this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2023
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It makes a second hand mac viable for me. The hardware is nice, it was always the OS that made me avoid it.
I really wouldn't touch secondhand Ms. No upgrades, no repairs, horrible components (CPU is ok, everything else is straight from the dumpster in order to cover costs).
So when something dies on your device from a company that has a long history of terrible design and QA (I'm betting on storage) you have to pay another $1000+ to replace the whole motherboard. On top of that, I'm guessing that they're also ripping off customers when selling those replacement boards, as having usable ram and storage costs an extra $1000+ when buying new.
This, I've tried to look up spare ssd and ram chips for apple arm laptops to reball and resolder them and couldn't find any
Inb4 apple locked down components to motherboard serial number
But seriously, I guess the only hope is to wait for the Chinese second hand market takes off.
I know that iPhones do that but about MacBook i didn't know until your message
It was a joke. But you can see why I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out true in the end.
I know for a fact they're making it impossible to make small repairs like changing the screen closed sensor. It requires a proprietary calibration tool they won't sell, and so MacBooks can't go to sleep when closing the screen.
On top of changing it from a sub $ hall sensor to some proprietary bs that's far more expensive.
Yeah you're right, we'll all wait till Chinese spare parts market will kick in again, they usually do this after few years from launch
Legitimate repairability and pricing concerns aside, what parts exactly are you accusing of being straight from the dumpster? The GPU is insane for a low-power laptop, screen, speakers, trackpad are best in class. Keyboard is a matter of preference but by any objective measure it’s not bad, much improved from butterfly switches.
I would never buy something new from Apple as I don’t like them, but I have to admit that their hardware feels great to use. I’m not tech savvy enough to know where that would be coming from, but it makes me wonder how people could say that the components are so bad.
My girlfriend has a 2012 MacBook Pro and I put Fedora on it and it feels like such a great machine. The ram and the hard drive have been upgraded, but it feels incredible for an old machine.
If in 10 years you can get an old MacBook Pro for 200$, I might jump on it even if upgradeability has been lowered.
I tried using a friend's m1 MacBook pro, and it's the worst laptop I've touched in a while. Like my oldest budget core2duo laptop has a better keyboard than a brand new $2000+ device. There's a very good reason it's permanently docked.
I've mentioned a few reasons in this thread. They basically used subpar components to offset the cost of developing their own CPU.
It's not lowered, it's absolutely removed, unless you count replacing the entire motherboard as upgradeability.
16gb ram is too small? New motherboard.
Crappy SSD is dying? New motherboard.
Haven't dug into it yet, but if that's right then not great. Then again if something doesn't break quickly in electronics it usually works fine for years, except maybe overheated GPUs, random RAM and HDDs.
I'm still unsure if I want to replace my 2016 Asus zenbook. Other than the aged CPU/AGPU from Intel, and unusable from the start touchpad it's fine.
When m1 came out, some tech guy on twitter did a review of MacBook Pro and studio storage. Apple literally used components that are so bad they had to disable data safety protocols to go above HDD speeds. The end result was that losing power is likely to corrupt your data.
Besides that apple was cutting out "unnecessary" parts of the arm specification in order to cut costs. The result is that the first 2(?) generations have hardware level exploit "m1racles" on top of others like "pacman".
I really wouldn't trust them to last
Funnily enough, that person you mentioned who discovered that was marcan, one of the Asahi lead developers.
I would if the particular hardware had no inherent or user caused issues and the price was reasonable compared to other purchase candidates, but it rarely is. It would also need to be Linux compatible too because the os has always been insufferable and praised by insufferable people that need something to feel superior about with zero justification.
The PowerPC days were pretty crap though even though the hardware was visually pleasing. Nobody made PowerPC compatible software. This time I guess apple is paying fees to arm and at least has arm compatibility. x86 is irritating in its own right too. Man, tech has gone in all sorts of shitty directions.