MacBook Air owner?
2018/2019 models are losing #Apple support.
#OptGreen with #GNU/#Linux to keep your device in use! These machines will run beautifully for many years to come.
Not only wallet friendly, #upcycling keeps CO2 emissions out of the atmosphere. Ca. 75% of Apple’s emissions comes from production alone (details in alt text).
Sustainable, independent #FreeSoftware: Better for users, best for the #environment.
I may be completely wrong but don’t Samsung, Google etc. stop supporting OS updates on Android phones after 5-6 years? Apple have supported devices for 6-8 years AFAIK.
Yeah this same conversation happens every time one of these headlines comes up and gets misinterpreted. The conclusion is usually that apple has longer than average hardware support across the board
It’s worthless when you can’t upgrade a damn thing, it’s frankly unacceptable to produce a laptop with soldered RAM and a soldered SSD (with no expansion options)
Apple claims it’s for speed and performance, which is technically true, but you’re not going to notice that 10% difference between a good quality NVMe and some speedy DDR5 RAM
But you will notice when you try to save some money on base RAM and base storage and then realize, you can’t upgrade shit a year or 2 later and your only option is to drop another couple grand for a whole new device
Fuck Apple.
“Not as shit as you could be” is not something we should be praising. A handful of years is still too short, just because it is marginally better than their competitors doesn’t mean we should give Apple a pass. It just means that the industry is full of shitty companies that profit off of producing e-waste, and know that consumers have no real choice but to put up with it.
On the other hand, I can put an open OS on my Android and get security updates long after the manufacturer has abandoned it. Can’t do that with an iPhone. (But honestly, few Android devices make it easy, and none that I know of allow every little part of the system to be supported this way.)
It’s about time we started legally requiring manufacturers to unlock our hardware when support ends, and release the driver specs ahead of time, so the open software community can take over support. The unending accumulation of e-waste due to nothing more than abandoned software is unforgivable.
This goes hand-in-hand with the right to repair.
You can format the Mac and put Linux on it and get updates forever as well.
Edit: or you could when it was x86… not sure where Mx stand on that.
Asahi Linux are working on it, should be pretty polished by the time the M1s stop getting updates.
@mox @manualoverride while I absolutely agree with your position, also keep in mind that this has security implications.
Beside the fact that most vendors dont even use all the patches available from AOSP, no custom ROM project can backport all patches. Sooner or later this means there are devices that cant be securely used anymore, unless someone does the effort.
a vendor concept with a subscription could solve this I guess or enough support for an open project e.g. @GrapheneOS
OEM support for the device is needed because an alternate OS cannot provide firmware updates otherwise. In practice, driver updates also come from the OEM. Providing the Android Open Source Project backports is nowhere close to full security patches. It’s unfortunate that most alternate operating systems mislead users about this by setting an inaccurate Android security patch level field, not being honest about what’s missing and downplaying the importance of it.
