Hey Apple: There’s Nothing ‘Sad’ About Long-Lasting Computer Hardware
At the company’s iPad Pro 9.7 and iPhone SE rollout event March 21, Apple Inc. senior vice president of worldwide marketing Philip W. Schiller remarked: “There are over 600 million PCs in use today that are over five years old. This is really sad, it really is.”
Hmmmmm. I can appreciate where Mr. Schiller is coming from being as he’s Apple’s marketing boss, but personally, as a value-conscious user, seeing people (including me) getting useful work out of supposedly “obsolete” Mac and iDevice hardware makes me the opposite of sad. It brings a smile to my face.
I’m the guy who squeezed 14 years of useful daily service out of two 2000 Pismo PowerBooks that are still in good working order — helped by a parts mule Pismo. I still use them to run some ancient scanners of contemporary vintage but a critical usability threshold was crossed when Dropbox cut off OS X 10.4 browser support last year along with there not much available in up-to-date Web browser support for these slow old machines.
I got three and a half years’ service out of my iPad 2, which lives on as my wife’s iPad. Her daily driver Mac would bring tears to Phil Schiller’s eyes — a 17-inch PowerBook G4 1.33 GHz Power PC of 2003 vintage running OS X 10.5 Leopard. An antique by any measure, but a still useful one for meeting her computer needs, which are mainly email,Web surfing, a bit of Facebook, downloading photos from her Pentax point-and-shoot camera, occasional photo optimization and simple graphics creation, and such light-duty tasks.
I had expected the iPad with a Brydge keyboard case would displace the old PowerBook for most of the needs in her computing world, but it turns out she absolutely hates touchscreen input, and as a touch typist, is attached to her mechanical key switch Das Keyboard non-Bluetooth keyboard and her favorite mice. A salute to The efforts of the fine folks at FloodGap Software who have been instrumental enablers in keeping the old PowerPC G4 powered machine viable with their TenFourFox hack of FireFox that supports obsolete G4 hardware..
The old 17-incher is not as easy to open up and work on as my ancient Pismos, but its sole hardware failure — the original 80 GB hard disk after 11 years of service, was swapped out and replaced with a new 40 GB HDD from Other World Computing by our tech savvy daughter in about an hour start to finish.
When the big PowerBook finally does bite the dust, probably due to Internet incompatibility, my wife will probably take over my late 2008 aluminum Core 2 Duo MacBook, another durable classic which is still highly usable running OS X 10.11 El Capitan, although she would also be a logical candidate to switch to an inexpensive Chromebook.
Unfortunately, it will note be as easy to extend the useful lifespan of my current mid-2013 Haswell 13-inch MacBook Air, which is the best Mac I’ve ever owned in terms of function, but not amenable to user repair of even something as basic as its battery. When the battery eventually deteriorates, I’ll be faced with the decision of whether to have the battery professionally replaced, or just move up to a later machine.
Happily, longtime vendor of Apple upgrades NewerTech is one of the only companies (besides Apple) producing high-quality battery replacements for Mac laptops, and stocks Mac battery replacements that span hardware from the last 15 years, ranging from 2001’s Titanium PowerBook to 2014’s MacBook Air models.
For more information, see the NewerTech website:
http://www.newertech.com
Still not a DIY proposition for my MacBook Air I fear, but it’s nice to know there are options for life extension.
I suppose I shouldn’t complain. The quality is there for those of us who think a tool as expensive as an Apple computer or tablet should not be a two or three year disposable device.
