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If you have the inclination and skills, it can be converted to an absolutely-zero-smartness display using an LCD driver board (this example conversion log used the A1419's housing with a separately purchased display panel): https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/diy-5k-monitor-success....
Absolutely do this. I built one and use it connected to a MacBook Pro. Building it was straightforward and 99% plug-and-play.
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> Apple is only "green" in their presentations - in reality they care more about inifite sales only. needs citation. I say this as someone who worked several years in engineering at Apple, and they were extremely environmentally conscientious years before it was a thing.
The citation is common sense.. if your business is consumerism, you are by definition the opposite of "green". Putting some idiots on stage every year to carefully gesticulate to soft music about how "green" creating immense amounts of industrial waste are and thinking it is real is getting high on your own supply.
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> Apple is only "green" in their presentations - in reality they care more about inifite sales only. needs citation. I say this as someone who worked several years in engineering at Apple, and they were extremely environmentally conscientious years before it was a thing.
It's simple. I have a old iMac w a 5K screen. I would like to just but a now Mac Mini and keep using my iMac as a monitor. Instead my 5K iMac will end up in a landfill. Which is less green.
Since this thread seems to be about niche asks for pro users, despite the product being targeted towards casual users who want an easy out of the box experience, I'll add my own to the mix. I'd love a bigger/better screen on these, specifically an ultrawide variety. An iMac Pro with an 8k ultrawide would be a near-instant purchase for me. I find the ultrawide form factor so good for productivity. I love the apple "it…
Using a large 8K display for productivity is underrated. I wrote a blog post about my experience: https://daniel.lawrence.lu/blog/y2023m12d15/
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It's not that they actively do bad things, it's that they only dedicate real resources in the direction of self-interest. Tim Cook likes to point to their solar investments and accessibility as examples of "doing good" when in reality the former is a good long term financial bet and the latter is generally under-resourced (or "cheap" to them). They'd use M.2 SSDs in their Macs instead of soldering flash chips to the…
Using an M2 SSD instead of soldering the chip on board has more implications: PCB gets physically larger, and takes more power or has less performance talking to the SSD. Heat transfer is also worse. I completely understand why they go for a soldered SSD chip. One way of true environmentally-friendly innovation could have been to find a way to attach the SSD chip so that a user could safely replace it, though, with l…
I don't think these are real problems. The M.2 device would take up space you could have used for the PCB, but then you would have had to use that PCB space for the chips that are on the SSD.
The SSDs in current Macbooks do around 3GB/s. NVMe Gen5 does 14GB/s. The speed-of-light latency from any kind of connector is going to be totally irrelevant compared to the latency of the flash controller itself. There is no performance concern. Power is the same; when idle the link goes to sleep, when in use the connector is negligible compared to the device itself.
Heat transfer doesn't even seem related. If you want to improve heat transfer from the SSD then you put it into thermal contact with a heatsink or the chassis, which you can do regardless of whether it's M.2 or not.
> One way of true environmentally-friendly innovation could have been to find a way to attach the SSD chip so that a user could safely replace it, though, with little additional space.
The only real space requirement is the size of the connector itself, which is on the order of 50 square mm in a PCB which in a 12" laptop is some tens of thousands of square mm. Obviously you could design a connector which is even smaller, but the premise would have to be that that's even a real problem.
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Apple should hire a couple hackers to create “end-of-life” firmware for their obsolete devices; give them new life as super-specialized devices. Part green program, part customer delight, even some wacky art projects. Maybe if an iMac doesn’t have a video input—have it boot as an AirPlay-only monitor. I’ve got 2 old EOL appleTV boxes sitting in a drawer—again, one last firmware update to make them dedicated AirPlay r…
> "Apple should hire a couple hackers to create “end-of-life” firmware for their obsolete devices; give them new life as super-specialized devices." They've actually done this in a few cases! There's a whole generation of obsolete Airport Express Wifi base stations that got a final firmware update which gave them AirPlay 2 functionality. Now they're still quite sought after as a device to make old stereos/speakers wi…
Besides the AirPort Express, were there other devices that were issued EOL updates?
Reading this on 2017 iMac 27" - is the first 5k iMac that couldn't be used as a monitor after the computer inside is irrelevant. I hope EU will push for some law that requires all AIO computers to work in monitor-only mode if internal hardware is no longer good enough or no longer supported by software updates. I love the 5k screen on this iMac but the CPU is too old for photo or video editing as software got so much…
Unless you need to render 4K or 8K video, why won't you just use older software?
The state of AI and other development in macOS seems like it's been pretty popular and solid for the past few years? Worth jumping in when the M4 laptops are announced, or better to get a deep discount on the M3s?
I love the innovation Apple has brought with their investment in ARM. That said, I can't imagine buying a computer in the 21st century that can't be opened and upgraded, especially with a price premium attached. I just don't get it. I am in no way trying to be combative, but I'd love to hear a counterpoint that makes sense for these machines.
> that can't be opened and upgraded One of the reasons I don’t buy into Apple’s marketing gimmicks especially when it comes to the “carbon neutral” initiative. > especially with a price premium attached. I just don't get it. Apple is a public company. Investors expect them to churn out profit so stonk goes up. As long as users are trapped in their Apple ecosystem/wall, then they will keep buying. If the devices were…
I can see why Apple does it.
Now the storage… nope, can’t see a reason for that except profit.
Reading this on 2017 iMac 27" - is the first 5k iMac that couldn't be used as a monitor after the computer inside is irrelevant. I hope EU will push for some law that requires all AIO computers to work in monitor-only mode if internal hardware is no longer good enough or no longer supported by software updates. I love the 5k screen on this iMac but the CPU is too old for photo or video editing as software got so much…
It's not really too slow. If you're a professional and must use the latest software to turn jobs around fast and meet client expectations, use the machine for administration, coding, or just wipe it and sell it to someone else. Why would you put a working machine in the trash?