- Moderator
- #21
Jeff Kilgroe
Well-known member
That blog entry, or whatever you want to call it, is pretty biased. Nevermind the multitude of other products out there from other manufacturers that have adopted similar designs. Apple actually does pretty good on the environmental front. All their latest products, especially the Macbook Pro land Macbook Air products, are entirely recyclable with the largest components being 100% recyclable aluminum and glass. As far as the battery argument goes, it's pretty weak. While the batteries aren't daily popped out of externally accessible compartments, there's nothing stopping people from replacing them and disposing of the old ones in a proper way. Apple parts sells replacement batteries for their laptops, the techs at the Apple store will install them for you if you don't want to crack open your system -- recommended if you're not handy with small screws and other such things. The iPhone and iPad are the only ones not designed to be user-serviceable, but they can be repaired and/or recycled when the time comes. Far more so than other products on the market that are more often made from various ABS or acrylic or other plastics.
Planned obsolescence? Fine with me. They still support all these products for several years after the truly serviceable lifespan. In fact, I admire the pace at which they retire older hardware, unlike the PC world where it lingers like some festering disease. I have yet to hear one compelling reason why Windows 8 needs a 32bit version, yet it will have one. I can still install OSX 10.7 on systems that are over 5 years old... As we reach the 6+ year old mark, we're limited to OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard at this point. Got to draw the line somewhere and I think Apple has done a good job. Sure, there's the comments to the above article where someone is complaining about the Intel platform shift and how his cube was left behind. Whatever... The cube was a novel idea, but it was never a powerful system to begin with and by todays standards it can't even cope with moderate web content, so what matters? I have a 6 year old Mac Mini that runs circles around a cube and I haven't been able to give that away. The kids won't even play with it because it's not powerful enough to run simple games they download for free off the app store.
I view Apple's "walled garden" and mostly closed ecosystem as a hinderance at times. But their planned obsolescence and forced progression has proven to be a good thing since Jobs pushed in that direction. I hope that aspect of it continues and I think the PC world could learn a thing or two here. I know others will disagree.
