Are these things worth anything any more?

[m1maverick]

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.

I was a huge fan of OS/2 back in the day. In fact I tinker with it from time to time as I have it running in a VM (amazing how small its footprint is compared to the other operating systems I have configured for VMs). I imagine it would have suffered the same fate that OS X and Windows are experiencing today. Maybe even more so as IBM was definitely a controlling company.

 

[TheShortTimer]

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.

I'm restarting this discussion because during some browsing through eBay I found a number of MacBook Air's for sale that are suffering from the three-beep error, which of course indicates a RAM failure and it made me think of this discussion.

RAM failures are commonplace: you're more likely to experience them than not. I'm sure that's been the case for most of us. Throughout computing history its been a simple remedy to replace the afflicted units - not with the MBA and other more recent Mac models. Those machines are basically paperweights if/when their memory chips develop faults because the RAM is soldered to the logic board and it's extremely difficult to remove them.

This means that similarly to what you described earlier with the Retina displays, you're faced with discarding or selling your machine for parts in the event of what should be an easily corrected problem. It beggars the rhetorical question, why would you design a product in such an illogical manner that burns your customers and is wasteful of the planet's resources?

 

[B S Magnet]

It beggars the rhetorical question, why would you design a product in such an illogical manner that burns your customers and is wasteful of the planet's resources?

Shareholders will not be denied, even as shareholders will kill this planet.