I’d trust their assessment more than a vague “everyone knows”. There’s nothing “everyone knows”.
Should Apple be better at repairability? Absolutely! But let’s criticise accurately and in good faith. When we don’t, points are easily dismissed and no one takes the valid parts seriously.
So no, it’s not what the above scores tell, because you were actively selective. If you scroll down the list in good faith (with is sorted from Newest to Oldest) what you see is that Apple is not the worst and has been getting better starting with the 15.
> Polite reminder that companies don't care about us if we love them or support them or not. Especially online.
You don’t have to tell me that, I’m an active critic of Tim Cook and the current state of Apple.
I’m also pretty vocal about not shilling for corporations and billionaires which would sell your nuts in a heartbeat. But I do care about criticism being valid, because when it’s not people ignore the valid points.
Again, Apple should absolutely do better and so should other companies. But lets call them out on what they actually do (or don’t), false accusations don’t help.
How do those numbers look with similar products from Huawei, Samsung, etc...? Fairphone/HMD are competitors focused on repairability above other factors so it's not really a fair comparison.
> But let’s criticise accurately and in good faith.
Apple pioneered some huge anti-repairability measures like e.g. soldered-in RAM.
Wasn't always that way though. I recall repairing a late 2011 MBP, so contemporary to the first soldered MBAs. Really easy to work on, with the battery held in place with just two triangular screws. That was four years ago and the user is still using it.
In doing an "everyone knows" assessment, you should analyze iFixit scores over time, which is what reputation is built on, rather than a point in time. Additionally, we're talking about Apple as a whole, not just one product. They've had several Macbooks that had scores of 1/10, and the Airpods received a 0/10. Even a recent iPhone had its score reduced from a 7/10 down to a 4:
I have machine washed my Airpods multiple times and they still work, and I use them for 3+ years. Seems like a good enough product, based on the alternatives available in the market.
However if we're going to talk about "eco progress" specifically we do have to talk about repairability. To be fair though, a long lasting product is probably more "green" than any easily repaired one in many circumstances.
Not op but that's missing the forest for the tree. Those devices are not meant to be e-waste conscious at all, which is the undertone here: you can't replace the battery yourself, you can't expand storage when you need, you can't safely expand their life when they are outside of Apple support period because they are soft and hardware black boxes. Instead, you just buy anew.
True, Apple is no more no less guilty of this than the competition, but they are also not shifting the needle while pretending to do so, with so many untaped opportunities.
Not true at all. I have a close friend (not an electronics or programming nerd in any way) which has replaced the battery (and a screen) on multiple iPhones with nothing more than iFixit instructions.
> you can't safely expand their life
Again, not true. See above.
> with so many untaped opportunities.
Which is obvious I agree with, since I said they absolutely should be better at repairability. But consider the dismissive tone of the original comment, which is justified with false information.
To give you an exaggerated example, let’s say someone is telling you about all the awful practices Nestlé engages in. All of them are true, but then they end with “and their CEO is literally Hitler, who survived and changed his face due to an agreement with the Beelzebub, and is going to control humanity through chocolate”. At that point most people would dismiss them as a nut job and ignore the other true valid points as fabrications too.
Which is why we should criticise, yes, but based on truth, not lies and rage bait.
They didn't say "nobody can replace the battery themselves", and "you" here was probably intended to mean "a normal consumer". Relative to items with replaceable batteries (a TV remote control, a camera, a pre-iPhone mobile phone), the batteries are extremely hard to replace.
The batteries are also not safe to replace, relative to items with replaceable batteries. There is a very low chance of me accidentally damaging my TV remote control while replacing the batteries.
None of the information you're responding to is false, and it's perhaps worth asking yourself why you're here defending Apple.
There's an easier argument that is simply "But Samsung!".
A "normal consumer", at least in most of the US, can take their iPhone to an Apple store, a Best Buy, and probably several small phone repair services that have small stores or kiosks in a nearby mall or inside a Walmart.
From an environmental point of view it doesn't matter if you do the repair yourself or you have it done by someone else.
> and "you" here was probably intended to mean "a normal consumer".
Which is why I used a normal consumer as an example.
> None of the information you're responding to is false, and it's perhaps worth asking yourself why you're here defending Apple.
I’m not defending Apple, I’m defending accuracy. When someone says something inaccurate about someone or something I oppose, I try to correct that too. It’s important that arguments are based on truth, because when they are not people start dismissing the true with the false.
My comment history shows I’m an Apple user but am constantly criticising its current state and Tim Cook. You’ll find more comments of mine criticising than praising them.
Perhaps it’s worth asking yourself why you see someone making an argument once and immediately assume they may have ulterior motives, and why you’re actively ignoring the arguments which do not feed your view, including my clear and repeated assertions in the thread that Apple should absolutely do better.
> There's an easier argument that is simply "But Samsung!".
Which was not once my argument. I abhor whataboutism.
If I never have to open it up and repair it before it’s genuinely obsolete, then repairability is much less important to me. Part of why I buy Apple products for decades is that they seemingly never break and I take good care of my stuff. I don’t even bother getting AppleCare anymore because I never end up using it.
First thing I do after I purchase any smart TV - turn off network access, disable auto-updates (mine is a Sony). So, this way 1) it can collect whatever it wants but it can't phone back home and 2) I don't wake up one day and find myself on a learning curve I didn't sign up for (happened to me once, they completely re-did the UI, for worse!)
I use Apple TV and give it network access instead, this way the TV doesn't have the chance to update. My Apple TV is set to update manually too. Of course, the assumption here is Apple TV doesn't phone home - and I'm no Apple fanboy, but I think this is as close as we get to online streaming with privacy.
> In September 2024, Amandla Thomas-Johnson was a Ph.D. candidate studying in the U.S. on a student visa when he briefly attended a pro-Palestinian protest.
Why would you go to a country for study purposes - where you explicitly tell the visa officers you're on US soil ONLY for study purposes - which is what the student visa explicitly grants you to do and then participate in a protest against the very country that granted you the study visa and then get mad that you are under investigation and would have been kicked out for violating the said visa? That's so bizarre.
> where you explicitly tell the visa officers you're on US soil ONLY for study purposes
What in the world does “ONLY for study purposes” mean? 24 hours a day, every day of the week?
> participate in a protest against the very country that granted you the study visa and then get mad that you are under investigation and would have been kicked out for violating the said visa? That's so bizarre.
First, he briefly attended the protest. Not the same as participating. I doubt the data from Google indicated he was holding a sign, shouting slogans, or speaking on stage. And it doesn’t sound like there was any marching or sit-in involved. (And if so, for 5 minutes?)
Second, why are you willfully equating a pro-Palestinian protest with being an anti-US protesT? Was the purpose of the protest to raise charitable funds, encourage more open discussion about the war on campus, provide moral support to Palestinian classmates, and/or any of a myriad of other purposes?
Finally, even if the purpose of the protest was politically motivated —- to push US policy on Israel and Palestine to change, how is that bizarre? In your mind is any protest that seeks to change a government’s policy at that moment an assault on that government, or on that nation? Someone who protests the death penalty, protests for stronger/weaker abortion laws, stronger/weaker gun laws, etc?
This is the USA we’re talking about. Despite all our faults (and they are legion), it is the bedrock of our founding and our core principles that democracy is a participatory process. Not just on Election Day. Throughout history we have advanced as a people and a nation because individuals have stepped up and spoken up. That has always been what has pushed us forward.
>First, he briefly attended the protest. Not the same as participating. I doubt the data from Google indicated he was holding a sign, shouting slogans, or speaking on stage. And it doesn’t sound like there was any marching or sit-in involved. (And if so, for 5 minutes?)
You misunderstand. I'm not against protesting, nor am I against the reasons behind his protests. He may have had valid reasons. What I'm saying is - if you are a green card holder or a citizen, this would be very little risk vs going to a foreign country in a study visa and doing what he did. If you pay tens of thousands of dollars to get a degree from whatever country, for whatever reasons, why would you want to gamble all of it?
Also, if you are getting into a fight, you need to make sure you have the upper hand. As it stands, it is him who is in hiding and crossing borders, not the government agents or the corporate white collars that gave away his data. That's my point.
Political events are usually part of student university life in western-tradition universities. From my personal experience, it was hard to completely avoid them if you had any involvement in the student extracurricular life.
I disagree. I cultivated a preference for the basement terminal labs while I was attending UCSD. While I was definitely in touch with the communist/socialist underbelly of dissenters there, I never found myself wrapped up in rallies or protests or any sort of political activism.
In fact, my mother had strongly discouraged me from attending UC Berkeley, because of the politicized environment there, the protests, the drug use. I had no interest in that stuff to begin with!
I read the on-campus commie newsletter that was distributed free. I ate at the vegan cafe out in the woods. It was literally called "The Ché Café". But I literally attended no protests or rallies. If they went on, I was steering clear or unaware of them. I went to rock concerts and other stuff at the student center, so I wasn't ignorant of events there.
Furthermore, in community college, I found engagement with a diversity of student groups, and most of them weren't political. There was an Asian-Pacific Islanders group (I am not) which had social events and films and no political advocacy (because they were probably oriented towards cultural exchange as well as assimilation.) There was an entrepreneur's group, an amateur radio group, and a cybersecurity group. Yes, there was a lot of activism on campus. There were rallies and protests and art installations. But I didn't partake, and it was basically easy to cultivate friendships and networking with apolitical people.
> From my personal experience, it was hard to completely avoid them
> I was definitely in touch with the communist/socialist underbelly of dissenters there [...] I read the on-campus commie newsletter that was distributed free.
Basically, this doesn't sound like disagreement to me. You did come across political activism, and you have some minor exposition. Granted our experience may be different, since we attended different universities at different times ; and so the magnitude of political activism was likely different. But academic freedom is a core tenet of western universities, and that means political life has always been part of campus life.
You seem to draw the limit at "attending protests", but this is an arbitrary limit. If, instead of profiling who attended the protests, the inquiry had been a network graph analysis of the commie underground, you may well have been listed.
Political rights are protected in the US. They don't have an arbitrary threshold such as "it's fine to read the commie newspaper but it's not fine to protest a topic". You draw an arbitrary limit which sets you on the good side, but what happens in reality is that this article questions whether it's fine for some government entity to draw that arbitrary line as they see fit. That's not exactly the same thing.
That's not a meaningful comparison. Eating a pizza isn't the same as violating the terms of your visa - which is an explicit contract between you and the country you're entering which you sign before you enter the said country.
Of all the words to use in the title, they chose "prompts" when talking about AI. Had to read it twice because, if you assume the AI "prompts" equivalent, the whole title becomes gibberish.
Second this. Their API is such a breeze and it is so much more automation friendly than any other messenger platform. It has a good adoption % too, otherwise Signal is the real winner if we account for privacy.
It's a bit less automation-friendly because the UX is not great when the bot doesn't have its own phone number (which costs money). I think it has better privacy, though. Matrix server operators can read message metadata.
This should ironically start at the VC level - and that includes YC et al. Some one comes and says "hey, we got this idea, we collect facial recognition data for training proprietary AI models", the response from the VC should "I'm gonna stop you right there. This is unethical."
Not "Did you say I can 5x my ROI? Here, shut up and take my money!"
Capital eschews no profit, or very small profit, just as Nature was formerly
said to abhor a vacuum. With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain
10 per cent. will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 per cent. certain will
produce eagerness; 50 per cent., positive audacity; 100 per cent. will make it
ready to trample on all human laws; 300 per cent., and there is not a crime at
which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its
owner being hanged. If turbulence and strife will bring a profit, it will freely
encourage both. Smuggling and the slave-trade have amply proved all that is
here stated.
We today can also add crypto schemes and mass surveillance to the examples.
And mind you, VC are people who are both pretty good at earning money and also eager for even more money. That's how they got to where they are, after all, not necessarily by being virtuous (over a certain minimally required amount, or a social signaling of possessing such an amount).
Fair enough. But, to be fair to them, they did have a falling out. There was a story on here how it went all the way to PG and then they asked Sam to leave (Something like that). I think saw it in a comment here, really don't remember.
Assume VCs are brainless profit maximizers who don't understand ethics. How do you get them to say "I'm gonna stop you right there"?
Answer: Make it unprofitable to collect this data. Change the incentives.
So really, the correct answer IS on the legal level. Make a set of laws which make it burdensome at best and completely unprofitable at worst, and then the incentives within the system aligns.
Agree with your point and the solution. Make it risky to operate - so that most VCs would wash their hands off due to legal risks. Kind of like what happened to the crypto space. But, it always gets worse before it gets better. Tons of rug pulls happened before SEC took action.
If you reached point B from point A - and you tell someone "I would like to go back", then you are expecting to go back to A. Not some intermediate, arbitrarily chosen point C.
Because I expect my browser to work for me instead of having memorize workarounds for the new web annoyance of the day.
Clicking "back", noticing that the site broke it, moving the mouse and long-pressing "back" (I normally navigate with a mouse thumb button or a trackpad gesture) is much more annoying than my browser just preventing this from happening in the first place.
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