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What if Apple had released the PowerMac in other colors?
- Thread starter Rikintosh
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This also is another gross oversimplification of a complex system. You can’t just paint some faceless entity as a villain and charge it like Don Quixote.
In talks about overconsumption and climate change the same idiotic Malthusian argument comes up again and again, and if you weren’t aware, there hasn’t been a malthusian catastrophe. In fact the global rate of poverty has continually declined!
The fact is that the market is very good at finding efficiencies. And will do so if you let it.
Now, on the topic of Carbon emissions, in the United States at least, our level of emissions has stayed high because we’ve built our cities around cars since the end of WWII. And the government has continually handed out subsidies for the auto industry, oil industry, and coal industry and said that green energy cannot be price competitive (blatant lie). Likewise, the resistance to any new nuclear power plants is a major hurdle.
The consumption of rare earth minerals is already being reduced with significant investment into technologies that are less rare and cheaper as well.
What if some other component on the motherboard fails? Like a shoddy capacitor for instance?
And that’s ignoring the capability to boot from an external drive.
If it lasts 10 years then I’d bet that any current modular system would have the same life expectancy.
I do believe in total right to repair law, and that said vendor contracts should be illegal, but that’s beside my point.
A poor quality capacitor is easily replaceable with a soldering iron. It doesn't even compare to replacing a soldered ssd that requires an expensive machine and tools
actually people change the gpu because when you buy a gpu, it already comes with the balls soldered on it, making the work easier. But it is not necessary to change the gpu, the problem is not in the chip itself, but in the spheres that connect it to the motherboardFor a 2007/2008 MBP, the correct thing is to replace the GPU.
If the component can be replaced, replace it.
I’m not going to have an external drive permanently dangling off a laptop to compensate for a dead internal drive.
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That is incorrect. It’s widely known that the original-revision NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT GPUs themselves are defective.
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I’d wager that the useful lifetime of a computer is the same no matter what degree of modularity.
Also, you’ve never had to source and replace a motherboard capacitor have you?
Flash storage is very compact, it’s likely by the time you need it it’d be unnoticeable. I’ve found it very convenient to boot from a flash drive in fact, if you buy the small ones (that cone in packs of three!) you won’t even notice.I’m not going to have an external drive permanently dangling off a laptop to compensate for a dead internal drive. That would be ridiculous.
Ok. Diagmos that you paid almost the value of a car for a macbook with 16gb of ram. For today 16gb is useful. 5 years from now it won't be enough for your needs, you'll have to buy another whole machine, which will cost you a lot because of that. Now, we think that in a parallel universe, you bought the same machine but it had memory slots, you put another 16gb module and use the machine for 10 years.
In addition to the money you saved, you saved a machine from the environment.
Let's go to another example, Oh no! You accidentally dropped your coffee cup on your laptop! The ENTIRE laptop goes to waste, even knowing that there is still a good battery (which will contaminate the environment), a good screen, its entire case, and other things. That's because the SSD, memory and processor are soldered on the motherboard, so a new board with these components will cost VERY expensive. If the laptop had all these removable components, you'd just have to buy a new card, and keep everything else. Even if you sell the parts on ebay, you will have a loss because you will have to "give away" the ssd, ram memory and processor with the damaged board, after all, you will not be able to charge more for parts that are soldered on the board, nobody are willing to pay more for it.
In the end, who's laughing and their pockets full of money? The big businessmen who decided that the "technology of the future" had to be like this.
People prefer the futility of something thin, fresh, and unmanly, at the cost of having huge personal losses, and being made a fool of by big business.
In addition to the money you saved, you saved a machine from the environment.
Let's go to another example, Oh no! You accidentally dropped your coffee cup on your laptop! The ENTIRE laptop goes to waste, even knowing that there is still a good battery (which will contaminate the environment), a good screen, its entire case, and other things. That's because the SSD, memory and processor are soldered on the motherboard, so a new board with these components will cost VERY expensive. If the laptop had all these removable components, you'd just have to buy a new card, and keep everything else. Even if you sell the parts on ebay, you will have a loss because you will have to "give away" the ssd, ram memory and processor with the damaged board, after all, you will not be able to charge more for parts that are soldered on the board, nobody are willing to pay more for it.
In the end, who's laughing and their pockets full of money? The big businessmen who decided that the "technology of the future" had to be like this.
People prefer the futility of something thin, fresh, and unmanly, at the cost of having huge personal losses, and being made a fool of by big business.
I’m of course speaking of the tiny capacitors used in smaller boards like laptops.
So you're saying that it's okay if your laptop is defective, you'd rather be ripped off by the industry at the cost of having a nice, thin laptop.
The useful life of the computer can be the same in the hand of the person who bought it, the difference is that a computer that breaks, and is not viable to repair, will end up in the trash, and a computer that you just don't want anymore, you advertise on ebay, and someone will be happy with it for years to come. Today we can find computers from 25 years ago on ebay. 25 years from now, we will hardly find today's computers.
They are also easily replaceable with a soldering iron, the only difference is that you will need tweezers. Incidentally, this has already happened on macbooks 2009 - 2012, a simple capacitor made the entire gpu system useless.
I have. On a desktop mainboard. Easy as pie.
I’m still not buying your argument. Having to boot from an external drive because the internal non-replaceable one is dead sucks. It’s a kludge I don’t want to be forced into.
If my 2010 MBA had had more RAM than the un-upgradeable 2 GB I purchased it with, I wouldn’t have replaced it as early as I ended up doing. Part of the blame is on me for not having gone with 4 GB, but all previous ultraportables I’ve owned did have upgradeable RAM.
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Somehow 16gb won’t be enough for 5 years and 32 gigs will be enough for 10? Please.
And of course there’s the option of not always updating to the latest software immediately. Or running an alternative OS even! By the time it won’t be useful for even browsing the web, the tech will have moved on.
Also lol “unmanly” I strap a 10 pound guitar to my shoulder daily for hours. I can deal with a huge ****er of a laptop, and did for years. I don’t want to if I don’t have to. Now if you’re worried about your masculinity because of that then you got bigger problems than thin laptops.
Im certain that spilling a cup of coffee over a framework laptop would destroy it as well.
If you’re careless enough to destroy your things that’s on you.
Lmao I salvage parts. It’s not hard to keep an old machine running modular or not.
And I said useful life, I still keep around my iMac G3, and it’s a fun toy, but you can’t compare it to a modern machine.
Clearly my soldering skills pale in comparison.
Repairs are a kludge! Salvaging is a kludge! Take it from someone trying to rebuild an old truck and tractor, kludges are needed sometimes!
And if your SSD dies after 5 years, your choice will be limited to salvage or older parts, as M.2 takes off.
You didn’t try installing, say, Linux mint on it? Rolling back the OS? Just assumed it was trash because you couldn’t upgrade the RAM?
The best iMac colors: Indigo, Ruby, and Sage
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I was wondering what a g3 imac would be like for the public that buys the current 32" imacs
23 years ago, the professional market used to popularly use 20-inch monitors, so I think it would be like this
And the complete line, with the 12" iMac Junior and basic specs
23 years ago, the professional market used to popularly use 20-inch monitors, so I think it would be like this
And the complete line, with the 12" iMac Junior and basic specs
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I didn't say anything like that.
Maybe my definition of kludge is different to yours. I’m not opposed to repairs, salvaging or creative workarounds at all. A kludge, to me, is something I don’t want to put up with.
I didn’t assume it was trash. I’m still using the machine, rolled back to Snow Leopard, for one specific task it handles perfectly. But it’s not my main laptop anymore.
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I’ve never had to go that far thankfully.
In my experience kludges are inevitable. You do what you have to to keep things working.
So it reached the end of its useful life? I’ve had laptops from that era that have plenty of replaceable components, yet they were pretty much unusable as a main machine. Technology moved on.
And that’s what I mean about the modularity argument, it’s a very nice and noble sentiment but reality is not that cut and dry. By the time most parts fail on their own the device is probably at the end of its rope anyway, and the parts you can buy aren’t compatible or necessarily better than what you have.
Chipsets, standards, things change very quickly with tech. And I’m not convinced there’s some grand conspiracy to keep people consooming over the simpler explanation that things just become obsolete eventually.
And the easiest route to reducing the e waste isn’t even hardware, it’s software. I don’t have data to back it up but my gut feeling is that people get rid of old computers due to poor performance rather than component failure. Which is more a matter of cleaning up old files, cleaning out fans, and if necessary doing a clean install. Maybe a lighter weight OS if absolutely necessary.
I believe the limiting factor for the iMac 20" CRT would have been the user's ability to put it on the desk, the desk's strength and the iMac's handle to support the weight of itself.
For a 2007/2008 MBP, the correct thing is to replace the GPU.
This is what many of us here have done.
Unfortunately, there wsn’t a fix for the 2010–2011 GPU failure of the 15- and 17-inch MacBook Pros, which was, frankly, irresponsible at a corporate level.
You know, for all the hubbub around the G3 iMac (which I do understand), I kinda prefer the design of the G4 iMac (which sometimes gets unfairly criticized, imo). The whole swiveling monitor without a VESA mount business is pretty enticing from a purely functional perspective, and the design is a lot more interesting than, say, the G5 iMac’s slab on a stand design. It might be fun to see a color take on the iMac G4 or on the G4 Cube, or some of the iMac only colors on the iBook G3 (the clamshell model). Around 12 years ago, I restored an iBook G3 (but the charging system seemed to have died, so I had to power it off of a power supply at all times), so the machine has a bit of a soft spot for me rivaled only by the G3 B&W (which is really a fun box for exploring things like Rhapsody, as well as older versions of Mac OS X or non-Apple PPC OSes).
The 8600GT GPUs (G84 chips) have no problem, every problem caused was caused by the solders, there are no failures in the chip die, or in its microcapacitors, or anything like that. In countries like the USA and maybe in China too, it is simple and cheap to replace the chipset, but in other countries, like mine, the chipset ends up being expensive. But this never caused me any problems, I have a 2007 asus G1s with an 8600gt that since the rebaling works until today
The whole problem started at the time of nvidia's 6xxx series, and the main problem has always been the solders. Not to say that the problem was only the solders, some notebook models used a cooling solution that underestimated the amount of heat that the chip would generate (or was purposely designed that way to decrease the useful life), I remember having an asus g72gx with a gtx260 and still having problems with bad cooling
The whole problem started at the time of nvidia's 6xxx series, and the main problem has always been the solders. Not to say that the problem was only the solders, some notebook models used a cooling solution that underestimated the amount of heat that the chip would generate (or was purposely designed that way to decrease the useful life), I remember having an asus g72gx with a gtx260 and still having problems with bad cooling
I like each one of them, in each generation. I think Apple simplified things on the G5 because that imac g4 pantograph system should cost some money. The only criticism I have about the imac g4 was about the cooling system not very efficient