Right to repair-Apple

[darenisepic]

On having an old 2009 Macbook pro (MBP) duel core from new which was getting too slow to use with Apple software (OSX) I recently replaced it with a used 2018 MBP.

This new machine was rapid but also horrible, having an awful keyboard and just one port which was USB C so no pen drive etc could be used without buying a converter I delved further into this and found out I couldn't upgrade the memory (RAM) or hard drive as these were soldered onto the motherboard and the further I researched this the more shocking it became.  I found out that with the exception of a brand new M1 Silicon which cost in 2020 upon release over £1500 that computor chips (CPU) hadn't really gained that much more speed or power.  The more I looked the more I realised that Apple had gone down a very dark path.

It seemed that with a little "know how" you could get a better, cheaper older machine that's more than capable for less than a third of a new one.  It seemed there was a choice for me to make between a 2015 MBP with a retina screen which is very beautiful but has a hard drive which is glued in and difficult to remove or going even older a 2012 MBP non retina so the screen isn't as crystal clear which has an upgradable hard drive and upgradable RAM, 2 USB A, ethernet, firewire, heaphone and SD card.

I decided to sell the dreadful 2018 model and purchased a 2012 MBP I7 2.3 Ghz which I upgraded the hard drive to a solid state drive (SSD) which makes it so much faster and added 16GB RAM the battery is great but also upgradable, whilst the new silicon would be faster its 5 times what I pad including my upgrades and any broken parts moving forward I can still replace.  There are thousands of newer machines not just macs that have failed SSD's that are being thrown away as the hard drive is onboard.

 

In 2020 an order was passed in the EU forcing manufactures to supply a "Right to repair" this goes for laptops, mobile phones (also forcing them to use replaceable batteries) even down to your washing machine.

 

I am very happy with my new-old macbook pro, its usable and not adding to landfill, it will take several years to implement the "Right to repair" but it's a step forward.

Edited August 17, 2023 by darenisepic

[alpha-acid]

8 hours ago, darenisepic said:

On having an old 2009 Macbook pro (MBP) duel core from new which was getting too slow to use with Apple software (OSX) I recently replaced it with a used 2018 MBP.

This new machine was rapid but also horrible, having an awful keyboard and just one port which was USB C so no pen drive etc could be used without buying a converter I delved further into this and found out I couldn't upgrade the memory (RAM) or hard drive as these were soldered onto the motherboard and the further I researched this the more shocking it became.  I found out that with the exception of a brand new M1 Silicon which cost in 2020 upon release over £1500 that computor chips (CPU) hadn't really gained that much more speed or power.  The more I looked the more I realised that Apple had gone down a very dark path.

It seemed that with a little "know how" you could get a better, cheaper older machine that's more than capable for less than a third of a new one.  It seemed there was a choice for me to make between a 2015 MBP with a retina screen which is very beautiful but has a hard drive which is glued in and difficult to remove or going even older a 2012 MBP non retina so the screen isn't as crystal clear which has an upgradable hard drive and upgradable RAM, 2 USB A, ethernet, firewire, heaphone and SD card.

I decided to sell the dreadful 2018 model and purchased a 2012 MBP I7 2.3 Ghz which I upgraded the hard drive to a solid state drive (SSD) which makes it so much faster and added 16GB RAM the battery is great but also upgradable, whilst the new silicon would be faster its 5 times what I pad including my upgrades and any broken parts moving forward I can still replace.  There are thousands of newer machines not just macs that have failed SSD's that are being thrown away as the hard drive is onboard.

 

In 2020 an order was passed in the EU forcing manufactures to supply a "Right to repair" this goes for laptops, mobile phones (also forcing them to use replaceable batteries) even down to your washing machine.

 

I am very happy with my new-old macbook pro, its usable and not adding to landfill, it will take several years to implement the "Right to repair" but it's a step forward.

The answer is do not buy Apple products, especially laptops,  a Generic PC is upgradeable with everything

[woolley]

12 hours ago, darenisepic said:

In 2020 an order was passed in the EU forcing manufactures to supply a "Right to repair" this goes for laptops, mobile phones (also forcing them to use replaceable batteries) even down to your washing machine.

Force isn't a word that global companies care for if it's applied to them. They carry on doing precisely as they please and pass on any inconvenient flak to their legal departments who do their best to bury it, or at least tie it up in decades of legal argument about why they aren't really doing anything wrong. I have many years of experience of this attitude in dealings with them. It's a stone wall.

[Bombay Bad Boy]

New 'old' Macs are great, until you realise that Apple refuse to update Macos if the model is too old. I have a 2012 Mac Mini, the only version they made with a quad core i7. Until the M1 came out, it was the fastest Mac. But I can't update Macos, for no other reason than Apple have decided thus.

The EU directive for everyone to use replaceable batteries and USB C cables is great, but I feel your pain about soldered-in memory and CPU's.

I've just bought a new laptop for travelling, an HP 820 G4.  It looks quite a lot like a Macbook 😄 I chose this specific model because it was the last version where you could have 2 internal SSD's, an M2 and a 2.5 SATA. After this , they dropped support for 2.5" drives, which is fine, if they think it's an obsolete form factor. But to then *only* have a single M2? Prime example of backwards progress.

[Guest]

The thinking person buys old ThinkPads from eBay...

[AcousticallyChallenged]

On 8/17/2023 at 5:27 PM, alpha-acid said:

The answer is do not buy Apple products, especially laptops,  a Generic PC is upgradeable with everything

Intel nearly stopped doing socketed desktop CPUs years ago.

Most laptops aren't upgradable meaningfully now. The CPUs are often soldered, even a ThinkPad will often have at least some of the RAM soldered.

[AcousticallyChallenged]

On 8/17/2023 at 9:09 AM, darenisepic said:

I found out that with the exception of a brand new M1 Silicon which cost in 2020 upon release over £1500 that computor chips (CPU) hadn't really gained that much more speed or power.  The more I looked the more I realised that Apple had gone down a very dark path.

That's not really true mind you. It has just been incremental. A 10% increase between two years does however start to add up.

A 2012 Macbook Pro or similar will have something like an Ivybridge i7. The 13" model you picture is a dual core one at that. So an i7-3520m.

If you compare that with a modern laptop CPU, of about equivalent price now, so say, the AMD Ryzen 5850U, which can be had in laptops costing less than that MBP did new. It's not a top-end one either, but it's reasonably high end.

Ghz aren't the only metric of useful work now.

If you take benchmark scores from Passmark:

The Macbook has 2 cores, each getting 1734 points per core, with a multi-core score of 2862.

The Ryzen 5850U gets 3036 points per core. But it has another 6 of them compared to the Macbook. So a total score of 17316.

Only an approximately 500% increase in processing power.

Granted, versus the 2009's 972 for the Core 2 Duo, you're still on a notable improvement.

But, if you compare gigahertz, a 3.1ghz i7 does appear initially faster than a 1.9ghz Ryzen.

The Ryzen also uses less than half the electricity to do the work (15w vs 35w), which nets you a much longer battery life, whilst offering onboard graphics that simply don't compare.

The story with the M1 is similar, but the M1 really benefits from vertical integration. For years, Apple insisted that developers used their interfaces for things like graphics and certain types of computation. When they designed the M1 with hardware tailored towards that, it meant that existing programs benefitted from it immediately.

Equally, often an older, high-end machine is a better experience all around than the cheapest new ones. You often end up with a much nicer display, better build quality and better keyboard.

[darenisepic]

On 8/17/2023 at 11:35 PM, Bombay Bad Boy said:

New 'old' Macs are great, until you realise that Apple refuse to update Macos if the model is too old. I have a 2012 Mac Mini, the only version they made with a quad core i7. Until the M1 came out, it was the fastest Mac. But I can't update Macos, for no other reason than Apple have decided thus.
 

Take a look at Mr. Macintosh on y0utube using opencore legacy patcher, you can load the latest Sonoma on your on your 2012 Mac Mini, I opted for Ventura on my 2012 MBP and its working great and I can use updates for everything other than the OS.  It breathes new life into your still more than capable Mac

 

[darenisepic]

On 8/25/2023 at 5:50 PM, AcousticallyChallenged said:

That's not really true mind you. It has just been incremental. A 10% increase between two years does however start to add up.

A 2012 Macbook Pro or similar will have something like an Ivybridge i7. The 13" model you picture is a dual core one at that. So an i7-3520m.

If you compare that with a modern laptop CPU, of about equivalent price now, so say, the AMD Ryzen 5850U, which can be had in laptops costing less than that MBP did new. It's not a top-end one either, but it's reasonably high end.

Ghz aren't the only metric of useful work now.

If you take benchmark scores from Passmark:

The Macbook has 2 cores, each getting 1734 points per core, with a multi-core score of 2862.

The Ryzen 5850U gets 3036 points per core. But it has another 6 of them compared to the Macbook. So a total score of 17316.

Only an approximately 500% increase in processing power.

Granted, versus the 2009's 972 for the Core 2 Duo, you're still on a notable improvement.

But, if you compare gigahertz, a 3.1ghz i7 does appear initially faster than a 1.9ghz Ryzen.

The Ryzen also uses less than half the electricity to do the work (15w vs 35w), which nets you a much longer battery life, whilst offering onboard graphics that simply don't compare.

The story with the M1 is similar, but the M1 really benefits from vertical integration. For years, Apple insisted that developers used their interfaces for things like graphics and certain types of computation. When they designed the M1 with hardware tailored towards that, it meant that existing programs benefitted from it immediately.

Equally, often an older, high-end machine is a better experience all around than the cheapest new ones. You often end up with a much nicer display, better build quality and better keyboard.

It is indeed an Ivybridge i7 but it's a quadcore not duelcore, I replaced a duelcore with the quadcore and the performance difference is amazing, I don't think you can compare it with a Ryzen as they are not supported on a Mac and it's about the overall feel, the build quality of an aluminium case with an amazing keyboard Vs a plastic laptop has no comparison.  An old Mac is like comparing a 2012 VW Golf which is expensive to purchase originally to a Fiat Punto, how many 2012 Fiat Puntos do you see today?

On 7/7/2023 at 12:22 AM, Numbnuts said:

I

 

On 8/17/2023 at 11:35 PM, Bombay Bad Boy said:

 

 

Edited August 27, 2023 by darenisepic

[Bombay Bad Boy]

I know you can 'patch' MacOS, to run on machines where it shouldn't. But as a registered IOS developer, everything has to be kosher. If they detect you've tried to create an app with a too-old Mac, your developer account gets pulled. 

[AcousticallyChallenged]

On 8/27/2023 at 7:46 AM, darenisepic said:

It is indeed an Ivybridge i7 but it's a quadcore not duelcore, I replaced a duelcore with the quadcore and the performance difference is amazing, I don't think you can compare it with a Ryzen as they are not supported on a Mac and it's about the overall feel, the build quality of an aluminium case with an amazing keyboard Vs a plastic laptop has no comparison.  An old Mac is like comparing a 2012 VW Golf which is expensive to purchase originally to a Fiat Punto, how many 2012 Fiat Puntos do you see today?

The Ryzen was just picked as a reasonably good x86 CPU in higher-end laptops.

I utterly agree about the feel and usability of high-end vs cheap laptops. If you're buying an older laptop, buying something that was expensive for the first owner often gets you a better deal down the line. But, it isn't just Macs. Thinkpads for example, are another.

Though, for performance, If we want to go for Intel, try the i7-13700H. That's in laptops that are commensurate with Apple build quality etc.

                      | Macbook i7-3630QM | Intel i7-13700H |
Single Core: 1892                                  3692
Multicore:     5666                                 28718

So, single-core performance is just about doubled.

Multi-core performance is astonishingly better, and would need 5 and a half of the older macbooks to match.

The tray price for the 3630QM was $378, and Intel list the new i7 as $500, so given inflation, pricing isn't a million miles out either.

As a matter of interest, the M2 processor has better single core performance than the newer i7, but fewer cores overall.

[darenisepic]

I agree looking at the figures theirs a lot of difference on paper, the M2 will be mine in another decade when its £300