Landfill and the environment are legitimate concerns.. i’m just gonna quote the website
> The new MacBook Pro has been carefully designed with the environment in mind. The enclosure is now made with 100% recycled aluminum. And we use recycled rare earth elements in all the magnets in the product. MacBook Pro is free of numerous harmful substances and all the virgin wood fiber in our packaging comes from responsibly-managed forests.
Other notable objectives: 1. full carbon neutrality across their supply chain and services by 2030, inclusive of the use of the device.
2. Recycling and refurb program
3. Circular sourcing (e.g reclamation.)
You concerns are valid, but the princess is in another castle.
That's all fine and good, but once any single component of that block of embodied carbon fails the whole thing is now e-waste. Which means I guess apple is buying up carbon offsets in order to recycle that e-waste back into a new M2 or M3 mac? How much faith do you have in carbon offsets? The aluminum and rare earth elements are recycled - what about the rest of it?
A modular design means a failed SSD only sends the SSD - not the entire product - into the waste (recycle?) chain.
Apple has a lot of engineering resources, and the fact that they are not spending those resources to make a computer that will still be in service in 10, 15, or 20 years is the problem.
But just something else to keep in mind: at mass production scales certain choices that may seem less useful for repair, often greatly enhance reliability. eg soldered on componentry - such things don’t present an issue to the official refurbishment programme however they present a challenge to the incredibly small % of people who want to open their laptop for amateur repair.
I agree that choices at scale might not make intuitive sense. I just don’t believe that Apple has a true motive to minimize climate impact, and thus their choices at scale are all suspect. They certainly want to appear as tho that is one of their goals - but as long as the impact of a choice is hidden they have no reason to make the right choice.
I'm going to call very large amounts of BS on #2 -- Apple devices are infamous in electronics refurbishing circles. Thousands of very functional devices are being scrapped instead of being reused because they are soft-bricked due to never being deregistered from iCloud accounts, for various legitimate reasons that have been discussed ad nauseam (and shouldn't be the responsibility of the end user in any case).
Many solutions have been repeatedly suggested to Apple to mitigate the e-waste damage from this without compromising their supposed dedication to iCloud-locking to prevent theft; they have fallen on deaf ears.
If I take a box of old apple devices and accessories to the Apple Store from any point in the history of the company, they will put them through their own recycling program. A box of old PCs will go to my municipal e-waste program and end up in an incinerator (which is the best case scenario, but we know what happens to e-waste in a lot of jurisdictions).
That iPhone torturing robot [0] that they demoed a few years back may have seemed a bit silly, but I don't think any other electronics manufacturer is concerned about finding a const-effective way of separating the screws from other metals before recycling everything.
The question is what percentage of the material that enters their recycling program actually cycles back into new things, and how much carbon is burnt doing that.
I'm glad apple is exerting engineering resources to make their products recyclable and out of recycled materials - but I also can't ignore that linking the lifespan of the entire computer to the lifespan of the SSD is going to result in many unnecessarily discarded computers.
If 75% of the materials are recycled (generous, I couldn't find recent numbers but in 2010 they were recycling 28%) that means one landfilled mac for every 4 recycled. If a machine is killed by it's SSD, that's at LEAST a quarter of a mac in the landfill.
The SSD being the thing that takes down a computer seems like a theoretical concern (for most users). They certainly typically have longer lifespans than spinning drives. I wouldn’t be too surprised if my parents’ hermetically sealed fanless MacBook Air is still sipping power a decade from now.
And that’s to say nothing of the extra materials that would be required to house a socket for a separate SSD board which 90% of users would never avail themselves of.
They have for sure increased the recycling rate massively since 2010. Lisa Jackson went from head of the EPA to Apple in 2013, and that’s also when they started to really focus on device longevity, and fostering the pass your old phone down to your kids or up to your parents plus trade-in and refurbish models.
> After taking into account drive age and equalizing it between SSDs and HDDs, we can see that the results have changed significantly. SSDs aren't that far behind hard drives in failure rate, with a 1.05% annualized failure rate compared to 1.38%.
But it hardly matters. If the failure rate is 1 in 100 or 1 in 1000 - either way there are a staggering amount of M1 macs that will be trashed every year because of failed SSDs.
You are right, the standard on-board connectors are extra material. It'd be a fun engineering challenge to reduce the non-recyclable material cost of standard connectors.
> The new MacBook Pro has been carefully designed with the environment in mind. The enclosure is now made with 100% recycled aluminum. And we use recycled rare earth elements in all the magnets in the product. MacBook Pro is free of numerous harmful substances and all the virgin wood fiber in our packaging comes from responsibly-managed forests.
Other notable objectives: 1. full carbon neutrality across their supply chain and services by 2030, inclusive of the use of the device. 2. Recycling and refurb program 3. Circular sourcing (e.g reclamation.)
You concerns are valid, but the princess is in another castle.