News: 1588622892

"although it'll no doubt linger in the form of refurbished and second-hand units"

Unlike better manufacturers, Apple kit doesn't really lend itself to anything but landfill once it goes out of consumer warranty. We probably won't need to worry.

Apple's warranty period in the UK is one year. In your imagination there is not a single piece of functioning Apple equipment more than one year old?

Point made, but in the UK, is not 2 years a mandatory minimum?

I looked up [1]Apple's official warranty ; it states that it "is a voluntary manufacturer’s warranty. It provides rights separate to rights provided by consumer law", so I guess you get the 'good' warranty for a year, then whatever else is required by law?

Either way, I tend to keep my Apple computers running for about five years before an upgrade tempts me, my current iPhone is a 6s from 2015 and it's still going strong (heavy caveat: I have replaced the battery), and I've a first-generation iPod that still works fine for the 45 minutes its battery holds charge for.

I've had two Apple computers fail on me in less than five years — a MacBook Pro that ended up being involved in the Nvidia recall of about a decade ago, and a 2015 Retina MacBook that failed without any connection to a recall programme. In the latter case there was some sort of thermal issue, but they fixed it for free despite being quite far out of warranty.

Those two contrast with another ten or eleven Macs that I've either owned, or been given possession of through work, due primarily to my bad habit of almost always changing jobs after two years but also because a couple of my employers have allocated multiple Macs to me. They're pretty much pervasive throughout US tech.

Additionally, I had every iPhone through to the 6s and never a failure, though I separately had a fourth-generation iPad at some point that failed. My first-generation iPad is still going strong, though for that matter so is my Nexus 5x and my Nexus 7 2013, both of which have famous issues, so probably my anecdotes in net aren't that valuable.

[1] https://www.apple.com/legal/warranty/products/uk-ireland-universal-warranty.html

Just as an adjunct, I worked for a National Telecoms Company (not a difficult one to figure out in the UK) and we got used to having iPhones failing every six months or so in daily use. Of the guys in my team (20 or so) only one had an iPhone for a personal device, we were that p*ssed off with their unreliabilty.

Eh?

If you wanted to make a point about the design failings that made the fault prone keyboards difficult and costly to repair then you should have just said so. And we'd have agreed.

What you actually said is demonstrably wrong. Apple kit usually holds a good resale value compared to other brands - the historical market data is clear. This is in part to them still being usuable after a few years - a cheap Dell laptop often left plugged in won't have any useful battery capacity left after a year, an Apple or Toshiba, as examples will do, due to cell matching and smarter charging control.

As for end of life, aluminium laptops are easier to recycle than ABS or carbon fibre laptops - reducing landfill is the point of it.

Oh, and using glue make recycling easier because dismantling can be done with a conveyor belt through an oven - if you paid a person to undo dozens of screws the recycling would be uneconomic.

Apple kit doesn't really lend itself to anything but landfill once it goes out of consumer warranty.

Damn. Both the ‘refurbished’ MacBooks I bought from the Apple Store for personal use must have been brand new. And they even knocked about 20% off the price.

With that kind of business sense, will Apple ever make a profit?

Of course there is, TB3, external graphics....

Has my MBP happily driving the five screens I use for work.

That's not a portable computer anymore, is it?

Depends on the screen sizes....

The computer is portable, the screens are not... unless you count an iPad as auxiliary screen (dunno why that wasn't a day one feature of the iPad).

The external GPUs allow you more grunt at home or at the office, but machine is still capable of running AutoCAD Fusion whilst on the proverbial train. And really, upgrading a GPU... if you find you need much more than what is originally built into the laptop, you likely need more than *can* be built into a laptop - racks, render farms, spare GPU capacity from other computers on site, or just renting from the cloud are more likely to be what you're after.

As a PC user (because Apple's shift to Unixy OS and Intel happened too late to catch the CAD software falling from the Unixy mainframe and SGI workstation and into the open arms of Windows NT), I've been waiting years for external GPUs to become mainstream - ever since Sony released that VAIO Z with the Thunderbolt-over-USB A setup. Aw, Sony. If it takes Apple's my-way-or-the-highway approach and purchasing power to get Thunderbolt widely adopted then it suits me fine. I don't use Macs so it doesn't cost me anything, but the things worth doing are picked up by other PC vendors eventually. Except, that is, for Microsoft who claim Thunderbolt is a security risk because of DMA, and please use our proprietary cable so you can't easily dock and charge using a standard, oh, and no external GPUs or video transcoders for you, sorry. Shame, cos they deserve credit for bringing back4:3 screens.

Meanwhile, those Razor laptops look very good. Good GPUs, look like black MacBooks instead of a teenager's sketch of a Lamborghini-branded toasted sandwich-grill with extra flashing lights.

Yes, it’s a portable computer - I don’t use 5 screens on the train - but similarly you could reasonably take an eGPU with you as well for pure processing grunt, but why are you doing that in a laptop and not an actual workstation or a server?

Ive been an Apple customer since 1980 and my first Apple II, but the latest round of laptops has just lost it for me. There is nothing about them that has the appeal of my current MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014) with its magnetic power cable and a decent range of USB and HDMI ports. When I got it I specced it high with 16Gb RAM, 1TB ssd, and a Nvidia Gforce GT750M. In terms of value for money it is the best Mac Ive got. The current MBPs for an equivalent spec are orbital prices up to about £4K, I think I paid about £1.8K when I got this one. I don't know what value Apple think they are creating with the current crop of MPBs, but I wont be spending money on them any time soon, not least because they wont support my 32 bit applications which I have invested in over the years.

I had a 2011 MacBook Air and grew strongly to dislike its MagSafe; twice in four years I had to source a replacement power adaptor because the cable frays so easily at the computer end, though admittedly the l-shaped ones are much worse for that than the t-shaped. But I think the USB-C chargers are a big win because you can just replace the cable.

Otherwise, the return of the escape key makes me think that Apple are at least now back on an upswing.

Usb-c replace the cable, or the laptop if your dog runs past at catches the cable.

MagSafe was excellent, and even if their cables weren’t the best it’s still a system that ought to be in common use

3rd party USB-C magnetic breakaway connectors are available for around a fiver. Handy if your power cable is hanging off the side of your desk and you have children and animals.

If you're docking with USB C to a desk-bound monitor, I guess a MagSafe-style magnetic break away connector is less useful.