There’s an e-waste timebomb in our future, and the Apple logo is all over it.
Yes, Apple’s M1 processor is amazing. Blazingly fast, runs cool, and it sips rather than gulps power. The Macs built around this processor are tempting — really tempting — but these Macs also highlight everything that’s wrong with Apple. These Macs represent the end of the road to upgrades, as well as making repairs difficult for most users. Also: Why I won’t be buying the new iMac Apple has led the way in making products that take what were once simple upgrades and repairs and made them close to impossible. It began with the non-replaceable battery and culminated with the M1 Macs, where if something goes wrong, you’re throwing a whole board away (and that’s assuming that the mainboard is replaceable without needing to calibrate it to the display because of the True Tone feature). They’re utterly disposable. You buy one, take it out of the box, run it until it breaks or becomes too slow to do what you need it to do, then you sweep it into the recycling bin and buy another. Part of this is the unavoidable march of progress. Components that were once discrete and modular have become smaller and integrated onto single boards or chips. This is what we see with the M1 Apple Silicon chip — the CPU, GPU, RAM, and storage are all on a single board — and this means that all the old school upgrades that people used to carry out to keep old systems running for longer have come to an end.
