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Comment by sockaddr | Hacker News Reader

How do they create more ewaste though? Like many others report my experience is that apple products routinely last multiple times longer than other tech.

I only just last week retired a MacBook bought in 2013, and it still worked just fine. Now someone else bought it and is using it.

Things like PCs and android phones usually have some combination of cheap materials, bloat/crap ware or poorly designed software stacks that don’t age well.

I used to own PCs, buy android phones, etc and the difference in longevity is incredible.

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I have an early 2013 15" MBP now running Ubuntu and a late 2013 13" MBP and it is running the latest macOS that is supported on it and Windows 11. I have a new M1 MBP but those other two machines are just slow compared to this. They are otherwise going strong in their new roles.

It's a double-edged sword. Macbooks are sturdy in some areas (bottom case assembly) but fragile in others (display assembly and keyboard). The e-waste partially stems from a lack of repairability; common issues like a cracked display or shorted Logic Board capacitor will run you upwards of $500. Not because those individual parts are so expensive, but because the entire display/motherboard assembly has to be replaced. Perhaps that does get salvaged with Apple's first-party reclamation programs, but that just means the wastefulness is passed on to the customer in the form of a surcharge. It doesn't fix the vast majority of devices that will never return to Apple either.

Apple's absolute authority over the platform ruins it in the end. Simple regulation like forcing them to add user-servicable storage would prevent M1 devices from getting bricked after hitting their TBW limit. It was a no-brainer for John Deere, so why not the largest company in America?

You're conflating right to repair with ability to repair. The issue with John Deere was the farmers were able to repair the tractors, but the licensing prohibited them from doing so. The right to repair laws say nothing about making products being repairable. In fact right to repair might drive more things to be non-repairable - if the manufacturer still has to honor their warranty even after your repairs then they have an incentive to make it not repairable in the first place. That's a hard position for a tractor costing hundreds of thousands of dollars to make but it's a simple position for a maker of devices in the $1k-$3K range.

This is the main reason I only buy Apple hardware as well. The moment you open the box on a PC desktop, it's basically worthless beyond what you could part it out for. A Mac will maintain >50% of it's retail price for years.

A quick glance at the market for clamshell g3 iBooks shows how irrationally well Apple computers can hold value.

In theory, Apple could still offer products that last many years AND are upgradeable, so that they only get partially converted to waste.

That's not really true, there are no sockets for LPDDR4X or LPDDR5.

> How do they create more ewaste though? Like many others report my experience is that apple products routinely last multiple times longer than other tech.

Compared to some other tech, you're correct that the e-waste is comparable or better. However, the comparison above is Apple to Apple. The other tech companies are irrelevant for this. Apple has full ability to dramatically lower the amount of e-waste their products by making them more upgradeable/repairable, and they choose not to in order to maximize profit at the expense of everyone else. It absolutely doesn't have to be that way, but it is, and IMHO calling this out and being critical is 100% fair, much like you would call out an oil and gas company who was intentionally generating waste to maximize their profit, regardless of how they compared to other oil and gas companies.

But it's also very fair to point out what you've pointed out, that compared to others Apple is pretty good, so this is not a compelling reason to avoid buying Apple products if you're going to buy a different one that generates just as much or more e-waste.

The only things that are easily repairable in most laptops are the SSD and RAM, but those very rarely fail anyway so it makes essentially no difference to e-waste.

It's annoying. But that's about it.

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