This only makes sense if you presume people throw away their laptops when they replace them after "a few years". Given the incredibly high second hand value of macbooks, I think most people sell them or hand them down.
You're talking about selling working devices but parent was also talking about repairing them.
Seems like a huge waste to throw away a $2000+ machine when it's out of warranty because some $5 part on it dies and Apple not only doesn't provide a spare but actively fights anyone trying to repare them, while the options they realistically will give you out of warranty being having your motherboard replaced for some insane sum like $1299 or having you buy a new laptop.
Or what if you're a klutz and spill your grape juice glass over your keyboard? Congrats, now you're -$2000 lighter since there's no way to take it apart and clean the sticky mess inside.
> Or what if you're a klutz and spill your grape juice glass over your keyboard? Congrats, now you're -$2000 lighter since there's no way to take it apart and clean the sticky mess inside.
Thanks to the Right To Repair, you can take the laptop to pretty much any repair shop and they can replace anything you damaged with OEM or third-party parts. They even have schematics, so they can just desolder and resolder failed chips. In the past, this sort of thing would be a logic board swap for $1000 at the very least, but now it's just $30 + labor.
Oh, there is no right to repair. So I guess give Apple $2000 again and don't drink liquids at work.
Removable ram wouldn't change anything in your story presuming the entire board is fried. Anyway, $30 + labor is a deceitful way to put it. The labor in your story would be 100s an hour and would probably fail to actually fix the issue most of the time.
Perhaps this is the real reason behind the "crack design team" jokes? A wholesale internal switchover from liquid-based stimulants after one too many accidents?
What makes you say that? What did you expect would happen if you spill juice into your laptop?
What they are perhaps fighting is unauthorized repairs, in the sense that they want to be able to void the warranty if some random third party messes with the insides. That's not quite the same thing.
Apple has been very helpful when I brought in a 5 year old macbook pro with keyboard issues, replaced some keys for free on the spot. Also when the batteries of 8 and 9 year old MBAs started to go bad, they said they could replace them but advised me to order batteries from iFixit and do it myself, which I did.
Seems like a huge waste to throw away a $2000+ machine
There are other options besides throwing it away.
You can (a) trade it in for a new Mac (I just received $430 for my 2014 MBP) or (b) sell it for parts on eBay.
Or what if you're a klutz and spill your grape juice glass over your keyboard? Congrats, now you're -$2000 lighter since there's no way to take it apart and clean the sticky mess inside.
You can unscrew a Mac and clean it out. You can also take it into Apple for repair.
"Yeah <normal guy>'s out sick today, I'm his replacement."
*yeet*
In all seriousness I would absolutely love to do this sort of thing IRL, in situations where I'll just make incompetent management etc unimpressed (because I'm showing their inefficiency) and there wouldn't be any real/significant ramifications (eg machines that processed material a couple notches more interesting than what PCI-DSS covers).
But obviously I don't mean I'd literally use the above example to achieve this ;P
I've just learned a bit about (eh, you could say "been bitten by") poorly coordinated e-waste management/refurbishment/etc programs - these can be a horrendously inefficient money-grab if the top-level coordination isn't driven by empathy in the right places. So I would definitely get a kick out of doing something like that properly.
We used to remove the hard drives which takes about 20 seconds on a desktop that has a "tool-less" case. Then donate the computer to anybody including the employees if they want it.
It takes a few minutes to do that on a laptop but it's not that long.
I suspect the disposal company your company contracts with parts them out and resells them. Although if you're literally throwing them in the dumpster, that's not even legal in many jurisdictions.
