There's also the cost of repair. I have a Dell laptop from somewhere around 2005 or so. I call it the Laptop of Theseus, since I'm not too sure what's still original besides the case. Almost everything has been replaced, mostly by me once warranty ran out. I've been able to do this with standard home tools.
Now my circa 2012 Macbook, I went out and bought the special screwdriver sets to take it apart, and replaced as much as I could over the years, but I had to stop when the repairs needed exceeded my comfort zone and/or just started costing too much. It was just cheaper and easier to just buy a new one.
Heck, send over your 2012 MBP. I’ll make fetch happen.
It's like with a car or home appliances. If you can't fix it yourself, at what point to all the maintenance costs stop being worth it.
True. That said, iFixit, as a public-accessible resource, is no spring chicken and is available to anyone who wants to repair their own Mac. I say this with a qualifying
“but…”
The
“but” is entirely on Apple’s hands: at a certain juncture during hardware product development, Apple laptop and desktop designers began to, zealously, implement features which made user-replacement difficult (the one-shot seal on iMacs, post-2011), to exceedingly difficult (soldering RAM, CPU, and even SSDs), to impossible (sourcing the part to replace a broken Retina display).
I’d contest these features as “user-hostile by design” and wilfully anti-competitive — hand-in-hand with reifying the idea that the end-user consumer doesn’t actually own their product, through and through. Each “feature” escalates the inherently disposable (by design) nature of Apple hardware — chock full of components which must also be sent to waste streams prematurely, and which trains consumers over time to accept a synthetic cycle of consumption and disposability and to pay no mind to (boring, but important) things like product life cycle analysis.
From a corporate vantage, especially in light of the way our species has a thing for extracting everything it can for the sake of wealth, with scant foresight on how the piper of mother nature will get paid, it’s reckless, irresponsible, and emblematic of how little regulation is linked with product life cycle analysis.
With a few design tweaks, Apple products would continue to be user-serviceable and even user-upgradeable (see, for instance, what Frame.work, whose laptops have been designed by former MacBook designers from Apple, have been striving to do).
My clothes washer has been fixed 3 times, at a total cost of around $1,000 including parts and labor. RIght now, the spin cycle on standard wash doesn't work. It does on different wash cycles I don't use. So, after every load, we have to move it to a different spin and wait the 5 minutes to finish. When I talked to the repair guy, he said it would be around $300 for the part, plus $125 max for labor, though he expects it will be $75, since he's familiar with the machine, but wants to hedge his bets. Anyway, point is, we decided it wasn't worth the money, and he suggested that at this point, when the next thing goes wrong with it or the dryer (which he's fixed twice), that I'd be better off buying new.
I’m not well-acquainted with the build quality or modular capability of washers and dryers, but if the durable goods industry’s drift/slouch toward anti-right-to-repair practices (which have found their way into products like cars and even farm equipment) have found their way into the appliance products being released by the LGs, the Samsungs, the Kenmores, and so on, then this bodes poorly for being able to maintain equipment for as long as earlier products once did.
By the same measure, appliances are being pressed, mostly by national-level regulations, to consume less power, water, heat, and so on. So, in a manner of speaking, the selling point of improved efficiency/certification can be a device for manufacturers to lean on to rationalize making replacement parts on existing equipment a prohibitive affair — enticing consumers to jettison and buy next-gen new.
Resource and wealth extraction are uniquely human technologies, and extraction really is the bane of this planet’s welfare.
Basically, Macs are great and last longer than PCs, on average. But, you can make a PC last longer because it's easier and cheaper to fix. The real question then, is when do the costs start to favor choosing the other option.
The modular parts on PCs for the bigger names — Lenovo, Asus, Dell, etc. — will tend to be easier to come by, but it gets tougher when looking for vendor-specific components which fail, when those vendors are smaller.
Back in the early 2000s and even early 2010s, Apple lacked the market reach they now have, so it might be forgivable that the Apple-specific bits might be tougher to procure back then. But this generally
wasn’t the case. Only once Apple flexed into the juggernaut they now are, post-introduction of the iPhone, did they lean hard into making more and more components tougher to acquire. That Retina display, for example? In their contract with display vendor LG, they proscribed LG from selling Retina displays to any third-party, repair or otherwise, with no exceptions. Once Apple designate a model as obsolete, they halt repair service on that product.
So if you’re stuck with a rMBP from 2012–2015 with a broken display, your sole recourse is to scavenge a unit with a non-ruined display or buy one, used, for remarkable amounts of money created by a contractual scarcity.
Sorry. I’ve long had a bee in my bonnet about Apple’s user-hostility around reparability, post-2012ish lack of tangible, material responsibility for a reduction of product life cycle waste at the point of design and development.
😤
In the absence of international regulation around corporate enforcement of slowing product life cycles from a flash flood torrent to a gentle brook, then what steers designers and manufacturers of hardware, appliances, vehicles, etc., is the quarterly earnings report being delivered to shareholders and private equity.
We really are our own worst enemy.
Obviously, I have other laptops, like the mentioned Dell, and I could live without the Mac. I bought the new one because I wanted it. 15", 16/1TB in Starlight for those who are wondering.
Sidebar: No Gnews is Good Gnews with Gary Gnu (bad gnews, ofc, is when Goriddle shows up to destroy Gary’s gnewscast…)
