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.
5 year old computers are end of life? What is wrong with apple. I’m glad I only bought one iphone and moved back to android afterwards
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.
@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
Not that big of an issue. Although Intel-based Macs won’t get software updates, they will be fine for many more years. My 2013 iMac is still going strong on its last os update back in 2019.
@mick @GravitySpoiled Although you can always of course use the excellent Opencore Legacy Patcher to (unofficially) run the latest version of macOS on Macs going back to 2007. That will run great on your machine.
@GravitySpoiled They may provide security updates for a couple of more years, but as the article points out, Intel Macs in the Apple Silicon era are on their way out.
Also a good point, this isn’t to knock products like the Fairphone since they’re offering extremely long product support windows, which should drive down demand for new devices and reduce their carbon footprint.
This is misleading. The models mentioned won’t get the latest MacOS update, true, but they will be supported. My older 2016 MBP is stuck on BigSur or something, but gets security updates regularly and doesn’t have any incompatibilities so far. I could probably force update it if I wanted to. Apple is known for supporting their devices for longer than other manufacturers.
Apple devices have enough legit reasons for criticism, no need to make up new ones.
Anyone knows how the usage is being estimated? What is the expected lifespan and how does one come up with a carbon budget there?
@phoenix Regarding the assumed operating life of devices:
“For the purposes of our assessment, years of use, which are based on first owners, are modeled to be four years for macOS and tvOS devices and three years for iOS and watchOS devices. Most Apple products last longer and are passed along, resold, or returned to Apple by the first owner for others to use.”
Hope that helps!
Thank you, that sheds some light onto it, yes. I’m still wondering how this number marches up. Just using the device by far uses not even comparable amount of energy than e.g. the production and then it also depends if you use green energy or a diesel generator in your backyard.
Not sure how to read this.
@phoenix It looks to be statistical inference based on sampled and modelled data. On p. 57 of the report: “To model customer use, we measure the power consumed by a product while it is running in a simulated scenario. Daily usage patterns are specific to each product and are a mixture of actual and modeled customer use data.”
The number of devices for the statistical inferences is: “In fiscal year 2018, we sold 217,722,000 iPhone devices, 43,535,000 iPad units, and 18,209,000 Mac products.”
Sorry, my old Toshiba was on it’s last legs, it’s from like 2010. Good news is I’m hoping the Framework I just got will be the last and now I’ll just upgrade, because I can, for as long as 64gb of DDR5 will get me (only 32gb rn, but once ddr6 comes out and ddr5 gets cheaper it’ll be go time and extend the life until I need to upgrade the mainboard and by that time it’ll be ddr7/8/9!)
I’m thinking sodimms will be retired by the time ddr6 comes out, and replaced by the camm2 standard everyone is talking about.
