Apple is environmentally among the best & reasons for minimal upgradablity
Hi All:
I see a lot of comments here about Apple's environmental practices including the extension that they are not as upgradable as PCs or as much as they once were.
First off, I am a mechanical engineer who designs many electro-mechanical consumer products. None for Apple, and I own no Apple stock: just tons of their products.
I do work for some fairly large companies, and if I even suggested something like a recycling program or to put something in the product or chose a more environmentally-friendly material that costed even one cent, they'd call me a subversive and worse.
I've worked in China and, although I've never been inside a FoxConn factory, I have been in a few FoxLink factories. The owners of these two are brothers, and they are quite similar and both supply for Apple. FoxLink factories are immaculately clean and you can easily see the bins and labels for proper disposal, intensive on-line testing, thorough IQC (incoming quality control), excellent working conditions (mostly clean rooms) and all the other manufacturing niceties that I wish all the factories I worked with had. I've personally worked in factories in the US that were much, much worse on all these levels.
This is totally necessary. I'm guessing there are at least 200 individual parts and components in an iPhone (resistors, capacitors, etc.): probably a lot more, but let's use 200 for this example. If one-in-200 parts were bad (either incoming or made at the facility), it is mathematically possible that every single iPhone would be defective. If you consider that on top of the components there are several manufacturing processes that could also cause issues (soldering, handling delicate connectors, etc.) the possibilities of defects becomes exponential. And out of the hundreds of iPhones and iPads I've known of from friends and family members, none has had a real problem that is a result of the product quality: usually a software issue if any.
And environmental concerns along with security are inherently integrated into the system. If metals and silicon and other raw materials are not pure, the electronic component will not work. As such these are tightly controlled and always kept in clean, well-marked containers and environmentally-controlled, isolated storage areas separate for good and bad.
Upgradeability: When a bunch of parts are cobbled together like a typical PC, it is very easy to upgrade. Somebody buys a mother board from this company, an ethernet card from that, slap in some RAM and plug in some hard drives and voila! You have a computer. When something is well designed into an integrated system, it is inherently more difficult.
A colleague of mine owns a high-end PC networking company in Manhattan. He had just gotten a new 15" big-brand-name laptop with an SSD. I had the late 2012 MacBook Pro Retina. He challenged me to a boot-up contest. I knew mine booted in 12 seconds, because I had timed it when I bought it (because I couldn't believe how fast it was). His took about 30 seconds. My guess is that his SSD had some type of industry standard connection interface and protocol and that my SSD is more highly integrated into the mother board. On the other hand, he could probably buy a new hard drive and install it much easier than I can: but I actually can buy one at OWC.
I would say a laptop is a great place to draw a line in the sand on this. Anything smaller like an iPad or an iPhone is simply not going to be as small as it is if they have connectors for all the batteries, RAM chips, processors and storage devices.
I usually buy the latest and greatest because I use many processor/storage intensive apps in my line of work which extends to graphic design and websites in addition to 3D molding and the like. But all my old items get handed down to relatives or sold on eBay and have significantly longer lives. Of those I've kept for one reason or another, I have two early 2000's-era G4s that I use for FTP to get files back and forth to China without any possibility of compromising my real server. I have an iPhone 4 that is unlocked that I take with me to China and and iPhone 3 that I just use for a music player or some other older apps I happen to like (admittedly the battery doesn't last too long). It can even go online with WiFi, it just can't make a call with no service connected.
