5 year old computers are end of life? What is wrong with apple. I'm glad I only bought one iphone and moved back to android afterwards
I may be completely wrong but don’t Samsung, Google etc. stop supporting OS updates on Android phones after 5-6 years? Apple have supported devices for 6-8 years AFAIK.
On the other hand, I can put an open OS on my Android and get security updates long after the manufacturer has abandoned it. Can't do that with an iPhone. (But honestly, few Android devices make it easy, and none that I know of allow every little part of the system to be supported this way.)
It's about time we started legally requiring manufacturers to unlock our hardware when support ends, and release the driver specs ahead of time, so the open software community can take over support. The unending accumulation of e-waste due to nothing more than abandoned software is unforgivable.
This goes hand-in-hand with the right to repair.
100% agree. You're not selling the hardware anymore, leave it in an unlocked state. Same with games.
You can format the Mac and put Linux on it and get updates forever as well.
Edit: or you could when it was x86... not sure where Mx stand on that.
Asahi Linux is in a daily driver state.
Debian does regular ARM builds and that would likely work
Edit: I run it with VMWare Fusion on a VM
@mox @manualoverride while I absolutely agree with your position, also keep in mind that this has security implications.
Beside the fact that most vendors dont even use all the patches available from AOSP, no custom ROM project can backport all patches. Sooner or later this means there are devices that cant be securely used anymore, unless someone does the effort.
a vendor concept with a subscription could solve this I guess or enough support for an open project e.g. @GrapheneOS
OEM support for the device is needed because an alternate OS cannot provide firmware updates otherwise. In practice, driver updates also come from the OEM. Providing the Android Open Source Project backports is nowhere close to full security patches. It's unfortunate that most alternate operating systems mislead users about this by setting an inaccurate Android security patch level field, not being honest about what's missing and downplaying the importance of it.
Firmware and driver patches are not any less important than generic OS patches. A high portion of critical severity patches are for drivers.
Android Open Source Project has a new release every month. These are monthly, quarterly and yearly releases. Yearly releases move forward around 3 months on the development branch. Since Android 14 QPR2, quarterly releases also do the same and just leave most new feature flags disabled. These are required for full patches.
Android Open Source Project provides backports of most but not all High/Critical severity patches to the initial yearly releases of Android 12, 13 and 14 for devices which have not updated to the latest release (currently Android 14 QPR3). The combination of these backports with baseline firmware/driver patches form the Android Security Bulletins referred to by the security patch level. This is not the full set of security patches, just absolute bare minimum.
Yeah this same conversation happens every time one of these headlines comes up and gets misinterpreted. The conclusion is usually that apple has longer than average hardware support across the board
It's worthless when you can't upgrade a damn thing, it's frankly unacceptable to produce a laptop with soldered RAM and a soldered SSD (with no expansion options)
Apple claims it's for speed and performance, which is technically true, but you're not going to notice that 10% difference between a good quality NVMe and some speedy DDR5 RAM
But you will notice when you try to save some money on base RAM and base storage and then realize, you can't upgrade shit a year or 2 later and your only option is to drop another couple grand for a whole new device
Fuck Apple.
and your only option is to drop another couple grand for a whole new device
...and send another whole system into the waste stream. It's incredibly irresponsible.
"Not as shit as you could be" is not something we should be praising. A handful of years is still too short, just because it is marginally better than their competitors doesn't mean we should give Apple a pass. It just means that the industry is full of shitty companies that profit off of producing e-waste, and know that consumers have no real choice but to put up with it.
G and S are doing 7y now, G has for almost 2y. Pixel 6 has 5y, while 7 + 8 + beyond get 7y, I believe.
@GravitySpoiled They may provide security updates for a couple of more years, but as the article points out, Intel Macs in the Apple Silicon era are on their way out.
Yep, if it's anything like the ppc to x86 transition there will be security updates for a year or two before they drop support entirely.
Writing this message on an 13 year old thinkpad that still got a lot of life in it!
Not that big of an issue. Although Intel-based Macs won’t get software updates, they will be fine for many more years. My 2013 iMac is still going strong on its last os update back in 2019.
@mick @GravitySpoiled Although you can always of course use the excellent Opencore Legacy Patcher to (unofficially) run the latest version of macOS on Macs going back to 2007. That will run great on your machine.
This is misleading. The models mentioned won't get the latest MacOS update, true, but they will be supported. My older 2016 MBP is stuck on BigSur or something, but gets security updates regularly and doesn't have any incompatibilities so far. I could probably force update it if I wanted to. Apple is known for supporting their devices for longer than other manufacturers.
Apple devices have enough legit reasons for criticism, no need to make up new ones.
That is true for my 2015 mbp. Still get security updates regularly
The pine64 products all look quite nice. I was thinking of getting one of those phones (Linux based) next time mine dies. I can confirm the pinecil is the best soldering iron I’ve used and it’s only $26. The laptop they sell also has decent stats
The phone is still not very usable. It's possible to use it as a daily driver but only if you have a high pain tolerance.
sigh I miss my N900.
I was looking into linux phones myself but I always hear others say how the ones on the market aren't developed enough and have lots of bugs :(
The app compatibility is what I’d be most worried about. Not enough people want to buy them since there are bugs. But there aren’t enough people buying to justify devs fixings these bugs. It needs some momentum, it seems
Sorry, my old Toshiba was on it's last legs, it's from like 2010. Good news is I'm hoping the Framework I just got will be the last and now I'll just upgrade, because I can, for as long as 64gb of DDR5 will get me (only 32gb rn, but once ddr6 comes out and ddr5 gets cheaper it'll be go time and extend the life until I need to upgrade the mainboard and by that time it'll be ddr7/8/9!)
I'm thinking sodimms will be retired by the time ddr6 comes out, and replaced by the camm2 standard everyone is talking about.
Neat! Well whatever it is, when it's time hopefully they'll have a board that supports it.
Mac book pro from 2012 still going, not strong, Bluetooth barely works, there's a dying row of pixels, on the screen, the CPU doesn't seem to support any modem video codec in accelerated mode, and the speakers were clearly garbage and it doubles how bad the Bluetooth is. But it's running pop os! And it's running it fine. I mean as long as you connect via rustdesk to another real machine to do real work. It can't handle tabs or browser rendering...
Anyway even if i retire it today, it's outlasted 3 work laptops.
Especially if it’s a 12”, parts to straighten that thing out are dirt cheap. Last time I did display work on the old late 2012 12”, the owner wanted a whole new upper assembly, top clamshell and all and it was ~$100.
Depending on the specific model, an Intel Mac running Linux is a very sustainable and repairable choice for a computer.
In my experience repairing all kinds of equipment, it doesn’t matter how long it’s officially supported or if the company made a bunch of boards to sell as parts, but instead how many are available on the second hand market!
I've seen some impressive traction on newer videos putting Linux on (intel) Apple devices for example. Purely anecdotal but regularly hitting 100k+ views on Linux videos is something that I've only seen in the last year or so and moreso on videos documenting "hardware restoration".
Anyone knows how the usage is being estimated? What is the expected lifespan and how does one come up with a carbon budget there?
@phoenix It looks to be statistical inference based on sampled and modelled data. On p. 57 of the report: "To model customer use, we measure the power consumed by a product while it is running in a simulated scenario. Daily usage patterns are specific to each product and are a mixture of actual and modeled customer use data."
The number of devices for the statistical inferences is: "In fiscal year 2018, we sold 217,722,000 iPhone devices, 43,535,000 iPad units, and 18,209,000 Mac products."
IPad second gen, dead speakers, barely does anything anymore
My dad uses it for music
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