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Comment by nojito | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

The old slogan "reduce, reuse, recycle" is written in priority order: buying recycled products is good, but extending life and avoiding consumption are better.

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.

"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.

> they support their devices longer than others

They support the laptop/desktop hardware longer than others. Software-wise, Windows supports a given hardware set longer than macOS does. Note that you can mod macOS to support older hardware than it official does (dosdude1, ben216k, opencore).

They've ended support for 2015 Macbooks after seven years. Even Microsoft, heavily critisised for its arbitrary cutting off point in Windows 11, still supports Windows 10 for years to come, supporting devices for well over 10 to 13 years. Personally, I think it's unacceptable that a $2k device from 2016 gets less support than a $700 laptop from 2012, especially in cases where the hardware manufacturer is also the software manufacturer.

If you want to run a fully patched operating system on the top-of-the-line Macbook you bought in 2016 you'll have to run Windows or Linux. Apple's software patches for older versions are spotty and often incomplete, after all, because so many devices upgrade to the latest OS immediately unless they have no choice.

iOS definitely receives excellent support, but Apple's reputation for long term support only seems to apply to mobile phones. The computer market has higher standards for software support in which Apple doesn't perform well.

> 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.

How is swapping one part built with "recycled material" not better than swapping that one part plus the whole rest of the device with equally "recycled material"?

Reusing instead of recycling will always be more environment friendly. No exception.

The idea came from logic, and from people who study the environment, and from endless peer reviewed studies.

Had you spent a few moments looking into the issue, you too would have come to the same conclusion.

> You’ll be hard pressed to find a laptop that is built with more recycled material than a MacBook.

From reading their materials, all the aluminum and most of the tin in the laptop are recycled, and most of the packaging they send you the computer in, and that seems to be it.

Chips can't be recycled. Macs seem to contain very little recycled plastic. The circuit boards are definitely not recyclable.

Reduce; reuse; recycle in that order.

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