Are these things worth anything any more?

[CapableLaw8039]

As I’ve remarked on here in the past, I will not be buying or using the more recent Macs. This has a lot to do with Apple’s design choices to eliminate and even actively prevent modularity and the ability to replace and/or upgrade components as needed. Further, I’ve never been fond of the T2 chip inclusion for a slew of reasons. Were it there only to handle, say, hardware HEVC encoding/decoding, then there wouldn’t be any complaint.

I honestly am unbothered by it considering the improvements it brought. This is unlike how locked down Intel Mac laptops were. It did not bring in enough of a value to tolerate that. Apple Silicon changed that.

If my workflow does not change then I would replace a decade or so later. When it does change because of paid work then get what is new within budget. Odds are that would occur within 4-6 years. This is longer than the upgrade cycle of every 3 years back in the 1990s.

So this means I continue to use, care for, and improve on older Macs for everyday activity. My next new laptop will almost undoubtedly be coming from Frame.work, on which I’ll run an iteration of Linux and VM for a version of Intel-supported macOS as required by work. Ultimately, after almost 35 years of using Macs, I’ll be moving away from contemporary and/or legacy-supported Apple products. The company have veered afar from their longtime mandate of “it just works” for the products they now sell. It’s a disappointment, but it’s their call.

That's nice. When buying laptops below $999 we go with those with AMD as they're on 5nm going forward. We keep these laptops for a decade also. ThinkPads are known for how repairable they are for the corporate environment.

That company you pointed to positioned themselves as something revolutionary when it isn't exactly a new concept.

This is, literally, not how my brain works at all, although I appreciate it’s how it works for you!

I’m not a hoarder of anything except data, and my lack of desire to hoard extends to the understated enabling of hoarding money in a social-economic system which, paradoxically, frowns on hoarding except as it relates to money and money-bearing instruments.

I live in a poor country that has no safety net. So philosophical perspectives on money is a luxury.

So when a passive source of income reaches >$200k then I may indulge in a tiny bit of hoarding.

From time to time, I watch YouTube clips from folks who work on vintage cars as a pastime or to teach viewers how to work on their own cars. These folks often have far more cars than I could fathom (the most I’ve ever owned was one at any given time, and I gave that up almost twenty years ago in favour of living in cities where one no longer needs a car, or can easily hire one for an inter-city road trip.

I have friends who are like that and yet their standard of living and qualify of life is not aspirational.

They're happy then I'm happy. Just don't try to convince me to spend my money into watches because I've seen how that turned out for them. I personally stopped wearing watches when I received my 1995 Nokia 2110.

I will rent a dwelling or rent a car when I hire one, but I never, ever rent data. That’s a hard, red line nope for me. Intangibles are not real property.

Streaming is a godsend. I don't have to up front money for TB of storage and a NAS. No need to learn a non-money making skill how to make that NAS work.

For some titles then renting or buying then selling would be the alternative.

Like I am thankful I sold my DVD copies of the X-Files a few years prior to the 2K Blu-ray remasters while it had some value. Today, if I still kept them around I'd have to pay someone to take them.

I expect a 4K Blu-ray remaster to come out soon-ish so I have placed that 2K set on sale before 2026 at a seller's price.

 

[B S Magnet]

I honestly am unbothered by it considering the improvements it brought. This is unlike how locked down Intel Mac laptops were. It did not bring in enough of a value to tolerate that. Apple Silicon changed that. [emphasis: mine]

I’d like to hear you elaborate on this.

As with later Intel laptops from Apple, virtually no components are user-upgradeable, and those which could be are blocked contractually by Apple, to their vendors, from selling replacement parts when they fail, or they’re cryptographically locked. As LG are one of Apple’s longtime suppliers of displays, Apple’s prohibition on LG selling replacement Retina LCDs to anyone, period (repair shops inclusive), has left untold numbers of screen-damaged rMBPs out of action, prematurely recycled, and/or have replacement displays scavenged from scarce working units and are sold used at fairly stratospheric prices.

That one must, up-front, order all the RAM and storage one could potentially use in their MacBook Pro/Air, iMac, or Mac mini, means a lot of products are hitting landfill prematurely and consuming much more energy-intensive recycling far sooner than they would have as Apple and others began to engage in these end-user-hostile practices.

When the 8 or 16GB of RAM in an M2 MBP with 256 or 512GB of SSD soldered can no longer keep up with growth in usage and operating needs (or, worse, when the SSD fails far too soon, as I faced a few years ago), they get jettisoned unnecessarily — whereas an ability for a consumer to upgrade their existing laptop, as components costs come down and use-cases arise for adding that increased capacity, makes a strong case for practical low-energy-and-resource-consumption which comes from upcycling what’s already out there and in active use.

If my workflow does not change then I would replace a decade or so later. When it does change because of paid work then get what is new within budget. Odds are that would occur within 4-6 years. This is longer than the upgrade cycle of every 3 years back in the 1990s.

One needs to factor the end of the line for Moore’s Law here.

As upgrades based on increases in speed, power, and lower energy consumption no longer get doubled like clockwork, companies as Apple have turned to locked-in-place components to prevent a consumer from using as long the gear they purchased new (whose CPU/GPU would otherwise be more than capable of operating at time scales of seven, ten, or even more years. This locked-in, soldered, cryptographically tamped-down approach assures Apple (and similar-minded manufacturers) will continue to have rates of consumer product turnover closer to the era of when Moore’s law made it necessary to upgrade every two to five years, such as during the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s.

This is why a well-prepared consumer now looks elsewhere to find computing gear whose components are not bound by this new model of post-Moore disposability (cryptographic locking, soldered consumables, contract-enforced embargoes, etc.) and whose components can grow and even operate well as a kind of upcycling Ship of Theseus for many more years to come.

That's nice. When buying laptops below $999 we go with those with AMD as they're on 5nm going forward. We keep these laptops for a decade also. ThinkPads are known for how repairable they are for the corporate environment.

Aside from, say, Zoom meetings, why might a corporation need 5nm or 3nm-based systems when 7nm, 10nm, or 14nm-scaled architecture can take on the same tasks of, say, Office 365, email, and cloud services? IT services’ reserves for backups and replacements notwithstanding, the only cost-effective reason in a post-Moore’s law setting to replace a generation of hardware within the company and/or department is that spares/reserves have dwindled; the cost of upkeep has exceeded their long-term cost-benefit; and new stock from the generation being replaced are no longer available from the vendor. In practice, that means buying department/company cycles should slow down alongside the slowdown and ending of Moore’s law.

As you noted, Lenovo’s ThinkPads have long done a good job with building sturdy laptops with repairable and replaceable components, as have some Asus series and a dwindling number of Dell lines.

That company you pointed to positioned themselves as something revolutionary when it isn't exactly a new concept.

You‘re correct: it isn’t new at all, except they very consciously are eyeing the value in the aforementioned Ship of Theseus model of replacing only what’s falling behind and/or worn out, without tossing the entire unit — working and faulty components on that unit, combined — into waste streams.

What’s evolutionary or revolutionary is their means to sell, provide, and maintain modular, yet fast, sturdy, and portable laptops in a competitive environment in which most of the established, very large players (ostensibly preoccupied singularly by the quarterly statement for shareholders), have moved away from modular and/or repairable products. Frame.work’s marketing might call that a “revolutionary” concept, whereas in practice it’s more a matter of delivering the contemporary idiosyncrasy of practicality and longevity by respecting their customers precisely where those customers both work and live with their “daily drivers”.

Their business model demonstrates effectively how customers never really stopped wanting things like upgradeability, modularity, and ease of repairability for their everyday computing devices. It was also an interesting tell, soon after their founding, how they hired several of the industrial designers and product engineers who’d worked at Apple developing MacBook-based products, who themselves wanted to continue developing products the way Apple once did (as recently as 2016 with the unibody MacBook Pro still being sold at that late date).

I live in a poor country that has no safety net. So philosophical perspectives on money is a luxury.

I live in a fairly rich country, but am “poor” by its standards. In the past, I have also experienced houselessness, hunger, and lack of access to medical care.

There is nothing philosophical about what I wrote, and in so saying, I stay mindful of six, wise words as I wend through my own life: “You can’t take it with you.”

What I leave behind for others who survive me is as much as I’m able to share and pass along which I’ve learnt during my short stay on this planet — with hope that that tiny bit of knowledge I cobbled together can pay things forward to future generations.

I have what what is necessary, materially, to do the tasks and work I both need to do and to care for those I love. This is what works for me.

So when a passive source of income reaches >$200k then I may indulge in a tiny bit of hoarding.

Wow. Okay.

I have friends who are like that and yet their standard of living and qualify of life is not aspirational.

Yah, that’s not my jam, either. But for other folks, things like owning a rural homestead with room to park rows of barnyard finds is what they believe is most important to them.

They're happy then I'm happy. Just don't try to convince me to spend my money into watches because I've seen how that turned out for them. I personally stopped wearing watches when I received my 1995 Nokia 2110.

Fun story: I once found a practically new and working wristwatch lying adjacent to a freight railway line. Obviously, it was not a luxury watch, but it did its one job very well until I killed it by doing something really careless and avoidable.

Streaming is a godsend. I don't have to up front money for TB of storage and a NAS. No need to learn a non-money making skill how to make that NAS work.

Aside from watching YT clips (for the most part, this amounts to music videos which I frequently archive; a streaming music station from Japan; and inset clips within a news story), I don’t do much stream-viewing. The monthly costs I’d need to spend on subscriptions to one or more of Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Apple TV+, Disney+, etc., easily pays for itself within a short time when setting that budget aside for addiing to local storage or, heck, for doing other things like film photography. That’s been my tack since before the outset of “renting a stream” became a business model.

I expect a 4K Blu-ray remaster to come out soon-ish so I have placed that 2K set on sale before 2026 at a seller's price.

I have the X-Files canon in 1080p tucked away in my digital archives (and for Millennium, the best to be made available, so far, to the public: 576p PAL.)


[EDIT to add: In any event, @CapableLaw8039 , I recognize how you’re just getting familiar around here (welcome!). I can also see where this discussion is headed. That place is neither topical to this thread subject, nor do I want to get into some kind of contest of wits (or contests involving anatomical equipment I lack). So I welcome you to get to know why the PowerPC Macs forum and its community thrives the ways it does — despite the fact that every PowerPC Mac on the planet was long-classified by Apple as ”obsolete”.]

 

[CapableLaw8039]

I’d like to hear you elaborate on this.

As with later Intel laptops from Mac, virtually no components are user-upgradeable, and those which could be are blocked contractually by Apple, to their vendors, from selling replacement parts when they fail, or they’re cryptographically locked. As LG are one of Apple’s longtime suppliers of displays, Apple’s prohibition on LG selling replacement Retina LCDs to anyone, period (repair shops inclusive), has left untold numbers of screen-damaged rMBPs out of action, prematurely recycled, and/or have replacement displays scavenged from scarce working units and are sold used at fairly stratospheric prices.

That one must, up-front, order all the RAM and storage one could potentially use in their MacBook Pro/Air, iMac, or Mac mini, means a lot of products are hitting landfill prematurely and consuming much more energy-intensive recycling far sooner than they would have Apple and others began to engage in these end-user-hostile practices.

When the 8 or 16GB of RAM in an M2 MBP with 256 or 512GB of SSD soldered can no longer keep up with growth in usage and operating needs (or, worse, when the SSD fails far too soon, as I faced a few years ago), they get jettisoned unnecessarily — whereas an ability for a consumer to upgrade their existing laptop, as components costs come down and use-cases arise for adding that increased capacity, makes a strong case for practical low-energy-and-resource-consumption which comes from upcycling what’s already out there and in active use.

Everything you mentioned is in exchange of these quality of life improvements made possible by Apple Silicon.

These improvements are in terms of

- up to 22 hours battery life
- raw performance
- performance per watt
- power consumption
- lowest BTU/hr
- smaller & higher weight products
- industrial design that tend to change every 5-9 years

The above are important to people like me.

I am willing to pay for that as these are quality of life improvements vs x86 PCs

If repairability and upgradeability detracts in any way from the above then I like many others would look for other products to buy.

Intel and AMD offers repairable laptops that can be easily torn down for repairs. I've owned and used them.

It adds bulk that translate to more weight and a larger size.

One needs to factor the end of the line for Moore’s Law here.

As upgrades based on increases in speed, power, and lower energy consumption no longer get doubled like clockwork, companies as Apple have turned to locked-in-place components to prevent a consumer from using as long the gear they purchased new (whose CPU/GPU would otherwise be more than capable of operating at time scales of seven, ten, or even more years. This lock-in, soldered, cryptographically tamped-down approach assures Apple (and similar-minded manufacturers) will continue to have rates of consumer product turnover closer to the era of when Moore’s law made it necessary to upgrade every two to five years, such as during the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s.

Moore's Law has been cited so often than not by every tech site I know. They've been citing that the end is near for over 3 decades on a monthly basis.

The thing is given enough R&D money and time there will be workarounds for that.

Compare a 2021 iMac 24" M1's 80-84W CPU max power consumption to a 2011 iMac 21.5" 101-114W CPU max?

That's a decade of progress. M1 model has a larger, higher nit 4.5K display and yet uses less power. It is multiples faster than the model a decade prior to it. That's a 32nm node vs a 5nm node that allegedly could never be feasible because of Moore's Law. 32nm was impossible from year 2001 point of view and 5nm was impossible by 2011 point of view.

This is why a well-prepared consumer now looks elsewhere to find computing gear whose components are not bound by this new model of post-Moore disposability (cryptographic locking, soldered consumables, contract-enforced embargoes, etc.) and whose components can grow and even operate well as a kind of upcycling Ship of Theseus for many more years to come.

If you are not aware of this that since as early 2005 consumers prefer laptops. They do not mind the limitations of upgradability it brings vs a desktop

Over time that limit of upgradeability became acceptable and it came to the head when the 1st ultrabook came out in 2008 in the form of the Macbook Air.

Since then that is the most popular Mac laptop Apple sells. Other brands followed suite and offered their own ultrabooks.

These have soldered on everything and the buyers accepts it.

Of course there are other users who do not accept it so they buy laptops that can be easily repaired but the demand for such is far lower than any ultrabook.

First ARM PCs that has Android SoC will be laptops. Desktops are an afterthought. These ARM laptops will provide equivalent Mac on Apple Silicon performance on Windows 11.

Odds are people buying these will not consider upgradeability or repairability a key concern as they will just buy new by year 4-6.

There may come a day that modularized laptops will not sell anymore as it is more expensive.

Aside from, say, Zoom meetings, why might a corporation need 5nm or 3nm-based systems when 7nm, 10nm, or 14nm-scaled architecture can take on the same tasks of, say, Office 365, email, and cloud services? IT services reserves for backups and replacements notwithstanding, the only cost-effective reason in a post-Moore’s law setting to replace a generation of hardware within the company and/or department is that spares/reserves have dwindled, and the cost of upkeep has exceeded their long-term cost-benefit, and new stock from the generation being replaced are no longer available from the vendor. In practice, that means buying department/company cycles should slow down alongside the slowdown and ending of Moore’s law.

Natural wear and tear will necessitate replacements. Windows support is up to 122 months as well.

Any person/corporation is courting problems if they go beyond that point using any PC that gets used and abused for ~8hrs/day 2600 days out of 3650 days in a decade.

As you noted, Lenovos ThinkPads have long done a good job with building sturdy laptops with repairable and replaceable components, as have some Asus series and a dwindling number of Dell lines.

You‘re correct: it isn’t new at all, except they very consciously are eyeing the value in the aforementioned Ship of Theseus model of replacing only what’s falling behind and/or worn out, without tossing the entire unit — working and faulty components on that unit, combined — into waste streams.

The marketing is such that it appeals to a market segment that feels the same way you do. But they want to use new words to express it to draw you more in than the corporate types.

My question is how can it sustain operations in the time scale others expect those Intel laptops to last? I have a sense that these are expected to have spare parts beyond 1 or 2 decades.

To keep any PC in tip top shape necessitates tearing it apart to clean out any possible dust clogging HSF. This is typically done every 5 years for laptops operated in relatively smoke or dust-free environment.

Typical user is not comfortable with that. Much less enjoy it.

That's why they typically outright replace 4-6 years after.

Example would the sudden demand for devices from 2020-2022 to replace devices bought earlier than 2014-2018. These were used for remote work/study.

They will not tear about those devices to upgrade or clean out. They'd rather buy brand new.

Think any person who is inept or did not grow up or worked with any Mac or PC that often. Or they bought based on price or how pretty it looked.

That’s evolutionary or revolutionary is their means to sell, provide, and maintain modular, yet fast, sturdy, and portable laptops in a competitive environment in which most of the established, very large players (ostensibly preoccupied singularly by the quarterly statement for shareholders), have moved away from modular and/or repairable products. Frame.work’s marketing might call that a “revolutionary” concept, whereas in practice it’s more a matter of delivering the contemporary idiosyncrasy of practicality and longevity by respecting their customers precisely where those customers both work and live with their “daily drivers”.

Odds are that company will close shop and may not be able to provide the spare parts promised.

Their durability is not proven as it is a new company.

People on a budget will steer clear of it and go with a sub-$800 known brand.

Their business model demonstrates effectively how customers never really stopped wanting things like upgradeability, modularity, and ease of repairability for their everyday computing devices. It was also an interesting tell, soon after their founding, how they hired several of the industrial designers and product engineers who’d worked at Apple developing MacBook-based products, who themselves wanted to continue developing products the way Apple once did (as recently as 2016 with the unibody MacBook Pro still being sold at that late date).

I think you're talking about a niche product for a niche that isn't exactly growing.

I live in a fairly rich country, but am “poor” by its standards. In the past, I have also experienced houselessness, hunger, and lack of access to medical care.

There is nothing philosophical about what I wrote, and in so saying, I stay mindful of six, wise words as I wend through my own life: “You can’t take it with you.”

That is a luxury many of us cannot live by. Your living in a rich country allowed you more opportunities to rebound. I hope you understand that and people who say “You can’t take it with you.” comes from that advantage.

>84% of adults living in my poor country earns <$4.5k annually. Earning $0.69-1.31/hr region to region. They tend to have 2-4 or more kids to support on that income in a 1 or 2 income household. They're so poor that our IRS equivalent do not bother collecting any individual income tax from them.

If anyone told them “You can’t take it with you.” they'd suddenly have their hands outreached asking you for a long term loan that they have no intention to pay you back for.

You are very lucky to be born and grow up in the US. No matter how you think you have it bad someone else in a country that is desperate for your personal standard of living will illegally immigrate to do so.

Aside from watching YT clips (for the most part, this amounts to music videos which I frequently archive; a streaming music station from Japan; and inset clips within a news story), I don’t do much stream-viewing. The monthly costs I’d need to spend on subscriptions to one or more of Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Apple TV+, Disney+, etc., easily pays for itself within a short time when setting that budget aside for addiing to local storage or, heck, for doing other things like film photography. That’s been my tack since before the outset of “renting a stream” became a business model.

You must have a nice cash flow.

That only works if you have the $$$ to pay it up front. I pay Prime Video & Spotify Premium each at $3/month & Netflix $5/month. With that monthly overhead how long would it take you to cover the up front cost of your TB of HDD & NAS?

When I was starting out with a dSLR in 2003 a copy of Photoshop was around $649? Today to subscribe to it its <$10/month? Using that metric it would take me approaching 65 months to to get my ROI.

That's pretty heavy on the cash flow.

Compare that to my telco offering me my $1099 iPhone 13 Pro Max 128GB at <$45.80/month on a 24 month contract with text/calls/50GB data. If they maintain that offer for me perpetually I'd have a new phone every 24 months without impacting my cash flow that badly.

I know many here prefering to buy their phones up front to be free of any contract. But to be honest how many here actually switch from one telco to another just because they felt like it?

 

[Dronecatcher]

Compare a 2021 iMac 24" M1's 80-84W CPU max power consumption to a 2011 iMac 21.5" 101-114W CPU max?

That's a nice improvement....shame though that electricity is now four times as expensive as it was ten years ago (UK)

 

[B S Magnet]

Everything you mentioned is in exchange of these quality of life improvements made possible by Apple Silicon.

These improvements are in terms of

- up to 22 hours battery life
- raw performance
- performance per watt
- power consumption
- lowest BTU/hr
- smaller & higher weight products
- industrial design that tend to change every 5-9 years

The above are important to people like me.

Cool, cool.

The only line item worth remarking on here (the rest being marketing-quality copy, and not topical to this forum and discussion):

Industrial design, done well, is timeless.

Ive knew that, and he cribbed multiple industrial design principles directly from Braun’s Dieter Rams. His seventh and ninth principles really hit home here: “Good design is long-lasting” and “Good design is environmentally-friendly.”

Tossing whole laptops into the recycling stream, whose function is hobbled by a single point of failure (which otherwise might be repairable and/or upgradeable) is not environmentally friendly by any metric.

I am willing to pay for that as these are quality of life improvements vs x86 PCs


[snip]

Example would the sudden demand for devices from 2020-2022 to replace devices bought earlier than 2014-2018. These were used for remote work/study.

The top-down-led shift toward software-as-a-service (and the immanent user-telemetry bloat embedded within that user-is-the-product model paradigm) was the greatest driver for a consumer need to upgrade their hardware.

Think any person who is inept or did not grow up or worked with any Mac or PC that often. Or they bought based on price or how pretty it looked.

OK.

Odds are that company will close shop and may not be able to provide the spare parts promised.

Their durability is not proven as it is a new company.

Apple once functioned out of a garage. 🤷‍♀️

People on a budget will steer clear of it and go with a sub-$800 known brand.

Or, people on a budget will do the consumer research to find a lightly used laptop whose internals can be upgraded as they can budget for it.

That is a luxury many of us cannot live by. Your living in a rich country allowed you more opportunities to rebound. I hope you understand that and people who say “You can’t take it with you.” comes from that advantage.

No. When you die, you don’t bring your material wealth with you. That’s it.

I live in Canada. I’m an immigrant. I have lived in states of poverty I described earlier. I have never been well-to-do or even comfortable from concepts like quote-unquote “passive income” — a matter you mentioned earlier.

>84% of adults living in my poor country earns <$4.5k annually. Earning $0.69-1.31/hr region to region. They tend to have 2-4 or more kids to support on that income in a 1 or 2 income household. They're so poor that our IRS equivalent do not bother collecting any individual income tax from them.

I’ve had several years in which I earned less than USD$4,500 annually. (Again, see earlier.) I also chose not to have children.

If anyone told them “You can’t take it with you.” they'd suddenly have their hands outreached asking you for a long term loan that they have no intention to pay you back for.

Explain this to me like I’m five. Why would one living in poverty “have their hands outstretched asking you for a long term loan” they’ll never pay down? Why would they need a long-term loan? Again, all of this is off-topic, but feel free to indulge me like I’m five years old.

If what you’re getting at is the nation-state where you live cannot care for its most vulnerable residents, then fundamental change/disruption/whatever must come to fore on how that nation-state looks after its most vulnerable constituents.

You are very lucky to be born and grow up in the US. No matter how you think you have it bad someone else in a country that is desperate for your personal standard of living will illegally immigrate to do so.

See above re: Canada, being an immigrant, being a woman, being on the GSM spectrum (and no, I do not mean LTE’s predecessor), and other absences of affordances you might frame in your mind as present for the archetypal resident of, I guess, the U.S.

You must have a nice cash flow.

I don’t. At all. In fact, I never have. I make do within the limits of where I live and what I earn from labour.

I take very good care of the material things I have. Whether by necessity or because I want to reduce my waste footprint for those who follow me after I’m gone, I’ve learnt how to fix things if and when they break — rather than throwing them out and running to a retail store (or, uh, Amazon) to buy replacements.

But that’s how I do things.

That only works if you have the $$$ to pay it up front. I pay Prime Video & Spotify Premium each at $3/month & Netflix $5/month. With that monthly overhead how long would it take you to cover the up front cost of your TB of HDD & NAS?

Nah. I bought the last addition to my server storage (my file server, incidentally, is the G5 in my signature line) in 2019.

I saved up, putting away a little every month (not too much more than your monthly service examples), to pay for it. The last computer I acquired was in 2020. That was the 2013 iMac in my signature line which a friend I helped, who was moving away, gave to me as a thank-you (and because they were using a different computer for their teaching work by then). I have yet to budget for the upgrades to its CPU, storage, and RAM, but it’s in the cards, as the system was designed and built to last a long time.

When I was starting out with a dSLR in 2003 a copy of Photoshop was around $649? Today to subscribe to it its <$10/month? Using that metric it would take me approaching 65 months to to get my ROI.

Wow. You have a DSLR? Amazing. I’ve never had one of those. Good on you!

But know that that early-gen DSLR was far more spendy than your static end-user licence for Photoshop, which is still valid. Bonus: that DSLR still couldn’t yield as faithful an image reproduction as what a then-fifty-year-old 35mm SLR could manage. Bet.

That's pretty heavy on the cash flow.

I imagine so, especially so that DSLR, which would have needed replacing to approach film resolution quality!

I love to talk shop about photography always, but this thread isn’t the place and time for it.

Compare that to my telco offering me my $1099 iPhone 13 Pro Max 128GB at <$45.80/month on a 24 month contract with text/calls/50GB data. If they maintain that offer for me perpetually I'd have a new phone every 24 months without impacting my cash flow that badly.

I bought my Android phone new in 2017. I am still using that phone, which remains in good condition and still supported by LineageOS, cosmetically and functionally — its life extended not long ago with a replacement battery. As memory serves, I think the phone, a Nextbit Robin, was under CAD$300, unlocked.

But, once more: we’re off-topic.

I know many here prefering to buy their phones up front to be free of any contract. But to be honest how many here actually switch from one telco to another just because they felt like it?

I switch telcos here when a competitor offers a better deal. That’s why competition, for all its faults, still has its place, and why Frame.work laptops are a viable, fresh competitor to the idea of forcibly-disposable appliances which is now the current, SoC Macs running tightly closed architecture.

---

Anyhow, you’re on your own from here on out, @CapableLaw8039 . I won’t be responding any further to your tit-for-tat replies on this thread — which was, I ought to nudge, about whether the original poster should keep or sell their vintage PowerPC-era gear.

Please make your way to a better vehicle (and to a more appropriate, topical venue) to vent your values toward new-to-you people on the internet whose world view departs from your own: this is the PowerPC Macs forum.

 

[CapableLaw8039]

That's a nice improvement....shame though that electricity is now four times as expensive as it was ten years ago (UK)

That's 1 reason I'm replacing my 10yo iMac for a new one.

The one I am using is now not worth salvaging for repairs. Not worth the time or effort.

May as well just sell this to someone who'd extend it with OCLP for another 10 years and use the money as downpayment for a new 27" model that uses 1/2 the power & BTU/hr.

If most Mac users bought their computer every decade then I'd have no doubt Apple would shut down that business unit or put into place methods to force upgrades sooner.

Apple deserves to make money. They provide an exceptionally good product and services. In the same way any professional that uses a Mac deserves to be paid their worth.

 

[B S Magnet]

If most Mac users bought their computer every decade then I'd have no doubt Apple would shut down that business unit or put into place methods to force upgrades sooner.

Uh… 🤦‍♀️

 

[Dronecatcher]

In the same way any professional that uses a Mac deserves to be paid their worth.

A professional deserves to be paid their worth based on the merit of the work they deliver - not the specs of their latest all new Mac.

Apple have had enough money off me in the past - they were good times but priorities change, disposable technology as status symbol was never meant to be the deal.

 

[lepidotós]

I'm kinda forced into am AS MacBook by my dual policies of not buying any new Intel products and excising amd64 from my life near-completely (besides projects limited to the pre-IME/PSP era -- think Opteron 2x0) at least until we see the T2080-based laptop and, one day, a Vantage based one, but I do really not enjoy the idea of chucking it out in three years, so I've had this on my mind plenty.
As counterintuitive as it might seem, my grand strategy is to just buy a refurbished one with the upgrades to 24GB/1 or 2TB and slap a (or a few) lightweight OSes on it, then do most write-heavy work over the Internet on a NAS. That upgraded memory and storage should mean the NANDs don't wear out before the rest of the laptop does (some rough estimates suggest at least 100 years with a 1500TBW endurance, up to 800 years with a 6000TBW endurance which isn't unhead of) and should let me get at least 25 years out of it, if my 20 year old, Moore-transitional-era iBook G3 being almost usable online nowadays is any indication.
I don't have any plan if any of the RAM or NAND chips goes out early, but I do hear that de-soldering them was done two years ago.
It almost doubles the price, but that price is spread out over such a long time that it should be a drop in the ocean ideally. I don't really see a better option while still sticking to those goals right at the immediate moment but if one comes up I'll look into it.

I'm aware of ROMA, but it's just a scam, the laptop doesn't exist outside of a prototype that they took pictures with. Notably, they don't show any UI images (let alone neo/hyfetch) and the chassis is just a generic Windows one, so I wouldn't be surprised if it just doesn't exist in any form and it was just some Clevo.

In regards to the OP, it's kind of funny how the question was posed regarding some pretty sought after stuff. Makes one wonder how many people just didn't bother to consider the possibility before choosing a course of action.​

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

[EDIT to add: In any event, @CapableLaw8039 , I recognize how you’re just getting familiar around here (welcome!). I can also see where this discussion is headed. That place is neither topical to this thread subject, nor do I want to get into some kind of contest of wits (or contests involving anatomical equipment I lack). So I welcome you to get to know why the PowerPC Macs forum and its community thrives the ways it does — despite the fact that every PowerPC Mac on the planet was long-classified by Apple as ”obsolete”.]

Oh my gosh, that's easy. It's because I'm right and you're wrong.

In all seriousness to the above comment and above conversation, I am an unapologetic capitalist, lover of amassing wealth and collecting all sorts of knicks n knacks to store away in my barns out in the woods while standing up to pee behind a tree. The ideological socialist, collectivist, & minimalist tendencies that some of the good & very knowledgeable folks here express certainly could rub me the wrong way if I allowed them to, however I personally enjoy the intellectual challenge they present to my own moral/ethical belief systems and ideas/limits of freedom within society. You do you, I do me and we move forward together. In idea, it seems simple enough eh LOL.

Suffice it to say, while I am not only tolerant of but in fact truly enjoy the diversity of thought that is occasionally expressed here at the PPC forum, I am very glad that we all come together to nicely (most of the time anyways lol) share focused conversation about our PowerPC collections, journeys and/or information about them. The fact that we mostly can self-moderate ourselves and our opinions is a great strength that makes this forum a fun place to hang out, joke around & chat. I appreciate you all and that common quality we share here.

 

[eyoungren]

A professional deserves to be paid their worth based on the merit of the work they deliver - not the specs of their latest all new Mac.

I missed this way back in Feb. when you posted it. I agree, but will just add that professionals are largely being paid for their knowledge and their time.

Of course, what you produce is important. No one pays a pro a lot of money for producing grade school work. But a pro's time is valuable as is all the knowledge the've acquired and the training they undertook.

But as with you, I agree, the specs (your tools to do the job) don't matter. Only the end result.

 

[B S Magnet]

Oh my gosh, that's easy. It's because I'm right and you're wrong.

🤦‍♀️

In all seriousness to the above comment and above conversation, I am an unapologetic capitalist, lover of amassing wealth and collecting all sorts of knicks n knacks to store away in my barns out in the woods while standing up to pee behind a tree. The ideological socialist, collectivist, & minimalist tendencies that some of the good & very knowledgeable folks here express certainly could rub me the wrong way if I allowed them to,

Mmm, that’s mostly your own hang-up. Also, thanks for sharing your off-topic aside even as it’s worth remembering how no one is an island — no matter how much one believes themselves to be. That island-me-first mentality is the root of why many of the other forums on MR often get festooned with a bunch of folks who work against one another and make the tenor of those places unpleasant to spend a moment longer than one absolutely needs.

however I personally enjoy the intellectual challenge they present to my own moral/ethical belief systems and ideas/limits of freedom within society. You do you, I do me and we move forward together. In idea, it seems simple enough eh LOL.

Indeed. And sometimes it is better to fold your hands in your lap and withhold making off-topic hot takes on a necromanced thread which, once more, deviates from the topic of this thread.

Suffice it to say, while I am not only tolerant of but in fact truly enjoy the diversity of thought that is occasionally expressed here at the PPC forum, I am very glad that we all come together to nicely (most of the time anyways lol) share focused conversation about our PowerPC collections, journeys and/or information about them. The fact that we mostly can self-moderate ourselves and our opinions is a great strength that makes this forum a fun place to hang out, joke around & chat. I appreciate you all and that common quality we share here.

🆗.

 

[FirDerrig33]

In regards to the OP, it's kind of funny how the question was posed regarding some pretty sought after stuff. Makes one wonder how many people just didn't bother to consider the possibility before choosing a course of action.​

In my defense, lol, I was not aware that the items I was asking about were so sought after. The display itself doesn’t support HDCP, no built-in audio and FW 400 isn’t exactly a supported I/O anymore. It also uses more energy than a new Mac mini.

I get it though that some people might want a display like that. That’s the reason that I posted it here in the PPC forum based on the items. I also didn’t anticipate the inability of modern MAC OS to repair and reformat an internal drive and therefore prepare to rely on a device that is now almost 20 years old to fix my more modern one.

I get it though that it might seem strange but I think the reason that ended up keeping those items is something that isn’t necessarily something that should have been common knowledge.

 

[TheShortTimer]

As with later Intel laptops from Apple, virtually no components are user-upgradeable, and those which could be are blocked contractually by Apple, to their vendors, from selling replacement parts when they fail, or they’re cryptographically locked. As LG are one of Apple’s longtime suppliers of displays, Apple’s prohibition on LG selling replacement Retina LCDs to anyone, period (repair shops inclusive), has left untold numbers of screen-damaged rMBPs out of action, prematurely recycled, and/or have replacement displays scavenged from scarce working units and are sold used at fairly stratospheric prices.

This, is disgusting. What I knew of Apple's latter day business practices had already left me with a bad taste in my mouth but this is another level. That's appalling on every conceivable level. They need to be legally challenged on this in a major way.

That one must, up-front, order all the RAM and storage one could potentially use in their MacBook Pro/Air, iMac, or Mac mini, means a lot of products are hitting landfill prematurely and consuming much more energy-intensive recycling far sooner than they would have as Apple and others began to engage in these end-user-hostile practices.

As I've harped on before, it goes against the basic principles of computing that were established by Apple and others that you are in the driving seat with your computer and it can grow with you through the years as and when your needs change. Not any more! Instead you now have disposable products which are designed with a fixed lifespan and its access to software releases is restricted to force you into abandoning it sooner rather than later, to repeat the cycle all over again with their latest disposable product.

Whilst this is acceptable for the fashionista crowd that Apple now covet who will jettison their Macs as they would last season's wardrobe, it alienates serious users who want more from a computer than a stylish object to pose with. I have computers which are forty years old that possess more capacity for upgrades than many of these Macs - and that's a disturbing realisation.

When the 8 or 16GB of RAM in an M2 MBP with 256 or 512GB of SSD soldered can no longer keep up with growth in usage and operating needs (or, worse, when the SSD fails far too soon, as I faced a few years ago), they get jettisoned unnecessarily — whereas an ability for a consumer to upgrade their existing laptop, as components costs come down and use-cases arise for adding that increased capacity, makes a strong case for practical low-energy-and-resource-consumption which comes from upcycling what’s already out there and in active use.

This is why Apple doesn't have anything to offer me nowadays. No matter, I've got enough of their better designed hardware to see me through the coming years.

Aside from watching YT clips (for the most part, this amounts to music videos which I frequently archive; a streaming music station from Japan; and inset clips within a news story), I don’t do much stream-viewing. The monthly costs I’d need to spend on subscriptions to one or more of Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Apple TV+, Disney+, etc., easily pays for itself within a short time when setting that budget aside for addiing to local storage or, heck, for doing other things like film photography. That’s been my tack since before the outset of “renting a stream” became a business model.

I have the X-Files canon in 1080p tucked away in my digital archives (and for Millennium, the best to be made available, so far, to the public: 576p PAL.)

Is this content that you recorded/acquired? I'm curious.

 

[B S Magnet]

This, is disgusting. What I knew of Apple's latter day business practices had already left me with a bad taste in my mouth but this is another level. That's appalling on every conceivable level. They need to be legally challenged on this in a major way.

You ought to watch a few of Louis Rossman’s videos on this strict-contract paradigm Apple have flexed over the last decade with their parts vendors, such as LG.

His frustration is barely veiled as a competent repair tech who can’t readily get the parts to replace a broken retina display (or other components on the logic board which fail for whatever reason). The really vexatious part is there was a brief time when one could order the part from one of the suppliers which bought from LG before Apple quashed that path. Indeed, there is at least one older clip on Rossman’s channel wherein he uses heat to remove the glass of a broken retina display, then carefully puts in a replacement-new retina LCD into the lid case, before re-sealing it with the glass. He, of course, was no longer able to do that soon afterwards.

As I've harped on before, it goes against the basic principles of computing that were established by Apple and others that you are in the driving seat with your computer and it can grow with you through the years as and when your needs change.

That Apple died with Steve Jobs, even if Jobs was all-in on the premise that Apple products, such as the original Macintosh, were supposed to be “appliances”. It’s been Cook’s captaining which has managed to realize this ominous vision for the sole benefit of Apple shareholders. Consumers pay the penalty in both the short and long term, as does this planet.

Not any more! Instead you now have disposable products which are designed with a fixed lifespan and its access to software releases is restricted to force you into abandoning it sooner rather than later, to repeat the cycle all over again with their latest disposable product.

Orquesta del sad horns… 📯

Whilst this is acceptable for the fashionista crowd that Apple now covet who will jettison their Macs as they would last season's wardrobe, it alienates serious users who want more from a computer than a stylish object to pose with. I have computers which are forty years old that possess more capacity for upgrades than many of these Macs - and that's a disturbing realisation.

You’re always going to get unhappy trolls who roll in with their hot takes about “you can’t create content on those old, slower relics,” yet time and time again, people continue to create remarkable work on older Macs. That’s because they’re still tools which enable the user to create work, ideas, and content.

You still find “old” Macs (i.e., models “vintaged” and/or “obsoleted” by Apple) populating most A-level recording studios worth their salt. You find longstanding film photo and hybrid (emulsion/CMOS) labs with older Macs running legacy hardware paripherals for digitizing analogue media (as there will never be a shortage of analogue media in need of digitizing). You find artists who, at home, still have “old” Macs in their studio because those Macs do the job they need. I mean, heck, look at the Bandcamp wizardry @Dronecatcher is doing on a 12-inch PowerBook in — ::glances at a metaphorical wall calendar, cos who uses those anymore?:: — the year of our Common Era 2023.

Not to pull out a sewing needle on this balloon of “Macs needs to be disposed of in 3, 5, 10, whatever years because Apple say so and enforce their point by making parts nearly impossible to replace,” but only a scant few folks in the general population are invested in creating 4K or 8K “content” — literally, ‘monetizable’ video clips.

For those folks, yah, buy what works and buy that for which they can budget, but even they deserve a piece of spendy equipment which will continue to do the job and will grow alongside the user(s) as long as components continue to work on that equipment and parts exist for that growth. For the rest of everyone, that isn’t the case at all.

And prompting API standards for the sake of make-work for developers (and for not watching their diet of code which escalates bloat with each rolling update because updates must be constant for sake of who even knows anymore… is it to patch more, avoidable holes in that giant code bloat via “security fixes”?) is not a framework for bona fide, paradigm-shifting technical innovation, even if the rare step forward could come of it. A stopped clock still shows the correct time twice daily. We are distracted by this absence of paradigmatic leaps forward, via a constant, incessant stream of tiny, spendy updates on hardware which, increasingly, can’t be upgraded. This constant barrage is a dog and pony show.

The fundamentals of a computer being a tool for creation remains as relevant now as it was in 2003 and, yes, even 1983. Pleasing and appeasing company shareholders by wilfully producing disposable, hyper-locked technology is both foolhardy in the long run and doesn’t change the paradigm of that fundamental. It’s also arrogant, and that arrogance becomes part of the brand legacy, sort of like barnacles or iron oxide.

This is why Apple doesn't have anything to offer me nowadays. No matter, I've got enough of their better designed hardware to see me through the coming years.

It’s a shame it ever had to come down to this.

Is this content that you recorded/acquired? I'm curious.

They were put together from a variety of sources.

 

[Dronecatcher]

@TheShortTimer @B S Magnet

Whilst I agree with all these points, I do feel Apple's greed is only one facet of Western societies current march into an evolutionary cul-de-sac.

There's always been a danger of this but it has accelerated in the last 5 years or so and as the divide between rich and poor gets larger, Apple tech will become beyond the reach of many - as the same many discover electricity is too expensive to be frittered on such things anyway.

Plus as every aspect of ours lives becomes controlled and interrogated by online AI (and authoritarian government before that) those who are perceived as being "unmutual" (for example by refusing to buy shiny new gadgets that will QR code you on your merry way) will disappear past a societal event horizon.

Probably before this point we'll have bludgeoned most of ourselves to death anyhow arguing about silly things whilst crooks and sociopaths steal our world.

We have become the product but not just for Apple.

 

[Dronecatcher]

And to prove I'm not all doom and gloom here's an amazing clip that creative people and modern tech have made possible - non Trekkies don't bother

 

[m1maverick]

[ snip ]

As I've harped on before, it goes against the basic principles of computing that were established by Apple and others that you are in the driving seat with your computer and it can grow with you through the years as and when your needs change. Not any more! Instead you now have disposable products which are designed with a fixed lifespan and its access to software releases is restricted to force you into abandoning it sooner rather than later, to repeat the cycle all over again with their latest disposable product.

Whilst this is acceptable for the fashionista crowd that Apple now covet who will jettison their Macs as they would last season's wardrobe, it alienates serious users who want more from a computer than a stylish object to pose with. I have computers which are forty years old that possess more capacity for upgrades than many of these Macs - and that's a disturbing realisation.

[ snip ]

I've started to move away from Apple for this very reason. Windows isn't looking promising either so I may eventually move over to Linux once Windows 10 is out of support.

 

[Raging Dufus]

@TheShortTimer @B S Magnet

Whilst I agree with all these points, I do feel Apple's greed is only one facet of Western societies current march into an evolutionary cul-de-sac.

There's always been a danger of this but it has accelerated in the last 5 years or so and as the divide between rich and poor gets larger, Apple tech will become beyond the reach of many - as the same many discover electricity is too expensive to be frittered on such things anyway.

Plus as every aspect of ours lives becomes controlled and interrogated by online AI (and authoritarian government before that) those who are perceived as being "unmutual" (for example by refusing to buy shiny new gadgets that will QR code you on your merry way) will disappear past a societal event horizon.

Probably before this point we'll have bludgeoned most of ourselves to death anyhow arguing about silly things whilst crooks and sociopaths steal our world.

We have become the product but not just for Apple.

Man...that is one bleak take. Not saying you're wrong, but...damn.

Quite at odds with what followed:

And to prove I'm not all doom and gloom here's an amazing clip that creative people and modern tech have made possible - non Trekkies don't bother

That was awesome! I too love Star Trek, in all its iterations. But in keeping with your first comment, I have to say I can't quite buy Trek's humanistic optimism. FWIW, I think The Expanse paints a much more realistic portrait of what humanity would be like as we settle space - much like we are now, and really none the better for all our technological advancement. BUT I will never NOT be a Trekkie 🖖

Not that any of that has anything to do with this thread - - I'm just rambling.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

🤦‍♀️



Mmm, that’s mostly your own hang-up. Also, thanks for sharing your off-topic aside even as it’s worth remembering how no one is an island — no matter how much one believes themselves to be. That island-me-first mentality is the root of why many of the other forums on MR often get festooned with a bunch of folks who work against one another and make the tenor of those places unpleasant to spend a moment longer than one absolutely needs.




Indeed. And sometimes it is better to fold your hands in your lap and withhold making off-topic hot takes on a necromanced thread which, once more, deviates from the topic of this thread.




🆗.

See, we do agree on some things.

and yes Op, these old macs still hold some value.

 

[TheShortTimer]

They were put together from a variety of sources.

Then I strongly suspect that you'll appreciate many of my upcoming posts.

@TheShortTimer @B S Magnet

Whilst I agree with all these points, I do feel Apple's greed is only one facet of Western societies current march into an evolutionary cul-de-sac.

There's always been a danger of this but it has accelerated in the last 5 years or so and as the divide between rich and poor gets larger, Apple tech will become beyond the reach of many - as the same many discover electricity is too expensive to be frittered on such things anyway.

@Dronecatcher Do you like William Gibson? Your fears are similar to those expressed by Gibson about the digital divide in the aftermath of the LA riots and ironically it involved Apple's products:

I was watching CNN during the riots of Los Angeles a couple of years ago and they were showing video footage of a mob looting a Radio Shack. Running out of the Radio Shack was hi-fis, video cameras and everything they could pick up. But the Radio Shack was right next to a Macintosh dealership which had powerbooks in the window. And it was untouched. So here these incredible valuable portable very, very powerful computers was sitting untouched behind an unbroken shop-window while the poor people steal Sony Walkmans. I felt that was so sad, and so indicative of our real problem. Because this technology, at this point, belongs to the middle classes and up. It's not available to the underclass at all, they're not interested in it.

As I'm sure you're aware, here in the UK, a digital divide exists within our society and is a significant problem with millions lacking basic IT skills and many households lacking Internet access at home.

And to prove I'm not all doom and gloom here's an amazing clip that creative people and modern tech have made possible - non Trekkies don't bother

I saw Generations in the cinema - and this would've been a lovely post-credits scene but then considering Nimoy had declined to reprise his role as Spock during the Enterprise-B scenes, the prospect of this would've been nil.

I've started to move away from Apple for this very reason. Windows isn't looking promising either so I may eventually move over to Linux once Windows 10 is out of support.

The path that Apple are pursuing doesn't interest me at all. Many moons ago, I dabbled with IBM's OS/2 Warp in a bid to escape Redmond's stranglehold of inferior products and to support alternatives and true innovation. Unfortunately "Big Blue" had thrown in the towel and didn't even offer telephone support at a time when it was standard with almost every other organisation. Eventually I ended up giving in and installed Win 9x.

Later, I tried to switch to Linux and found myself spending more time trying to solve problems than getting on with using my computer and I reluctantly returned to Windows. A family member urged me to buy a Mac because pre-owned machines could be picked up cheaply and use it as an opportunity to get to grips with this hitherto unknown quantity. I bought a PowerMac G4 and a few years later, a MacBook Pro and I never looked back.

Fingers crossed that my arsenal of Macs will take me as far as they can and for as long as possible. I'm definitely in the right place to ensure that this happens.

 

[Amethyst1]

Many moons ago, I dabbled with IBM's OS/2 Warp […]

Same here. I actually wasted money on licences for eComStation and ArcaOS: the poor thing dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Back in the gloomy Windows 3.x days, OS/2 had a few amazing tricks up its sleeves. DOS and Windows in a window, anyone?

 

[TheShortTimer]

Same here. I actually wasted money on licences for eComStation and ArcaOS: the poor thing dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Back in the gloomy Windows 3.x days, OS/2 had a few amazing tricks up its sleeves. DOS and Windows in a window, anyone?

With IIRC superior performance running DOS and Windows software than via either of those Microsoft products. It also runs Unix software natively too. Once again, mediocrity triumphed over brilliance.

 

[Amethyst1]

It also runs Unix software natively too.

That’s news to me. There’s EMX but software still needs to be compiled for OS/2 AFAIK.

 

[TheShortTimer]

That’s news to me. There’s EMX but software still needs to be compiled for OS/2 AFAIK.

This is where I read it:
https://www.os2world.com/wiki/index.php/OS/2_Warp_Introduction

OS/2 Warp Introduction - OS2World.Com Wiki

www.os2world.com

OS/2 can natively (non-emulated) run 32-bit and 16-bit OS/2 programs, DOS, Windows 3.1 and most Unix programs, it can run/boot almost any 16-bit operating system in a window (virtual machine), including Novel Netware 4, it has the fastest Java virtual machine...