What if Apple had released the PowerMac in other colors?

[Rikintosh]

iBook G4 Sparkle Motion special edition

I also made an iMac g3. I developed this paint inspired by the aluminum of the 2008 imacs

Obs. I'm not a depraved maniac who likes to spoil classics, I painted it because its carcass was brown due to the previous owner having used it all his life in a place that got a lot of sun

 

[amagichnich]

View attachment 1941787

I was wondering, what would powermacs look like in other flavors? I decided to create this preview.

I think it was complete stupidity to assume that the home market would only want all in ones. PowerMacs for the home audience would have been really cool, maybe it could even have boosted the "gamer" issue, as they were more powerful and versatile.

I like the red one! But what about the Polka Dot prototype AGPs they found in a secret warehouse near Cupertino last summer?

 

[B S Magnet]

I like the red one! But what about the Polka Dot prototype AGPs they found in a secret warehouse near Cupertino Miami last summer?

?

 

[B S Magnet]

And yet here we are in the most dystopian time and Apple has the most colorful product line in their history. (iMac, Apple Watch, iPhone, iPad)

Fashion, like history, always repeats, but in rhymes.

The current colour offerings are, as anodized metal goes, way more subdued than, say, the 4th and 5th generation iPod Nanos, which hit the market as the Great Recession was underway. And organic shapes remain few and far between with their 2022 offerings.

Rhymes.

 

[bunnspecial]

All their products are currently "more of the same", you can take a 2008 macbook and put it next to a 2022, and apart from the slightly darker color and the thinner screen border, they look like the same machine, besides being ugly with that giant touchpad

I think making this somewhat fair comparison is overlooking a lot...Apple made a lot of what are often consider mis-steps in the interim between those designs and in a sense has come full circle to realize that they really had something good back in 2008.

I'm sitting here typing this on an M1 Macbook Pro, which became my main machine nearly a year ago, replacing a 2012 MBP. The first generation M1 carries a lot of the interim mis-steps including the awful touchbar and a complete lack of connectivity outside 2x TB4 ports and a 3.5mm jack.

When you refer to "ugly" giant trackpad, have you actually used one? IMO, this is one of those areas where Apple has actually put a lot of thought into substantially improving an aspect of the UI of their systems rather than giving up functionality in the name of appearance. I've always considered Apple to have the best trackpads in the business, going back even to the days of computers like the Pismo. The glass "buttonless" trackpad of the 2008 unibody Macbook/Macbook Pro was a big step forward at the time. It freed up a lot of space for gestures, which if you embrace using them are a significant part of OS X/macOS interaction now. Making(sort of) the entire area clickable adds a lot of convenience.

The current trackpads are better than they've ever been. Bigger means more space for gestures and just general interaction, and palm recognition is good enough that I have fewer issues with inadvertent clicks or mouse movements than I ever did on PowerBook G4s. Even going back to my 2012 feels cramped, much less a TiBook. Also, I didn't appreciate just how big of a deal the forcetouch trackpads were until I lived with one. Someone who wasn't aware of what's going on in them wouldn't realize that the pad doesn't physically move when you click it-it's that well designed. At the same time, it actually truly does click anywhere on the surface, where the first generation buttonless design is hinged at the top so really only clicks toward the bottom half or so of the pad.

 

[kc9hzn]

I think the negative reaction to the B&W G3 killed the chance for fun "pro" macs forever, sadly. Though the post 9/11 shift mentioned by B S Magnet didn't help! Plus, volumes for G4 towers were likely not high enough to offer a bunch of choices effectively. Even if cheap to make the panels, this was a time where Apple was all about limited SKUs, so complicating the G4 line, which launched with two motherboards, three processor speeds and lots of BTO options with multiple case color options may have been a bridge too far.

I do agree that colors would have been amazing, looking at my Sawtooth and Quicksilver G4 towers, they are boring to look it. But then so is my iMac DV SE, I thought getting graphite was cool and edgy when colors were everywhere, now I wish I had a color even if it was slower at the time. (almost enough to get an M1 imac just for the appearance, but I have no use or space for it)

The original Mac Mini seemed to be the beginning of the end for a cheapish "non-pro" tower for home, sadly. I think we all wish there was a "Mac Mini," "Mac," and "Mac Pro" in the desktop line, but Apple seems to think that "Mac Mini," "grey Mac Mini" HUGE GAP ... Keep waiting .... "Mac Pro" works from them.

The reception of the G4 Cube probably also hurt the chances of a consumer-y tower in a five flavors style of color lineup. Also, oh, goodness no! Not a Dalmatian or Flower Power colored Power Mac! The Power Mac doesn’t deserve to have that abomination photoshopped onto it, what did it ever do to hurt you?!

 

[kc9hzn]

I like white in general. It means “clean, bright, friendly”to me. Just have to make sure it doesn’t get dirty or starts yellowing because that quickly looks gross.

I think there’s a time and a place for bright colors, white plastic, and subdued metallics. People in this thread seem to have forgotten about the iPhone 5c, which was Apple’s most recent experiments with colored plastic. While I certainly prefer the iPhone in anodized aluminum instead of plastic, perhaps, building on the iPhone 5c, splashier colors and plastic could be used in a child’s edition of the Apple Watch?

White definitely has that clean look to it, and, to some extent, it can even fade into the background. At the very least, it’s a fairly organic color and would pair well with the Apple Store decor. But the look of the future seems to be the “all display, no chin” look of Wall-E style screens (seemingly) just floating in free space.

 

[B S Magnet]

I think there’s a time and a place for bright colors, white plastic, and subdued metallics. People in this thread seem to have forgotten about the iPhone 5c, which was Apple’s most recent experiments with colored plastic. While I certainly prefer the iPhone in anodized aluminum instead of plastic, perhaps, building on the iPhone 5c, splashier colors and plastic could be used in a child’s edition of the Apple Watch?

I never forgot about the iPhone. It’s just that I’m not a consumer of the iPhone, the iPad, or the iPod Touch. I’m generally not a fan of glass UIs, and I even lament not having a tactile keyboard on my non-iPhone phone (as with my old Nokia E62, which was a joy to use).

A thing about Apple’s offerings which has been quite nice, though, is the constant existence of a bright anodized red — the Product Red series — starting back in 2006 with the second-gen iPod nano and having it stick around in varying product lines, even as the other hues offered within a particular line were themselves pastels or variations on low-colour metallics (such as the “space greys” and “rose golds”).

I have two iPod nanos in red — the 4th and 5th gens. I absolutely love them and have long thought about how nifty it might be to see a low-quantity edition release of, say, an aluminium MacBook anodized in Product Red.

But by and large, the focus of this conversation, I think, relates to Apple’s desktop/laptop products and less so on its mobile/glass offerings.

The classic hues of primaries and secondaries, especially as jewel tones, will always have a place with designers and consumers — even if their sold quantities will trail the fall-backs of whites, greys, and blacks which amount to today’s version of the 1990s “beiges” (in terms of most-units-sold and in playing it conservative).

One need only look back to when Sony offered very limited runs of their portables in the 1980s and 1990s — as with Walkmans and other portables — which were in high demand when new and which remain extraordinarily collectible to this day.

White definitely has that clean look to it, and, to some extent, it can even fade into the background.

White, as with black, gets visibly dirty remarkably quickly — as anyone who’s ever owned or used an iBook G4, an A1181 MacBook or, heck, a vehicle of either colour can attest. When that white (or black) is finished with a glossy side, it also shows the scratches more readily than for hues in between (including the near-ubiquitous use of plain aluminium).

At the very least, it’s a fairly organic color and would pair well with the Apple Store decor. But the look of the future seems to be the “all display, no chin” look of Wall-E style screens (seemingly) just floating in free space.

Unlike a couple of folks who griped over and over on another forum’s thread when the rainbow M1 iMacs were announced, I’ve never had an issue with the absence of a “chin” on the iMac. My issue relates to what’s on the inside and how nothing within is upgradeable — assuring a dramatic uptick into e-waste streams over the coming years.

 

[kc9hzn]

Unlike a couple of folks who griped over and over on another forum’s thread when the rainbow M1 iMacs were announced, I’ve never had an issue with the absence of a “chin” on the iMac. My issue relates to what’s on the inside and how nothing within is upgradeable — assuring a dramatic uptick into e-waste streams over the coming years.

Fair enough, though I was just talking generally about some of the comments on design in the thread.

As for non-upgradability, we find ourselves in a world where the things that are popular (and thus, optimized for) put it at odds with upgradability. For all the complaints about the lack of upgradability, people seem to prefer the thinner, lighter weight stuff that sacrifices upgradability to reach its weight and thickness goals. No one seems prepared to carry around a phone of sufficient size to be modular/upgradable/repairable (all three are different sides of the same coin). Laptops, outside of the gaming market, have a similar issue, and desktops are increasingly rare these days in the consumer market (and why wouldn’t they be if a smartphone, a tablet, or a laptop meets your internet usage needs).

What’s more, with Moore’s Law slowing down, we’re in a world where technological improvement increasingly requires shedding modularity. SoCs are the way of the future because we’re hitting a bit of a brick wall when it comes to non-interconnected modular parts.

There are other bigger picture social issues that lead to overconsumption, too (social media and social pressure in general pushing people to stay current, society’s tendency towards denigration of the sorts of things that people used to find meaning for their lives in like community, faith, and family without an adequate replacement, the cynicism of the era, inflation-driven consumption). Thin, non-upgradable glass displays are honestly more symptom than cause. A lot of people complain about how samey-samey modern design is (and implicitly blame Apple for setting the design standard, never mind that Apple would prefer that these other firms actually try their own designs), but there are seemingly valid reasons for that. (Also, there’s a similar trend in media, so there seem to be larger systematic issues going on, a certain conservatism in design and media production, a belief that something that borrows from a previous success is more likely to be successful than a new idea.) I think that, to address overconsumption and/or non-upgradability, you’d have to address those more foundational issues.

 

[Amethyst1]

Unlike a couple of folks who griped over and over on another forum’s thread when the rainbow M1 iMacs were announced, I’ve never had an issue with the absence of a “chin” on the iMac.

IMO the chin makes the iMac look ugly. I wouldn’t mind it being disposed of… if I cared about my computer’s design, that is.

 

[Rikintosh]

The imac's chin is a lineage feature, a tradition feature. Apple is a traditionalist company.

Particularly I prefer an all in one LG or Dell

 

[JMacHack]

I think the bellyaching over the chin is dumb when you stare at the screen when you use the machine.

Even if you use a multiple monitor setup the bezels around the left and right sides become more important.

I used an iMac at work and you know how distracting the chin was? Not at all.

 

[Amethyst1]

I think the bellyaching over the chin is dumb when you stare at the screen when you use the machine.

Some people apparently care a lot about a monitor’s design. Maybe I’ve been doing it wrong all the time by staring at the panel instead…

 

[B S Magnet]

As for non-upgradability, we find ourselves in a world where the things that are popular (and thus, optimized for) put it at odds with upgradability.

For all the complaints about the lack of upgradability, people seem to prefer the thinner, lighter weight stuff that sacrifices upgradability to reach its weight and thickness goals. No one seems prepared to carry around a phone of sufficient size to be modular/upgradable/repairable (all three are different sides of the same coin). Laptops, outside of the gaming market, have a similar issue, and desktops are increasingly rare these days in the consumer market (and why wouldn’t they be if a smartphone, a tablet, or a laptop meets your internet usage needs).

That’s a myth — one which major manufacturers like Apple and Samsung have been conditioning consumers to believe for better of the last 10–15 years. It ties in with their zealous embrace of planned obsolescence — their shareholders demand nothing less.

The Frame.work laptop and the Fairphone 3 and 4 are counter-arguments against that specious myth, and others, including established players, will soon be joining them.

What’s more, with Moore’s Law slowing down, we’re in a world where technological improvement increasingly requires shedding modularity.

Balderdash. Hogwash. Citations needed.

On the contrary, modularity assures that a device can accommodate future improvements to technology by upgrading the components which do get that improvement. Newer, faster CPU? Swap it out. Faster NVMe? Swap it out. Faster RAM needed for faster CPU? Swap out the logic board. That’s what the above linked examples are doing in real time.

SoCs are the way of the future because we’re hitting a bit of a brick wall when it comes to non-interconnected modular parts.

No they aren’t. SoCs are a major corporation’s cop-out in a largely unregulated industry — an industry whose ecological and carbon impacts are only now just beginning to be taken into account as new regulations are drafted for limiting ecological and social impacts to e-waste streams (which, in itself, produces plenty of carbon dioxide and releases abundant amounts of other toxic chemicals which leach into water supplies and soils).

SoC is unsustainable.

There are other bigger picture social issues that lead to overconsumption, too (social media and social pressure in general pushing people to stay current, society’s tendency towards denigration of the sorts of things that people used to find meaning for their lives in like community, faith, and family without an adequate replacement, the cynicism of the era, inflation-driven consumption).

Nah. Faceless and many shareholders who demand quarterly profit by any means necessary (I would call this the legalized laundering of money, but that’s just me) is the greatest enabler behind a culture of overconsumption which accelerates carbon dioxide, methane, PM2.5, and ozone production. The rest is just noise — if not merely the accelerants used for stoking the fuel of profit.

Thin, non-upgradable glass displays are honestly more symptom than cause. A lot of people complain about how samey-samey modern design is (and implicitly blame Apple for setting the design standard, never mind that Apple would prefer that these other firms actually try their own designs), but there are seemingly valid reasons for that. (Also, there’s a similar trend in media, so there seem to be larger systematic issues going on, a certain conservatism in design and media production,

See, all you’re doing here is hot-taking with vague, broad strokes and without providing the (scientific) process to step-by-step assert why this is valid — much the way the corporations which strive to move people to disposable-by-design products do. Why? Profit by any means necessary, even when that means borrowing (or even stealing) against the future to do so.

a belief that something that borrows from a previous success is more likely to be successful than a new idea.)

Hollywood “reboots”.

I think that, to address overconsumption and/or non-upgradability, you’d have to address those more foundational issues.

This is already happening.


EDIT to add: Another case example of the necessity for modularity, especially going forward:

Avoid single-point-of-failure in supply chain issues (i.e., holding up the completion of units like laptops, desktops, servers, TVs, and even vehicles because key parts are held up). “Just-in-time” for supply chains is a flawed model, and we are living with the consequence of those flaws (just as we’re also beginning to acknowledge them and their impacts on not only compulsory consumption, but more crucially, on its ecological and social impacts). Without that SPoF, devices and items already in people’s hands can continue to be used and not disposed of as they await upgradeable parts; and if it’s a part needed for repair, then the only part going into e-waste is the faulty part being replaced — not the entire complex device with its many chemical components.

 

[B S Magnet]

The imac's chin is a lineage feature, a tradition feature. Apple is a traditionalist company.

“Think different.” ?

 

[Project Alice]

Because Apple would have sued them into oblivion.

Just look at what Apple did to the eMachines eOne in court.




Cheaper, yes, when not factoring in the per-unit costs of eventual litigation.



Having colour wasn’t what Apple’s claim was so much as having those colours used for a particular form factor for product lines which they themselves produced for sale first — and which others would try to emulate. It’s a practice which continues to the present day, but the ability for Apple to sue a claim for, say, a competitor removing a headphone jack off a glass phone after Apple did so first, is probably not worth their time. If anything, they now use this as a tool to shape the industry outcome to their own whims.

The size of a third-party plastic injection moulding company is probably minuscule relative to the might of an Apple, even in 1999 or 2000, and it wouldn’t take much for Apple’s legal team to have bankrupted them quickly. As to 3D printing, however, that’s another matter entirely. But for things like injection moulding, the moulds have to be made and there are pre-production costs involved which raise risk if Apple were to have filed a legal claim against them.

Of course, these days, I’m sure such a company could produce those alternate colour pieces without fear of a lawsuit, if they could rationalize the costs for very slow-moving inventory.

I actually had one of those in the house when I was a kid. It wasn’t mine but I occasionally used it. I didn’t have a Mac at all until around 2006 or 2007 and it was a grape 333MHz iMac.

Other companies made inlays for the PB1400, and today you can even buy aftermarket shells for iPhones with a different color bezel or home button (for those phones that have buttons obviously)
This was common for the clickwheel iPods too.
I doubt they’d care much if someone back then had started selling a colored plastic piece for G4s.

 

[Amethyst1]

I actually had one of those in the house when I was a kid.

Cool. I wonder if the contoversy it caused has turned it into a collector's item, despite it having a "Celery".

 

[Project Alice]

Cool. I wonder if the contoversy it caused has turned it into a collector's item, despite it having a "Celery".

I have seen them posted a couple times on subs like r/retrobattlestations so probably. Basically any machine from that era seems to have become somewhat of a collectors item. I could probably post a photo of a P4 Dell Dimension on there and get a thousand reddit points lmao

I don’t have the eMachine anymore, it belonged to a women my dad was dating whom we lived with for a long time. I unfortunately don’t have that iMac anymore either.. But I do have the Macs I got awhile later. A 500MHz indigo iMac and a dual USB iBook G3.

 

[Rikintosh]

Cool. I wonder if the contoversy it caused has turned it into a collector's item, despite it having a "Celery".

I collect this kind of stuff, they sold a few units at first (due to the lawsuit with Apple), there's also the whole story behind it (a lot of things have value because of their history) and it was also a pretty cool computer. If my memory serves me correctly, it was commonly a Celeron 466mhz, and it had an ATI graphics card, which at the time was a medium but very capable card (I think it was a Rage LT), it was kind of cost-effective, more or less like a GT 1050 nowadays. A big difference is that it had a composite video input on its side, which made it a replacement for a TV, so that parent who wanted to buy a computer for their child could buy it and save money with a TV for the son playing video game in his room.

I always wondered why the imac G3 didn't have a video input, it would be nice to use the imac as a tv for video games.

Another reason for Apple to accuse of plagiarism, its keyboard, in addition to being translucent blue with black keys, had the same usb output scheme of the imac keyboard (those usbs that are on the top of the keyboard) only instead of ports usb, it had ps/2 ports, at one end you plugged in a two terminal ps/2 cable, one plugged into the keyboard, the other into the computer, and the spare port on the keyboard, would be to connect the ps/2 mouse .

It would also be popular because in addition to the cdrom it had a floppy drive (imac was heavily criticized for not having one, most consumers at that time needed it).

Despite internet photos suggesting he was blue like the imac, he was a slightly darker, deeper shade of blue. And its white tone was a bit more of an ice color, more gray (I had the opportunity to compare it side by side many years ago). They also DO NOT suffer from heating or flyback inverter issues, you can still find most of them working with a factory flyback. Emachines tried to change the design to a full silver machine but I think it was only sold in japan or something, in very little quantity.

Currently 486 computers are VERY valued, followed by pentium 1, pentium 2 has some value, pentium 3 is starting to have value, pentium 4 onwards are in what I call limbo, which is the time when nobody wants it, and it's not worth anything . That's when I buy things and keep them.

 

[Amethyst1]

I always wondered why the imac G3 didn't have a video input, it would be nice to use the imac as a tv for video games.

There was a short period (2009–2014/2015) when iMacs actually had video input.

 

[JMacHack]

That’s a myth — one which major manufacturers like Apple and Samsung have been conditioning consumers to believe for better of the last 10–15 years. It ties in with their zealous embrace of planned obsolescence — their shareholders demand nothing less.

The Frame.work laptop and the Fairphone 3 and 4 are counter-arguments against that specious myth, and others, including established players, will soon be joining them.




Balderdash. Hogwash. Citations needed.

On the contrary, modularity assures that a device can accommodate future improvements to technology by upgrading the components which do get that improvement. Newer, faster CPU? Swap it out. Faster NVMe? Swap it out. Faster RAM needed for faster CPU? Swap out the logic board. That’s what the above linked examples are doing in real time.



No they aren’t. SoCs are a major corporation’s cop-out in a largely unregulated industry — an industry whose ecological and carbon impacts are only now just beginning to be taken into account as new regulations are drafted for limiting ecological and social impacts to e-waste streams (which, in itself, produces plenty of carbon dioxide and releases abundant amounts of other toxic chemicals which leach into water supplies and soils).

SoC is unsustainable.



Nah. Faceless and many shareholders who demand quarterly profit by any means necessary (I would call this the legalized laundering of money, but that’s just me) is the greatest enabler behind a culture of overconsumption which accelerates carbon dioxide, methane, PM2.5, and ozone production. The rest is just noise — if not merely the accelerants used for stoking the fuel of profit.



See, all you’re doing here is hot-taking with vague, broad strokes and without providing the (scientific) process to step-by-step assert why this is valid — much the way the corporations which strive to move people to disposable-by-design products do. Why? Profit by any means necessary, even when that means borrowing (or even stealing) against the future to do so.



Hollywood “reboots”.



This is already happening.

You’re trying to reduce a far more complex subject down too far. I’m sorry but SoCs are the future, and if they’re unsustainable, then no processors are sustainable.

“Just swap parts” is a gross oversimplification of the process that goes into designing and engineering components.

Narrowing the case to just Apple, taking a look at their laptops since 2013, they use lpddr (some MacBook pros ship with ddr4 though) which doesn’t come on standard dimms in the first place. Your first instinct might be to say “well make dimms anyway!” But that brings in the question of whether that creates MORE waste than simply soldering the chips.

Continuing the topic of RAM, there’s no single standard, or even single speed. Different processors may have or not support for different types of RAM. And by the time you’re ready to upgrade, you may find that your processor or motherboard no longer supports the ram types in existence. Or you may find that it never did in the first place!

When talking about reducing e waste, you can’t ignore the rapid pace of technology. Even supposedly “modular” products will likely have the same useful life as non modular products.

Unfortunately, the problem isn’t as simple as “make it modular!” And to paint it as such is an oversimplification.

 

[Rikintosh]

That’s a myth — one which major manufacturers like Apple and Samsung have been conditioning consumers to believe for better of the last 10–15 years. It ties in with their zealous embrace of planned obsolescence — their shareholders demand nothing less.

The Frame.work laptop and the Fairphone 3 and 4 are counter-arguments against that specious myth, and others, including established players, will soon be joining them.




Balderdash. Hogwash. Citations needed.

On the contrary, modularity assures that a device can accommodate future improvements to technology by upgrading the components which do get that improvement. Newer, faster CPU? Swap it out. Faster NVMe? Swap it out. Faster RAM needed for faster CPU? Swap out the logic board. That’s what the above linked examples are doing in real time.



No they aren’t. SoCs are a major corporation’s cop-out in a largely unregulated industry — an industry whose ecological and carbon impacts are only now just beginning to be taken into account as new regulations are drafted for limiting ecological and social impacts to e-waste streams (which, in itself, produces plenty of carbon dioxide and releases abundant amounts of other toxic chemicals which leach into water supplies and soils).

SoC is unsustainable.



Nah. Faceless and many shareholders who demand quarterly profit by any means necessary (I would call this the legalized laundering of money, but that’s just me) is the greatest enabler behind a culture of overconsumption which accelerates carbon dioxide, methane, PM2.5, and ozone production. The rest is just noise — if not merely the accelerants used for stoking the fuel of profit.



See, all you’re doing here is hot-taking with vague, broad strokes and without providing the (scientific) process to step-by-step assert why this is valid — much the way the corporations which strive to move people to disposable-by-design products do. Why? Profit by any means necessary, even when that means borrowing (or even stealing) against the future to do so.



Hollywood “reboots”.



This is already happening.

I totally agree 100% on everything.

I not only collect old machines, but I am also a technician. I can tell you all, EVERYTHING you buy is designed to stop working, becoming obsolete, increasing the amount of garbage in landfills. I completely hate it. You buy new equipment because your old equipment doesn't like you anymore, it's one thing, it breaks for you to be forced to buy a new one, it's another. Old outdated equipment is sometimes not useful to you, but it can be a wonderful gift for a low-income family that cannot afford one. But the bloodsuckers don't care, they just want you to open your wallet.

I recommend everyone to learn a little about electronics, and try to fix it at home, 60% of the things that stop working stop for the same reason, so all you have to do is basically open youtube and write Brand + product + defect presented, and then you will see 1001 people talking about the same problem and how they fixed it.

Who had a 2006, 2007, 2008 macbook pro that died? How many of you just cooked your plate in the oven and it started working again? (Of course, the correct thing would be to change the solder balls, and baking is a temporary solution). How many of you have had a PowerMac G3 B&W or G4 that stopped turning on? Your power supply is proprietary, but it's easy to convert an ATX power supply. Even the iMacs G3, which would stop turning on, simply because the internal battery died! I wonder, how many people threw their imac g3 in the trash because one day they took it out of the basement, and realized it wouldn't turn on anymore, ended up throwing an entire computer in the trash because of a battery that costs less than 5 dollars.

There have even been laptops that are almost completely modular, with replaceable graphics cards, desktop processors, or easy plug-in/unplug components. Nowadays, to maintain a thin laptop, you almost need to be a cell phone technician, because of the solutions adopted. People want a laptop so thin, if you put a melon on it, the screen will break.

 

[Amethyst1]

Even supposedly “modular” products will likely have the same useful life as non modular products.

What if you have a laptop with a soldered-on SSD and the SSD dies? You’d need a new mainboard at possibly prohibitive cost, possibly ending the laptop’s usefulness prematurely. If the SSD is removable and uses a standard form factor, you can just replace it.

 

[B S Magnet]

You’re trying to reduce a far more complex subject down too far. I’m sorry but SoCs are the future, and if they’re unsustainable, then no processors are sustainable.

“Just swap parts” is a gross oversimplification of the process that goes into designing and engineering components.

Narrowing the case to just Apple, taking a look at their laptops since 2013, they use lpddr (some MacBook pros ship with ddr4 though) which doesn’t come on standard dimms in the first place. Your first instinct might be to say “well make dimms anyway!” But that brings in the question of whether that creates MORE waste than simply soldering the chips.

Continuing the topic of RAM, there’s no single standard, or even single speed. Different processors may have or not support for different types of RAM. And by the time you’re ready to upgrade, you may find that your processor or motherboard no longer supports the ram types in existence. Or you may find that it never did in the first place!

When talking about reducing e waste, you can’t ignore the rapid pace of technology. Even supposedly “modular” products will likely have the same useful life as non modular products.

Unfortunately, the problem isn’t as simple as “make it modular!” And to paint it as such is an oversimplification.

As is, “Make it disposable, non-repairable, and completely proprietary, guaranteeing such with exclusive vendor contracts prohibiting sales of parts to any party other than us.”

 

[B S Magnet]

What if you have a laptop with a soldered-on SSD and the SSD dies? You’d need a new mainboard at possibly prohibitive cost, possibly ending the laptop’s usefulness prematurely. If the SSD is removable and uses a standard form factor, you can just replace it.

I’ve already had the OEM SSD in my early 2015 MacBook Pro fail. I could at least replace it. But I get so annoyed when I have to listen to tech bros who mansplain to me how “SSD failure doesn’t really happen.”