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.
> 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.
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?
It definitely still exists on AOSP, and most vendors still have it. Xiaomi did get rid of it. It used to be available, then only available if you "disable MIUI optimizations", then it's been entirely removed. Whether this is to force you to buy two phones, or simply as a result of how amateurish the software stack on Xiaomi phones is up to debate.
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.
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.
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..
There was a whole fiasco with Toyota Camries maybe 15 or so years ago where the brakes would go out. It turned out that Toyota skimped out on thick enough wires or wire insulation and either the wire connecting the brakes to the pedal wore out or the insulation wore out and caused the brake wire to short. They chose the wiring they did to save something like 2 cents a unit (each Camry).
My laptop repair count went way down (from 3 a year to one every 5 years) once chips no longer had the ability to become unseated. I think it is a reliability boon and a repair cost savings, not an up-front cost savings.
Working IT consulting for about 5 years, I have never experienced an end user with an unseated chip, not even on my personal products.
Irony, of all laptop I have owned, the most problematic was the Apple PowerBook. It's screen became defected a month or two after the warranty ended. The external VGA connection had issues and might require a couple restarts to get a signal. It could barely be used as a desktop computer. Even though I used it to write my first production software solution. It was ditched as soon as financially possible.
> They integrated an NVMe controller into the SoC and they can now just buy NAND chips instead of full SSDs.
What they/everyone really ought to do is to standardize that, with the flash chips themselves still connected via a modular connector and the "NVMe controller" as open source.
Imagine integrating the flash ECC/RAIN with ZFS et al. Or the ability to decide for yourself if you want a lot of QLC or a bit of SLC or a mix of both, in software at runtime.
Failure rates are multiplicative, not concurrent. If I have a car with an engine that lasts on average 200k miles, adding a transmission that fails on average at 300k miles results in a vehicle with a MTBF of less than 200k miles.
As far as I know, they can't. Why would Thunderbolt be special?
At least some portion of an operating system's bootloader chain must be installed to the internal storage, because that's all the firmware knows how to read (unlike Wintel PCs where there's a UEFI driver providing USB storage stack support). That bootloader running from internal storage is then free to enumerate external storage devices to locate the rest of the OS it is trying to load.
:) 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...
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
If that’s not planned obsolescence I don’t know what it is.
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."
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.)
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,
> "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.
I bought an M1 Max with a 2TB SSD, but I’m running up against the capacity and I want more storage. The computer is still plenty fast. Normally, I’d upgrade my computer and continue using it, but now I need to sell it and get a new one to get more storage. Not to mention the carbon cost of doing that, these things are $4000!
Further, when I buy a new one, I’m now incentivized to over-provision it based on my current needs by that same logic.
I used OWC parts to make a 16 TB m2 SSD array that connects over Thunderbolt. It's fast enough to edit 8K footage, just like the internal disk. Look for the 4-bay Thunderbolt enclosure on Amazon. I did add extra cooling (heatsinks on the modules, and a bigger fan).
I have one of those suckers, but the read/write performance is nowhere near the multi GB/s speeds of the NAND. Could be useful for archival, but it wasn’t great for blockchain indexing or running VMs.
USB4 can hit those speeds, but then you’re in dongle town.
Agreed, it's just minority of users trying to defer extra $2500 upfront, and also about managing RAM capacity arms race. There is no engineering reason a laptop has to be upgraded _later_ to e.g. 8way/192GB/6TB configuration.
That said, I do think upgradable laptops are important as a resistance force against constant upgrades and planned obsolescence; if you could hypothetically add 2x32GB DDR4-2100 to a decade old ThinkPad and run stolen Apple Intelligence LLM just fine, the humanity wouldn't need $5k worth of labor wasted on one laptop per person per year.
Completely custom chip? Best webcams? Extremely tidy internals. Insane audio. You can hate on apple for many reasons but that their hardware is top class and this will demand much more engineering cost is really clear.
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.
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...
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.
Just look at the latest iMac M4.
Going from 256GB SSD to 512GB costs 230€.
Going from 256GB to 1TB costs 460€. The smallest model isn't offered with 2TB (or more). The upgrade from 512GB to 2TB on the better model costs 690€
You're saying few people would buy the 256GB model and pop in a fast 2TB M.2 SSD for 103€ if they could?
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.
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.
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.
That is an iCloud lock thing that you need to worry about, but aside from antitheft issue, it’s actually quite nice to reinstall the OS on an Apple Silicon Mac because it behaves like an iOS device. You can simply use Apple Configurator or an open source tool on Linux to DFU restore the device. It’s faster than installing OS by booting into recovery mode.
With the way modern macOS is immutable and exactly the same on all machines thanks to signed and sealed images, no one needs to DFU to reset a Mac unless there is something very wrong.
Macs have had internet recovery even in Intel days (command+option+R). On Apple silicon they also have a nice erase process which quickly erases (effacable storage) as you describe but doesn’t quite as quickly install. In my experience DFU (or recovery) is faster esp if you have the macOS image pre downloaded. I usually opt for that even if not strictly necessary and firmware is not bricked.
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.
I factory reset a 2012 Mac book pro that was needed for a client to use to check emails and use the web browser. Device was instantly blocked by Apple from accessing most websites because the factory version of the OS was deemed insecure by Apple. This included blocking the updater from being able to update the device via the web to a safe version of the OS that was available. What was supposed to be a 1 hour service became about 4 hours of me reading online trying to work out wtf was going on. Then I had to spend time navigating my way around the nightmare of distro hopping it up OS updates manually til it got to the most recent "safe" supported os version.
Device works completely fine and lives behind a well secured network (battery was stuffed but it lives plugged in). Apple took it upon themselves to dictate to the user that it was no longer fit for operation. Apples solution was "replace the device and send the old one to landfil.
Apple literally greenwash their entire business model. But they are one of the most wasteful companies around.
Meanwhile I'm still reformatting 8, 12 and 15 year old windows pcs with Linux and putting them back into service for email checking and basic web browsing without a single hiccup. Saving more and more from landfil, they get used once in a blue moon but it's literally all the owners want. They don't mind waiting a bit for stuff to turn on, hell plenty of them are over 60, they've spend their life being patient and a few mins to make a cuppa while something turns on is a blessing to them.
> Device was instantly blocked by Apple from accessing most websites because the factory version of the OS was deemed insecure by Apple.
Is that your way of saying "it doesn't support any modern SSL ciphers?" I don't think there is anything built into the OS that asks Apple if it's allowed to visit websites.
Well given it was both the update app and the web browser, not just the web browser. It's definitely built in. Unless their app updater/software updater is just safari with an overlay.
The updater and Safari would use the same TLS/SSL library (which would only support older, no longer secure TLS ciphers and would have the same root certificates, some of which would be expired). If you put a recent version of Firefox or Chrome on (via a USB drive), they bundle their own TLS libraries and certificates so those would work.
(But in the same way the OS ones weren't working, you wouldn't be able to use a 12 year old version of Firefox or Chrome to access most websites either for the same reasons).
Either way the inbuilt update system had zero way of updating itself or the OS to something that worked and it resulted in a painful few hours of stepping the system up through various OS versions downloaded on other devices until it got to the end of the downloadable versions, and from there on it was inbuilt app for updates only. No downloadable OS. Which would indicate since you can no longer download the latest OS iso's eventually they will block the last available Iso's one from working on their app store and the devices will be bricks.
This is shite design. Let's not kid ourselves here. This is one of the wealthiest companies on earth and thy control their entire hardware and software stack from the ground up. If they can't keep stuff sorted so when an old system plugs in it atleast limp mode upgrades it to the latest offering that system was supported with, this isn't because it's something that's impossible, it's because they don't want to.
If community non profit managed linux distros can get installed on 15 year old machines and just you know, sort out the drivers for the ancient ass tech in them without the user doing any more than running the update manager to hell apple couldn't have worked out the same.
It's a load of crap sold under the guise of security. Some nefarious actor wants to dl updates from their servers for ancient tech? Why in the world should they not be able to? Their update servers shouldn't have any services attached other than being a glorified dl directory.it shouldn't even be something they care about because there is zero risk attached.
> This is shite design . . . [Stuff] sorted so when an old system plugins in it at least limp mode upgrades
It’s an economic- and risk-based calculation based on security.
You’re trying to get a TWELVE-YEAR OLD system online. Let’s see, since 2012, TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 have been officially deprecated (in 2021). In 2024, companies serving TLS 1.1 do not pass certain modern compliance standards. Mountain Lion from 2012 doesn’t support TLS 1.2. Are you arguing that they should leave around a TLS 1.1-based endpoint up, with ciphers that are no longer recommended? And how many CAs can still issue a valid cert trusted by a 12-yr old system?
> [there is zero risk attached]
Community-based Linux distros also offer HTTP (insecure) mirrors. There is also zero risk attached to the mirror serving HTTP. All the risk is on the user side. They don’t care that it’s an exploitable vector. They don’t have a commercial risk/downside. They didn’t sell fleets of old devices with their name on it.
> This is one of the wealthiest corporations on earth
Well this is why. It’s because they spend their money wisely. They decided that supporting OSes over 7 year old (with god knows what unpatched critical bulbs) is not money wisely spent and poses too much risk to their user populace, so they would rather not allow it, rather than support it. They don’t want to train their support on it and they don’t want to allow the possibility of punters getting their old hardware to an older release with open CVEs.
SSL/TLS/etc are libraries, yes. And the certificate store is an OS service.
Ancient software has trouble talking to modern services; modern services and devices don't want to fall back to speaking the old versions because of downgrade attacks.
And if you have an important CA certificate expire, you can't talk to anything.
Why can't you just put Linux on the Macbook then? Most 12-15 year old laptops are not capable of running the current version of Windows, either, and have major vulnerabilities.
Because the client is >55 in age and isn't a fan of change. They want what they are used to. Other clients who are more open to learning definitely and have in the past gotten linux. Huge fan of using it for bringing life back to old hardware. Some clients are however very abrasive towards the idea of a different OS/Interface/Change.
Your elderly client made a smart choice using MacOS. Elderly using Windows were not given a choice to not upgrade to Windows 8, this forced upgrade was a crime against the elderly, many of whom suffered in silence.
Not sure if this is what they meant, but from what I've heard, lots of companies send "obsolete" devices to recyclers without disabling Activation Lock. Not really Apple's fault, but if they added a last-resort way to wipe devices they could cut down on a lot of waste. I'm somewhat skeptical that locking does anything to deter thieves anyway.
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.
> 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).
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.
> 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.
M.2 devices save space on a PCB: yes, the connector itself takes some room, but the alternative is sticking all those chips on the PCB itself, and those chips take up more space (just look at any M.2 NVMe drive). The M.2 form factor is moving those things off the main PCB, and onto a daughterboard that usually sits directly on top of it and parallel to it.
The idea that a PCB gets larger with an M.2 slot is truly insane.
Even on desktop motherboards, the space under a M.2 slot is usually nearly empty. On laptop motherboards, it is almost always completely empty save for possibly a thermal pad. Some laptops position the M.2 slot to have the SSD extend beyond the edge of the motherboard. But in either case, laptops are not reducing PCB footprint by using M.2 SSDs, because nothing gets stacked under the SSD; that space is reserved for the SSD.
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.
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.
> Wow, it’s almost like they are a publicly traded company with a legal obligation to do so!
This is an amazingly common misconception about fiduciary responsibility to share holders. Nowhere in the law does it state that they must seek profit and shareholder value at all costs, above all other concerns, regardless of the impact. Companies are absolutely allowed to do things that are not 100% aligned with self interest. Many companies routinely do such things like charitable giving, excellent customer service, expensive processes that make the product more recyclable or repairable, etc.
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!
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.
It boggles my mind that there are legions of people like this who will defend mega corporations for free. If you're gonna gaslight for a trillion dollar corporation, at least get paid to do it.
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. ; )
Maybe people are just tired of the same old low-quality axe grinding that fills the HN comments section every time any story appears about Apple.
This whole page is filled with people rehashing 15-year-old complaints, moaning about computers other than the one in the article, and generally turning the whole thing into yet another off-topic bitch session.
You can put together a BINGO sheet for HN comments any time there is a story about Apple ("walled garden!"), Google ("graveyard!"), Microsoft ("Micro$oft!"), or Adobe ("subscription!").
It's old. It's boring. It's off-topic. It is rightly downvoted.
You forget to list 'it is not true' as the reason for downwote, my child!
(no, you did not forget, you had no such reason, only that you are bored or some are even offended by others do not like what is grown to be precious while done with a megaload of pretention and are not tired of pointing it out. Like a fella closeby, participating in distributing billions of electronics using a sizeable chunk of Earth's resources, then is proud of not throwing away each and every vessel he/she drank out of on the campus. And does not see the galactic inbalance. Does not want to, I suspect. Happy with the rigtheous image put on like a t-shirt. Being bored is no fucking mandate to make actions or criticize in this free discussion. Your bored sensitivity is insignificant in the subject, try to grow up, be adult and see the significant part of picture too and take seriously what is serious - unlike your boredom - instead of trying to wrap reality around your lack of amusement, please. People like yourself yield to pretentious greediness preserving a problem with willfull an intentional ignorance make problems 'old' - but definitely not boring. Would you care please yawn a huge one and downvote anything of a different an even bigger and even older 'boring' problem like child poverty for example? Just as an instance, there are mountains of 'old' and 'boring' problems you could consider boring and righful of shut about it! :( Before biting on details or analogies, the subject of criticism is the ignorant and egocentric mentality you represent, not the randdom elements came accross.)
I did not say that it’s bad or wrong or changeable.
I was actually just trying to explain that the internal feelings of employees are not the driving force, even if those feelings are real and deeply felt.
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!)