devices. They talk about green stuff because that's what they want to be, for whatever reason.
  - mikae1 2y ago
    > They talk about green stuff because that's what they want to be, for whatever reason. How else would the conscious consumer justify another marginal hardware update?
    - ben_w 2y ago
      > How else would the conscious consumer justify another marginal hardware update? I don't even know how they do it with all of that. None of the changes between successive versions of the iPhone — ever — have felt like good value for money to me. I get new ones when the old ones break. Then again, I am a weird outlier in economic things, and I've known that since I was a teen. I'd ask if people really are so much more interested in signalling green than being green, but of course I know they do — an old flame campaigned Green in the US, despite also having a big thing about supporting the striking coal miners in the UK (that happened before she was born).
- Kirby64 2y ago
  I’ll bite: what about their devices is not easily resellable? Sure seems easy to factory reset basically anything Apple, and their resale values hold up a lot better than most devices.
  - _mlbt 2y ago
    Exactly! My iPhone 12 Mini is actually worth replacing the battery in. I could do that and still turn a profit reselling it, or continue using it for a couple more years before it actually becomes obsolete and unusable.
  - reaperman 2y ago
    Apple Silicon MacBook's are actually a bit difficult to truly factory reset. In a divorce I ended up with an M1 MBP that was first set up using my ex-wife's AppleID, but was primarily my laptop. Her administrator account was deleted, my AppleID was shown in all the system setting menus that I could see in the operating system, and "FindMy" on her phone at least was not tracking its location. Two years later I updated my login password and then promptly forgot the exact punctuation of the new password. I ended up getting completely locked out of the laptop with no self-service options to fix anything. That day I learned that you have to boot into a special mode to truly factory reset, not just delete the administrator accounts with other AppleIDs. I was able to get Apple to remotely unlock the computer for me, but only because I could "prove" it was mine by sending them the original invoice slip from store.apple.com with my name, email, and the serial number of the laptop on it. But that invoice slip is literally a piece of paper in a box, and you can't access it yourself after 18 months - I had to call into Apple support and get them to email me a new copy because it had been longer than 18 months. If I had purchased the laptop from someone else on craigslist 2 years prior and then got locked out, I would be completely shit-out-of-luck, because I wouldn't be able to prove I truly owned it.
    - wtallis 2y ago
      I think the key thing to check is that the device is no longer shown on the previous owner's iCloud account when checking through the website. It's Apple's servers that you have to ensure no longer hold any association between that machine and an iCloud account that you don't have the credentials for, because the activation lock that survives a complete erase of the machine is implemented server-side.
FirmwareBurner 2y ago
> (maybe) take more time to engineer Apple, the richest company in the world, who spends millions in money and engineering hours on stuff like making sure the packaging having the right neutral smell, and the box sliding out with the right amount of friction when you open it, and on security teams/mercenaries able to pull family members of workers from warzones, and you're telling me they have to nickel and dime their HW team for routing an NVME slot on the board instead of soldering the NAND chips because that would cost some more engineering time? Thanks for the chuckle, I loved it. I think Apple spends more on toilet paper or hand soap in a month than the effort would cost their HW engineers to do that.
- harikb 2y ago
  :) but we take it that you are not disagreeing on the first part of their claim? That said, I have bought many cheap Windows PCs/Laptop in my lifetime and I have only ever upgraded them once and they also don't last as long. Somehow... I don't feel shouting at Apple. These things do last a bit longer...
- ferbivore 2y ago
  It's to reduce unit costs, not engineering costs. They integrated an NVMe controller into the SoC and they can now just buy NAND chips instead of full SSDs. Soldering them to the board is just an asshole thing to do though, especially since these machines can't boot off of USB if the NAND dies. Surely some elastomer BGA sockets wouldn't cost that much. There's no sane explanation other than they're doing it so you have to buy a new Mac to get more storage.
  - Wytwwww 2y ago
    > It's to reduce unit costs The increase in per unit cost probably would be entirely insignificant and minuscule compared to the revenue they'd lose by not being able to charge predatory prices for storage upgrades. So it would be a secondary or a tertiary concern at best..
    - 7speter 2y ago
romanobro56 2y ago
“They only dedicate real resources in the direction of self interest” Wow, it’s almost like they are a publicly traded company with a legal obligation to do so!
- piyuv 2y ago
  You know, keeping the planet we live on alive is also self interest.
  - mihaaly 2y ago
    (... just silently, with a shy look: perhaps could make and distribute much much less fast obsoleting electronic devices then?... just an idea...)
  - anticensor 2y ago
    Court enforceable (immediate or imminent) vs. activism required (long term or indirect) distinction enters the picture there.
- throwaway48476 2y ago
  Of course. But it's hypocritical to then pretend like they care about the environment when they manifestly don't.
  - mihaaly 2y ago
    I wonder how many offended Apple employees and dedicated fans hang around this article, but seeing the number of grey comments being a bit sceptical about the overall efficiency of Apple environmentalism there most be more than one. ; ) But maybe still less than the number of electronics mass produced, sparing no efforts and resources, to supply mass(es of) consumers, the world!
    - throwaway48476 2y ago
      We live in a sick society where peoples identities are intertwined with their consumer choices and they feel personally attacked by criticism of a megacorporstion. An engineer is more likely to be aware of design tradeoffs and skeptical of marketing fluff.
lynx23 2y ago
Funny how accessibility seems to be both. Too complex and manpower-sucking to actually fully support, and cheap, because someone need his argument to work. As a VoiceOver (blind) iOS user (since 13 years or so) I submit you are underestimating the complexity of something like shipping a screen reader for every device you put out. Yes, there are days where I hope the Accessibility Team had more resources to fix obviously long-standing issues, but that doesn't let me forget what a gracius gesture it originally was to say "Fuck ROI, we're going to be the first to do this."
- conradev 2y ago
  The entire organization is very small. The work is complex, yes. They get to work early on their new platforms, which is great planning and prioritization. All great stuff. But if it took an organization 1,500 people strong, like Maps and Siri did, I’m not so sure the Apple of today would do it. The praise goes first to the hard working engineers and managers who deeply care about this stuff, and second to management is all I’m saying. For context, I built the Shortcuts app! (edit: AX is also a much broader effort, because it improves usability for everyone on the ability spectrum, and it digs into design, too. So I do think it does have a more foundational role because Apple is still at its core a design-driven company. I think of all of the effort to make the apps usable at all text sizes, for example. The easier to use the products are for more people, the more people will buy them. There are less inherent trade-offs in AX than with the environment/carbon, where selling fewer devices is in direct conflict with sustainability goals.)
v1ne 2y ago
Using an M2 SSD instead of soldering the chip on board has more implications: PCB gets physically larger, and takes more power or has less performance talking to the SSD. Heat transfer is also worse. I completely understand why they go for a soldered SSD chip. One way of true environmentally-friendly innovation could have been to find a way to attach the SSD chip so that a user could safely replace it, though, with little additional space.
- conradev 2y ago
  Yes! I forgot that the NVMe controller is on-die. I want some way to swap the NAND chips. Reminds me of this video: https://youtu.be/KRRNR4HyYaw https://youtu.be/KRRNR4HyYaw For an iMac, though, they have a bigger thermal envelope and no battery. It seems more reasonable. Apple even did the software engineering necessary to support the Mac Pro. That would be Apple’s counter-argument right there. Want Linux on your M1? Get a Mac, not an iPad. Want swappable storage? Get a Mac Pro, not an iMac.
  - Aaron2222 2y ago
    This video[0] claims to show such a mod to a MacBook. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3N-z-Y8cuw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3N-z-Y8cuw
    - thrtythreeforty 2y ago
      That is some gorgeous PCB work. And goes to show that JLCPCB (you can tell from the order number) is perfectly usable for applications needing a controller impedance stackup.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  > PCB gets physically larger, and takes more power or has less performance talking to the SSD. Heat transfer is also worse. I don't think these are real problems. The M.2 device would take up space you could have used for the PCB, but then you would have had to use that PCB space for the chips that are on the SSD. The SSDs in current Macbooks do around 3GB/s. NVMe Gen5 does 14GB/s. The speed-of-light latency from any kind of connector is going to be totally irrelevant compared to the latency of the flash controller itself. There is no performance concern. Power is the same; when idle the link goes to sleep, when in use the connector is negligible compared to the device itself. Heat transfer doesn't even seem related. If you want to improve heat transfer from the SSD then you put it into thermal contact with a heatsink or the chassis, which you can do regardless of whether it's M.2 or not. > One way of true environmentally-friendly innovation could have been to find a way to attach the SSD chip so that a user could safely replace it, though, with little additional space. The only real space requirement is the size of the connector itself, which is on the order of 50 square mm in a PCB which in a 12" laptop is some tens of thousands of square mm. <0.5% is "little additional space" to begin with. Obviously you could design a connector which is even smaller, but the premise would have to be that that's even a real problem.
rowanG077 2y ago
I think it's extremely overestimated by the technical crowd how many people would ever upgrade their RAM or SSD in their Macbook. I honestly doubt it's even in the single digit percentage points. The energy, engineering and material wasted on having connectors probably vastly outweighs the environmental savings by having that one tech person upgrade their RAM or SSD,
- indymike 2y ago
  The article is about the desktop iMac model. Regardless, I think many would upgrade because ssds are cheap... RAM would lead to customers getting another year or two out of their computer...
  - rbanffy 2y ago
    Its very easy to upgrade storage on any desktop machine - my Mac Mini has a couple external drives attached to it. In the case of an iMac, a little Velcro tape would even hide them behind the screen.
- Reason077 2y ago
  > "I think it's extremely overestimated by the technical crowd how many people would ever upgrade their RAM or SSD in their Macbook." Back in the day when this was possible (iBooks, Powerbooks, early-model MacBooks), I'd say that a large percentage of Mac laptops eventually did get upgraded. I certainly upgraded 100% of the Macs I owned and also did many for friends and family. Some models made upgrades quite easy: the RAM slots, especially, were often accessible without special tools. It was common to buy the base model Mac with the fastest CPU, then install your own RAM modules and big HDD/SSD to save money. Swapping HDDs out for SSDs was also, of course, a huge performance upgrade for a while. Even non-technical users who wouldn't upgrade their Macs on their own would often trade them in to dealers/resellers who would refurbish and upgrade them for resale.
- hajile 2y ago
  Apple wants $1200 for a 4TB SSD. I'm sure a LOT of people would gladly pay $300 for a top-end SSD of the same size and pay someone to install it for $100 and still save $800 on the price of the machine.
hnburnsy 2y ago
> They'll also never let the iPad run macOS, because if people could own one device instead of two, that would be bad for their profits. They'll keep them cleanly differentiated for as long as they can. They also don't have profiles on the iPad because then families could share devices which would be bad for their profits. Instead it is one iPad per person.
- brookst 2y ago
  You know some rich families! I know a half dozen families with shared ipads, and not a one where each person gets their own.
  - flemhans 2y ago
    Sharing an iPad feels weird to me. Denmark middle class chiming in
    - wodenokoto 2y ago
      Haha, was about to write the same.
      - dleary 2y ago
        I know a number of poor US families (on food stamps/WIC) who have a tablet per child. I think it is the norm, in the US. A cheap android tablet only costs a couple hundred bucks. That's just not that much, even for a poor family. And that buys years of 'childcare'.
        janstice 2y ago
        Also shared tablets don’t really work as kids homework devices.
- schmorptron 2y ago
  That functionality used to exist on Android, but I haven't seen it show up on the past two phones I owned. Does it still exist in stock and xiaomi just got rid of it for whatever reason?
xuki 2y ago
The engineer that developed AirDrop released an unofficial update because Apple would not support older Mac despite it was developed and tested on that very machine: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/s/gYXcHRGP4d https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/s/gYXcHRGP4d If that’s not planned obsolescence I don’t know what it is.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
conradev 2y ago
10/10/24 update: they’re actually removable! https://x.com/SnazzyLabs/status/1854959732228079714 https://x.com/SnazzyLabs/status/1854959732228079714
- fragmede 2y ago
  And dosdude1 has already shown that you can (if you can resolder bgas) upgrade the storage. https://youtu.be/cJPXLE9uPr8 https://youtu.be/cJPXLE9uPr8

2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago

You can tell they're full of shit because they can't stop tooting the green horn. It's self evident. If they made their devices repairable, easily resellable, etc. then they wouldn't have to greenwash.

ben_w 2y ago
They don't strictly need to greenwash even despite the difficulties with repairing their devices. They talk about green stuff because that's what they want to be, for whatever reason.
- mikae1 2y ago
  > They talk about green stuff because that's what they want to be, for whatever reason. How else would the conscious consumer justify another marginal hardware update?
  - ben_w 2y ago
    > How else would the conscious consumer justify another marginal hardware update? I don't even know how they do it with all of that. None of the changes between successive versions of the iPhone — ever — have felt like good value for money to me. I get new ones when the old ones break. Then again, I am a weird outlier in economic things, and I've known that since I was a teen. I'd ask if people really are so much more interested in signalling green than being green, but of course I know they do — an old flame campaigned Green in the US, despite also having a big thing about supporting the striking coal miners in the UK (that happened before she was born).
Kirby64 2y ago
I’ll bite: what about their devices is not easily resellable? Sure seems easy to factory reset basically anything Apple, and their resale values hold up a lot better than most devices.
- _mlbt 2y ago
  Exactly! My iPhone 12 Mini is actually worth replacing the battery in. I could do that and still turn a profit reselling it, or continue using it for a couple more years before it actually becomes obsolete and unusable.
- reaperman 2y ago
  Apple Silicon MacBook's are actually a bit difficult to truly factory reset. In a divorce I ended up with an M1 MBP that was first set up using my ex-wife's AppleID, but was primarily my laptop. Her administrator account was deleted, my AppleID was shown in all the system setting menus that I could see in the operating system, and "FindMy" on her phone at least was not tracking its location. Two years later I updated my login password and then promptly forgot the exact punctuation of the new password. I ended up getting completely locked out of the laptop with no self-service options to fix anything. That day I learned that you have to boot into a special mode to truly factory reset, not just delete the administrator accounts with other AppleIDs. I was able to get Apple to remotely unlock the computer for me, but only because I could "prove" it was mine by sending them the original invoice slip from store.apple.com with my name, email, and the serial number of the laptop on it. But that invoice slip is literally a piece of paper in a box, and you can't access it yourself after 18 months - I had to call into Apple support and get them to email me a new copy because it had been longer than 18 months. If I had purchased the laptop from someone else on craigslist 2 years prior and then got locked out, I would be completely shit-out-of-luck, because I wouldn't be able to prove I truly owned it.
  - wtallis 2y ago
    I think the key thing to check is that the device is no longer shown on the previous owner's iCloud account when checking through the website. It's Apple's servers that you have to ensure no longer hold any association between that machine and an iCloud account that you don't have the credentials for, because the activation lock that survives a complete erase of the machine is implemented server-side.

FirmwareBurner 2y ago

> (maybe) take more time to engineer Apple, the richest company in the world, who spends millions in money and engineering hours on stuff like making sure the packaging having the right neutral smell, and the box sliding out with the right amount of friction when you open it, and on security teams/mercenaries able to pull family members of workers from warzones, and you're telling me they have to nickel and dime their HW team for routing an NVME slot on the board instead of soldering the NAND chips because that would cost some more engineering time? Thanks for the chuckle, I loved it. I think Apple spends more on toilet paper or hand soap in a month than the effort would cost their HW engineers to do that.

harikb 2y ago
:) but we take it that you are not disagreeing on the first part of their claim? That said, I have bought many cheap Windows PCs/Laptop in my lifetime and I have only ever upgraded them once and they also don't last as long. Somehow... I don't feel shouting at Apple. These things do last a bit longer...
ferbivore 2y ago
It's to reduce unit costs, not engineering costs. They integrated an NVMe controller into the SoC and they can now just buy NAND chips instead of full SSDs. Soldering them to the board is just an asshole thing to do though, especially since these machines can't boot off of USB if the NAND dies. Surely some elastomer BGA sockets wouldn't cost that much. There's no sane explanation other than they're doing it so you have to buy a new Mac to get more storage.
- Wytwwww 2y ago
  > It's to reduce unit costs The increase in per unit cost probably would be entirely insignificant and minuscule compared to the revenue they'd lose by not being able to charge predatory prices for storage upgrades. So it would be a secondary or a tertiary concern at best..
  - 7speter 2y ago

romanobro56 2y ago

“They only dedicate real resources in the direction of self interest” Wow, it’s almost like they are a publicly traded company with a legal obligation to do so!

piyuv 2y ago
You know, keeping the planet we live on alive is also self interest.
- mihaaly 2y ago
  (... just silently, with a shy look: perhaps could make and distribute much much less fast obsoleting electronic devices then?... just an idea...)
- anticensor 2y ago
  Court enforceable (immediate or imminent) vs. activism required (long term or indirect) distinction enters the picture there.
throwaway48476 2y ago
Of course. But it's hypocritical to then pretend like they care about the environment when they manifestly don't.
- mihaaly 2y ago
  I wonder how many offended Apple employees and dedicated fans hang around this article, but seeing the number of grey comments being a bit sceptical about the overall efficiency of Apple environmentalism there most be more than one. ; ) But maybe still less than the number of electronics mass produced, sparing no efforts and resources, to supply mass(es of) consumers, the world!
  - throwaway48476 2y ago
    We live in a sick society where peoples identities are intertwined with their consumer choices and they feel personally attacked by criticism of a megacorporstion. An engineer is more likely to be aware of design tradeoffs and skeptical of marketing fluff.

lynx23 2y ago

Funny how accessibility seems to be both. Too complex and manpower-sucking to actually fully support, and cheap, because someone need his argument to work. As a VoiceOver (blind) iOS user (since 13 years or so) I submit you are underestimating the complexity of something like shipping a screen reader for every device you put out. Yes, there are days where I hope the Accessibility Team had more resources to fix obviously long-standing issues, but that doesn't let me forget what a gracius gesture it originally was to say "Fuck ROI, we're going to be the first to do this."

conradev 2y ago
The entire organization is very small. The work is complex, yes. They get to work early on their new platforms, which is great planning and prioritization. All great stuff. But if it took an organization 1,500 people strong, like Maps and Siri did, I’m not so sure the Apple of today would do it. The praise goes first to the hard working engineers and managers who deeply care about this stuff, and second to management is all I’m saying. For context, I built the Shortcuts app! (edit: AX is also a much broader effort, because it improves usability for everyone on the ability spectrum, and it digs into design, too. So I do think it does have a more foundational role because Apple is still at its core a design-driven company. I think of all of the effort to make the apps usable at all text sizes, for example. The easier to use the products are for more people, the more people will buy them. There are less inherent trade-offs in AX than with the environment/carbon, where selling fewer devices is in direct conflict with sustainability goals.)

v1ne 2y ago

Using an M2 SSD instead of soldering the chip on board has more implications: PCB gets physically larger, and takes more power or has less performance talking to the SSD. Heat transfer is also worse. I completely understand why they go for a soldered SSD chip. One way of true environmentally-friendly innovation could have been to find a way to attach the SSD chip so that a user could safely replace it, though, with little additional space.

conradev 2y ago
Yes! I forgot that the NVMe controller is on-die. I want some way to swap the NAND chips. Reminds me of this video: https://youtu.be/KRRNR4HyYaw https://youtu.be/KRRNR4HyYaw For an iMac, though, they have a bigger thermal envelope and no battery. It seems more reasonable. Apple even did the software engineering necessary to support the Mac Pro. That would be Apple’s counter-argument right there. Want Linux on your M1? Get a Mac, not an iPad. Want swappable storage? Get a Mac Pro, not an iMac.
- Aaron2222 2y ago
  This video[0] claims to show such a mod to a MacBook. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3N-z-Y8cuw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3N-z-Y8cuw
  - thrtythreeforty 2y ago
    That is some gorgeous PCB work. And goes to show that JLCPCB (you can tell from the order number) is perfectly usable for applications needing a controller impedance stackup.
AnthonyMouse 2y ago
> PCB gets physically larger, and takes more power or has less performance talking to the SSD. Heat transfer is also worse. I don't think these are real problems. The M.2 device would take up space you could have used for the PCB, but then you would have had to use that PCB space for the chips that are on the SSD. The SSDs in current Macbooks do around 3GB/s. NVMe Gen5 does 14GB/s. The speed-of-light latency from any kind of connector is going to be totally irrelevant compared to the latency of the flash controller itself. There is no performance concern. Power is the same; when idle the link goes to sleep, when in use the connector is negligible compared to the device itself. Heat transfer doesn't even seem related. If you want to improve heat transfer from the SSD then you put it into thermal contact with a heatsink or the chassis, which you can do regardless of whether it's M.2 or not. > One way of true environmentally-friendly innovation could have been to find a way to attach the SSD chip so that a user could safely replace it, though, with little additional space. The only real space requirement is the size of the connector itself, which is on the order of 50 square mm in a PCB which in a 12" laptop is some tens of thousands of square mm. <0.5% is "little additional space" to begin with. Obviously you could design a connector which is even smaller, but the premise would have to be that that's even a real problem.

rowanG077 2y ago

I think it's extremely overestimated by the technical crowd how many people would ever upgrade their RAM or SSD in their Macbook. I honestly doubt it's even in the single digit percentage points. The energy, engineering and material wasted on having connectors probably vastly outweighs the environmental savings by having that one tech person upgrade their RAM or SSD,

indymike 2y ago
The article is about the desktop iMac model. Regardless, I think many would upgrade because ssds are cheap... RAM would lead to customers getting another year or two out of their computer...
- rbanffy 2y ago
  Its very easy to upgrade storage on any desktop machine - my Mac Mini has a couple external drives attached to it. In the case of an iMac, a little Velcro tape would even hide them behind the screen.
Reason077 2y ago
> "I think it's extremely overestimated by the technical crowd how many people would ever upgrade their RAM or SSD in their Macbook." Back in the day when this was possible (iBooks, Powerbooks, early-model MacBooks), I'd say that a large percentage of Mac laptops eventually did get upgraded. I certainly upgraded 100% of the Macs I owned and also did many for friends and family. Some models made upgrades quite easy: the RAM slots, especially, were often accessible without special tools. It was common to buy the base model Mac with the fastest CPU, then install your own RAM modules and big HDD/SSD to save money. Swapping HDDs out for SSDs was also, of course, a huge performance upgrade for a while. Even non-technical users who wouldn't upgrade their Macs on their own would often trade them in to dealers/resellers who would refurbish and upgrade them for resale.
hajile 2y ago
Apple wants $1200 for a 4TB SSD. I'm sure a LOT of people would gladly pay $300 for a top-end SSD of the same size and pay someone to install it for $100 and still save $800 on the price of the machine.

hnburnsy 2y ago

> They'll also never let the iPad run macOS, because if people could own one device instead of two, that would be bad for their profits. They'll keep them cleanly differentiated for as long as they can. They also don't have profiles on the iPad because then families could share devices which would be bad for their profits. Instead it is one iPad per person.

brookst 2y ago
You know some rich families! I know a half dozen families with shared ipads, and not a one where each person gets their own.
- flemhans 2y ago
  Sharing an iPad feels weird to me. Denmark middle class chiming in
  - wodenokoto 2y ago
    Haha, was about to write the same.
    - dleary 2y ago
      I know a number of poor US families (on food stamps/WIC) who have a tablet per child. I think it is the norm, in the US. A cheap android tablet only costs a couple hundred bucks. That's just not that much, even for a poor family. And that buys years of 'childcare'.
      - janstice 2y ago
        Also shared tablets don’t really work as kids homework devices.
schmorptron 2y ago
That functionality used to exist on Android, but I haven't seen it show up on the past two phones I owned. Does it still exist in stock and xiaomi just got rid of it for whatever reason?

xuki 2y ago

The engineer that developed AirDrop released an unofficial update because Apple would not support older Mac despite it was developed and tested on that very machine: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/s/gYXcHRGP4d https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/s/gYXcHRGP4d If that’s not planned obsolescence I don’t know what it is.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

conradev 2y ago

10/10/24 update: they’re actually removable! https://x.com/SnazzyLabs/status/1854959732228079714 https://x.com/SnazzyLabs/status/1854959732228079714

fragmede 2y ago
And dosdude1 has already shown that you can (if you can resolder bgas) upgrade the storage. https://youtu.be/cJPXLE9uPr8 https://youtu.be/cJPXLE9uPr8