As a Mac user at work I just close the lid and put the laptop in my back. Windows users shut down and power up again the next day.

Whenever I bring this topic up IRL people inundate me with stories about how much issues arise if they just sleep their computers.

Apple literally rolled out the feature 13 months ago with 24 months free use with the purchase of a compatible device.

How can you claim any statistics on the topic?

But yeah, I think the real interesting thing is what’s going to happen with the LEO constellations, but I also get why Apple isn’t keen on relying on a Musk-driven enterprise.

All other LEO-constellations are probably a decade away from having enough coverage.

I think Apple wants to get in the game now, and they have the money to spend on differentiating themselves.

And for those who have stumbled into a situation where they needed it and been rescued it’s great, but on the other hand the majority of the planet is not served as of now.

I didn’t mean the customers, but sure.

Apple has shown that the market could be willing to adapt.

But then again, they’ve always had more leverage than the Wintel-crowd.

But what people seem to ignore is that there is another option as well: hardware emulation.

IIRC correctly old AMD CPU’s, notably the K6, was actually a RISC core with a translation layer turning X86 instructions into the necessary chain of RISC instructions.

That could also be a potential approach to swapping outright. If 80% of your code runs natively and then 20% passes this hardware layer where the energy loss is bigger than the performance loss you might have a compelling product.

A 1% recommendation 👌

I’m saying that anyone singling out Apple for planned obsolescence and disregarding the rest of the market is playing into someone’s playbook.

I’m also fully aware of the so-called batterygate (oh, how I loathe how people add a “gate”-suffix to things to make a “scandal” completely clueless to the fact that Water_gate_ was the name of a fucking hotel. Anyways…), and while we may only speculate wether or not Apple was trying to push people to buy new phones, from appearances it would seem that they were acting in the (somewhat*, I’ll get back to that later) best interest of the consumers, but just failing to communicate it in a good manner.

1. Before the story broke people discovered that replacing batteries made the devices run faster again.
2. Before Apple started power/performance-throttling devices with worn batteries plenty of older iPhones exhibited shutdown issues, especially at lower SoC. I remember being clueless as to why some devices among friends and family behaved this way. After Batterygate broke it suddenly clicked.
3. Built-in batteries can be replaced for a reasonable price either via Apple (less reasonably), or via a third-party (more reasonably). Device experience is regained (minus software bloat), and device longevity is maintained.

Now let me get back to my asterisk:

*: There are different types of battery chemistries, and while Apple thumped their own chests back in the day that their MacBook batteries took 1000 charge cycles to get to 80% of factory capacity.

Apple willingly choose to use cheaper chemistries for iPhone batteries than they could use if they wanted longevity to be higher.

So yes, in that regard you can argue planned obsolescence. The amount of money Apple charge for their phones they could definitely put better batteries in, but on the other hand there’s likely arguments for why they choose these batteries, such as capacity or other characteristics. I’m not going to claim to be an expert on battery chemistries, and will leave that to someone else.

With regards to some of your comments on longevity then and now; note that we used to use the best material to make something, regardless of its impact on people and environment. Some environmental concerns do actually reduce product longevity.

Combined with increased technological complexity and a higher rate of improvement in the digital era than in the analog era it’s been a long period where don’t think it’s too bad to replace a device after a few years time.

However, we’re now seeing so good performance from a lot of our tech products that an upgrade feels much more incremental than it used to.

I definitely think we should demand more lifetime from our products, but this needs to be through regulation and not just left to consumers.

• Software needs to be supported and updated so that the devices can be used safely
• Parts need to be available for replacement.
• Soldering components with limited lifespan to the motherboard should be illegal without providing a backup port and room for a replacement device, at least over a certain form factor. Thinking of SSD’s primarily.

Louis Rossmann also had some good points here: https://youtu.be/l27_75pDvd4

We should be able to use cloud features without being locked to the manufacturer. Especially if they go belly-up.

He mentions a Chinese car manufacturer, and Arlo cameras, but it could just as well be Norwegian EV charge box manufacturer Easee, or a cell phone manufacturer like RIM (BlackBerry) or a TV manufacturer, etc.

So many products today depend on cloud services for basic functionality, and for a lot of those devices their planned obsolescence will be the cloud service they’re connected to.

Should Apple support their products longer?

Yes, definitely.

But there’s a big difference between not supporting old devices with software updates and designing them to stop working which you allege to.

If you ask me theres way worse fish out there than Apple, and if you look at phone support Apple is the golden standard by a mile with most Android devices still not being supported for more than a year or two tops.

What we should have is a requirement to support devices for at least ten years.

Yes, I know, ten years is a long time, but we’ve gotten to a point where we should expect a device that’s been treated well to last that long.

My 2013 MBP runs just fine, so does my 2011 MBA, my dad’s Fujitsu-Siemens laptop from 2008 even still works. But only one of those is running an updated operating system. Guess which one?

Doesn’t mean that the product is designed to fail, just that Apple chose not to support them any longer.

Right. Keep pretending.

lol what? How do you think the world works? What kind of argument is that - at all? SMH

In my experience very varied. I feel students lean more towards Android, but if you develop on Mac you’re also more likely to have an iPhone, but the one place where it’s somehow been consistently Android in my team is the app developers.

While I don’t mind it at all, somehow the Android build of our app still has the most issues. Consistently over almost six years now. Which I find a bit ironic.

A friend of mine that was also a former colleague has always been an Android guy. A year ago he switched employer and the new company is iPhone only - but he can’t get the latest versions, and it’s basically just the base version too. So he’s still running with his Galaxy S21, but no e-mail or calendar sync.

I think he’d switch if he could put some of his own cash in and upgrade to the top model.

People can have the preference they want in life, but there’s no need to obnoxious about it.

“Known to scam people”, “designed to stop working”.

I am fully aware that people can say anything on the internet, but clearly you are not objective at all.

Obviously any further attempt at discussion is pointless. Enjoy your fruit-less life, may it treat you with software updates until the next flagship device is launched.

Honestly don’t know. Whenever I check back in on the few communities that I care about that didn’t find a new home on the fediverse (at least that I’ve seen) the rest of Reddit seems less engaged than before.

You almost had me there - until you claimed Apples business plan was to sell to stupid people.

Most of the sysadmins I know have incredibly high tolerances for friction, but ridiculously low tolerances for repetitive tasks. Which I think is a bit ironic.

I’m not sure this crowd will be representative in terms of which tools and services they use (or prefer to use).

No idea where the other guy is getting his Lenovos. We’ve been buying Pi’s because of form factor and GPIO.

We had a fair share of those Lenovos in the office when I started (I think they were around $500 in our config back then), but they’ve all been replaced with laptops now.

In my department we run around with $3000 MacBook Pros, so not very budget minded at all.

eBay is not where we buy new hardware.

Pi has been ridiculously expensive and hard to get from 2020 to 2023, and we’ve had applications where we’ve been deploying them.

Think we’ve seen cost up to $200 for a complete kit.

You need power, SD-card, a case, and depending on application also a micro HDMI adapter. It all adds up.

Slight difference if you are just upgrading in place, but comparing the unit price of a bare Pi to a computer with everything that you need is not apples to apples.

Still not a reason to give Google more power.

Not OP, but “something else from another company” is the only thing that makes sense.

I mean, it’s all fine on paper.

But… how… the… fuck… do…. we… get… there???

Communism is fine on paper. Fuck. Even capitalism is fine on paper.

However; through empiric data we can learn that humanity is full of shitheads who want to be in power and have control.

Sadly, as I see it, that is incompatible with any form of utopia.

I’m from Norway and we used to be fucking close to having an utopia for a short while. Politics were civil, the differences between low income and high income were low, and we actually pooled our oil money into a pension fund so that we would be wealthy when the oil age ended.

On top of that we were rich on natural resources and had abundant renewable electricity from harnessing our mountains (read: damming up valleys and putting rivers and falls in pipes) to create hydro power.

Combine that with a socialist government (“the Scandinavian model”) with free education for the masses, affordable housing, free healthcare, some of the best employee protections in the world, great consumer protection with the law basically granting consumers 5 years warranty on everything from cars to phones or TV’s.

Sadly, since everyone was feeling so wealthy everyone stopped caring. Housing is now anything but affordable. Electricity that we paid for by destroying beautiful nature is no longer a resource for the Norwegian people, but thanks to numerous new export cables to Europe and the fact that production is sold on a fucked-up “stock market” where the most expensive bid to produce electricity for any hour of the day sets the price for everyone, we now have extremely high and volatile electricity prices affecting inflation and reducing competitiveness of Norwegian businesses.

On top of that politicians keep getting caught with their hands in the cookie-jar at an ever increasing rate, and I think it must have been 20-30 years since we had a prime minister with actual work experience.

Call me cynical, but good things don’t last if we even get them at all.

The Romans knew it; the masses simply needs to be entertained by bread and circus and you can do what you want.

Social media is the best circus so far, and when everyone is busy debating pronouns or whatever flavor of distraction there is this week the political decisions that actually affect us gets made without anyone paying any attention.

Sincerely though, best of luck with your utopian society. I hope for all of us that we get what you describe.

I sadly suspect we will keep doing what we are doing until it kills the planet.

Obviously I’m doing a poor job at getting my points through if you think I’m arguing for the current state of affairs.

It doesn’t mean I’m against copyright.

The principle of copyright is important, so is copy-left (eg. GPL).

Being for copyright doesn’t mean I am against artists being paid their fair share. These are not contradictory principles.

There are certainly huge problems with parts of copyright legislation, especially in the US, and in particular the DMCA.

I always recommend this TED Talk where Larry Lessig talks about the issues with DMCA, and even though it’s starting to get old now it’s still just as relevant and he is still just as on point:

https://youtu.be/7Q25-S7jzgs

However, the fact that you don’t care about how business works means you ignore the root of the problem - how business works.

I’m not going to argue for communism, but when politicians are for sale to the highest bidder the rest of us lose out.

Feel free to dive into other videos with Larry Lessig if the first one hits home.

I would particularly recommend these two:

https://youtu.be/mw2z9lV3W1g

https://youtu.be/PJy8vTu66tE