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- cross-posted to:
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MacBook Air owner?
2018/2019 models are losing #Apple support.
#OptGreen with #GNU/#Linux to keep your device in use! These machines will run beautifully for many years to come.
Not only wallet friendly, #upcycling keeps CO2 emissions out of the atmosphere. Ca. 75% of Apple’s emissions comes from production alone (details in alt text).
Sustainable, independent #FreeSoftware: Better for users, best for the #environment.
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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.”
@phoenix Regarding the assumed operating life of devices:
“For the purposes of our assessment, years of use, which are based on first owners, are modeled to be four years for macOS and tvOS devices and three years for iOS and watchOS devices. Most Apple products last longer and are passed along, resold, or returned to Apple by the first owner for others to use.”
Hope that helps!
Thank you, that sheds some light onto it, yes. I’m still wondering how this number marches up. Just using the device by far uses not even comparable amount of energy than e.g. the production and then it also depends if you use green energy or a diesel generator in your backyard.
Not sure how to read this.
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
Asahi Linux are working on it, should be pretty polished by the time the M1s stop getting updates.
That would be nice for iPhone, I’ve got a perfectly fine iPX that I’m only going to upgrade because my banking apps are going to drop support for iOS 16 soon
@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.
OEM support for the device is needed because an alternate OS cannot provide firmware updates otherwise.
Firmware and drivers can be made open, just as other software can be made open. It’s really just a matter of incentives. In my experience, law tends to be a pretty effective incentive.
If the bill of materials included the legal requirements discussed here, then a component supplier would either start producing open firmware/specs, or they would lose that market to another supplier.
Obviously, Android would not be the only project/product affected by such a legal change.
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
I’m still using my MacBook Air from 2011.
Idk what losing Apple support means, but those 2018/2019 models are good for another ~decade.
I am also still using my 2015 macbook pro A1502, the battery isn’t as good but it can still run my daily tasks. Its still on Catalina, there is no need to upgrade.
Theres always Linux if I ever wanted to upgrade OS.
The last few OS releases will continue to get security updates, but new versions of the OS won’t support those models at all.
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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.
Did you own one? I’ve yet to meet someone that has so any other insight would be appreciated.
High pain tolerance like using Linux as a daily back in ‘06?
Yeah, I have one. It’s slow and unstable, no good browser, no good Signal client and an almost unusable camera and GPS.
All these things kind of sorta work. But not in any satisfying capacity.
It’s especially baffling to me that it seems to be impossible to make a modern smartphone with even a small fraction of the power of a PC. It must be hardware or driver issue because devices like the Steam Deck or Raspberry Pi show that the software is perfectly capable of delivering a good experience. And Android phones show that Linux on a smartphone works in principle. There just seems to be a gap between them and mainline Linux. Probably Google bribing chip manufacturers to keep competition down. Can’t think of much else.
Wow all those are features I want to work properly on a device.
Not to downplay Signal, their encryption is good and they added anti-quantum technology, but I miss what Wikr used to be. Friggin corporate takeovers.
Linux was never strong at graphical type things though. I think one of the reasons for a JRE for Android was a graphical setup. You take out the Java, get the bare OS. The Pi is pretty basic. SteamDeck works well because of the people working on Proton which also functions extremely well for Linux desktop Steam users. Hats off to them and I definitely appreciate all that work
The Steam Deck works well if you have a particularly twisted definition of “working well”. SteamOS is certainly among the worst Linux distros I’ve used. It is certainly significantly worse than the average desktop-oriented distro. Sure, Valve has done good work with Proton, but basically every other piece of their stack is broken in some way.
Just a couple of days ago I had an issue where after the battery died and I plugged my Steam Deck into the charger, it simply failed to turn on. The fans would start spinning and that’s it. Nothing else worked. I could not get into the BIOS menu. I could not get into the recovery menu. The solution? Unplug the Deck, let the battery die from spinning fans and plug it back in, hoping that time it’ll turn on. Spinning fans take a long time to drain the battery, so this took me a couple of hours even though I’d only been plugged in for about ten minutes. I am not the first to deal with this issue. You can see posts online about it more than a year old. Those posts are how I was even able to figure out the solution.
I will never understand why SteamOS gets any kind of praise. This kind of issue is unacceptable. Any non-tech-savvy user will assume their device got bricked. I’ve seen several people mention they did RMA over this. And despite being a critical failure known for over a year, it hasn’t been fixed.
If you’re not a techy, SteamOS is garbage. It is ridiculously unpolished and keeps breaking in ways that can be difficult to fix. Every update (especially the client updates) has a 50/50 chance of breaking something, even on the stable update channel. You have to switch to desktop mode just to use a web browser. In fact, you have the switch to desktop mode for a lot of things, because gaming mode doesn’t let you do things like adding non-Steam games, install Flatpak applications or use a file manager. But desktop mode is entirely unsuited for gamepad controls and the on-screen keyboard feels particularly sluggish (though it can also get sluggish in gaming mode, just not as often).
If you’re a techy, SteamOS is also garbage. It is still ridiculously unpolished and the immutability is implemented in such a way that completely neuters the whole OS as anything you change gets wiped on every update (you can’t layer). There are hacks to do most things from gaming mode. You can run Firefox with some kind of weird setup where you run it inside a nested KWin session, because Gamescope is completely incapable of handling multiple windows, which would normally break all of the context menus and the hamburger menu in Firefox. Similar deal with Dolphin for file management. You can even run the entire Plasma desktop nested inside Gamescope, albeit with some caveats. Still need to switch to Desktop Mode to add non-Steam games tho, since you can’t run the desktop Steam Client from Nested Desktop. Things break occasionally, but it’s manageable. Figuring out all of these workarounds is quite time consuming though. This would not be the case if SteamOS was actually a good distro.
@leopold
SteamOS was designed for playing Steam Games, and Valve allowing access to the desktop was them being nice. I don’t expect using desktop mode to work well. Everything else you complained about (besides the Power issues which is not the fault of SteamOS btw), is you complaining that features work as intended. If you don’t like it, install Vanilla Arch, nothing is stopping you. But don’t complain that it works as intended.
@billbasherThat’s why I run OpenSUSE on my Deck instead of SteamOS.
I would say I have more of a limited view rather than a twisted view. I have used friend’s decks (don’t own one) and haven’t run into issues like that. That boot issue is top-tier ridiculous… You need to be able to power off your devices
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
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.
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.
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”.
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!
IPad second gen, dead speakers, barely does anything anymore
My dad uses it for music
@sleepybisexual
Wired/wireless speaker’s I guess?
@be4fossI guees, never saw him use it
Also a good point, this isn’t to knock products like the Fairphone since they’re offering extremely long product support windows, which should drive down demand for new devices and reduce their carbon footprint.
