this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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[–] [email protected] 58 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I'm an Apple user and think their attempts reduce the environmental footprint of their product's manufacturing is pretty good, however this is unequivocally good news.

Purchasing carbon offsets to claim your product is carbon neutral isn't good practice in my opinion and I'm quite glad to see the EU is thinking of outlawing it. Of course Apple needs to get its arse into gear about expandability and repairability if it is serious about reducing eWaste

[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 year ago

Carbon offsets are modern day letters of indulgence. It’s complete bullshit.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Get it's ass in gear? Apple has been actively fighting RtR and expandability in every way and only 'supported' the last RtR bill in Cali because they already had a circumvention in place using versioning. This is the exact same thing, PR gets to say they're carbon neutral while they pump the exact same amount of CO2 into the air each year. It's not just bad practice it's deceitful.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don’t think so. If you look at the manufacturing of the latest watch, they clearly have taken steps to reduce the carbon emissions. But not enough to claim carbon neutral.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I don’t see why you’re being downvoted - whilst a significant portion of Apple’s claimed ‘carbon neutrality’ can indeed be attributed to carbon offsets, they have also made changes in other areas. Here’s a graph from Apple’s climate report that shows the supposed change in emissions between last year and this year’s watches.

Source

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The absolute most important thing is the ability for end users to replace their batteries and displays. Storage expansion is somewhat moot by now thanks to cloud and NAS storage options coupled with 5G speeds.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Personally, I think there is absolutely no reason why in something like the iMacs, HD and RAM shouldn’t be user replaceable and upgradable.

They always used to be until Jonny I’ve got his thinness bug.

If Apple went for it and introduced a new aesthetic where there were small visible screws which became a symbol for cate about the environment, they could probably push the industry in that direction

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Storage and RAM not being user upgradable is an environmental nightmare for sustainability.

Not having internal slots for storage and relying on USB or NAS is not an appropriate alternative for professionals regardless of what their leadership says is what professionals want.

We’ll never know, but RAM being part of the SoC is probably contributing substantially to their performance capabilities compared to competition. The only real way to know that probably requires being an engineer at Apple. I’d wager $3.50 that they’d get a substantial performance deficit from switching to DIMMs, and that terrifies them since that would further push everyone to x86 workstations.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Perhaps. But they started removing upgradable RAM in the Intel era. It’s not a new thing that came with the M1

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Personally, I think there is absolutely no reason why in something like the iMacs, HD and RAM shouldn’t be user replaceable and upgradable

Simple: user-replaceable RAM is too slow. Apples M-series SoCs combine the CPU and GPU and both share the same memory. This has massive performance advantages, especially for GPU-compute tasks. Performance of GPU code is very dependent on memory bandwidth. You cannot have high-bandwidth memory on a user-replaceable module, you have to have the memory chips physically close to the processor. This is the reason there are no user-replaceable RAM modules on GPUs either.

With GPU compute becoming more and more important, I expect the PC world to get rid of user replaceable RAM and GPUs as well in the future.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That doesn't really explain why they removed the ability in the Intel Macs. But that's very informative, thank you.