Charlie Wang

The exorbitant prices that Apple charges for basic upgrades to memory and storage mean that Windows devices often offer superior performance at a more affordable price.

As I walk around the upper school campus, I see hundreds of space-gray, silver and rose-gold Macbooks being used for tasks ranging from writing essays to debugging software projects. However, despite their pervasiveness at our school, these laptops lag behind Windows PCs both in terms of their environmental impact and technical capability.

Nowadays, a major consideration for customers when buying anything is carbon footprint. Apple has latched onto this, making boastful claims about their sustainability and extracting public relations and marketing mileage from an unsuspecting public. It is particularly striking that Apple does not channel their famed innovation prowess to help reduce and reuse their products instead of shipping non-repairable, fast-fashion style products that are doomed to become e-waste and end up in landfills around the world when they no longer work. Yet, millions of people still spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on these shiny new devices, oblivious to the environmental price tag. Because of the desire to own the latest and greatest hardware, consumers purchase products often and upgrade them in sync with marketing rhythms. 

In particular, Apple has many policies that go against the principle of right to repair, including preventing third parties from accessing the schematics necessary to fix broken components. In response to online criticism, they have taken some strides in this area by introducing a self-service repair program where customers can purchase the parts they need to fix broken devices. Ultimately, by limiting the ability of customers to repair their devices, Apple further incentivizes consumers to just replace their old and non-functional devices instead of fixing them, putting more e-waste in landfills.

In contrast, many Windows devices allow users to replace internal components, which greatly reduces the amount of e-waste generated due to new purchases. iFixit, a company that focuses on helping end consumers repair their devices, assigns laptops scores based on how easy it is to fix them. Their findings revealed that Apple’s products are explicitly engineered in a manner that makes it difficult for them to be serviced in comparison to many Windows devices.

For example, the ever-popular 2019 Macbook Pro received a score of just two out of 10, with repair experts noting that many key parts like the CPU, RAM and storage were all soldered to the motherboard, making it very difficult to repair them in the event of a failure. In contrast, every Windows device examined scored at least a five. Many shoppers in the market for a new laptop are unaware of these details despite the fact that they can result in thousands of dollars in additional expenses and significant waste.

On the technical side, Apple’s limited ecosystem of products means that its customers lack access to many applications that users of other platforms have. For example, many games don’t have Apple-native ports, so Mac users who want to play them have to either tolerate subpar experiences through emulators-programs that enable a host system to run software intended for a different device — or buy entirely new devices. Beyond this, developers often prioritize working on apps for Windows due to its much larger user base, leading to a lack of feature parity.

With Apple’s recent switch from x86 processors to their own ARM based chips, those who use their devices are no longer able to take advantage of dual-booting Windows to run incompatible applications. Dual-booting entails installing multiple operating systems on the same device to give users access to applications that only work on a specific one.

Personally, I have appreciated how my Windows laptop can run pretty much any software out there, since almost all of them are developed with the x86 architecture in mind. The emergence of browser-based applications lessened the problem of necessary software being incompatible with the operating system to some extent, but it’s still frustrating. As a chess player, I often use the database tool Chessbase to review games. However, as there is currently no support for running it directly on OS X, people have to use questionable workarounds to use it.

Another huge win for Windows laptops is in hardware flexibility — it doesn’t take too much digging to see that Apple’s catalog of products don’t offer the range of choices offered by the countless PC manufacturers out there. The exorbitant prices that Apple charges for basic upgrades to memory and storage mean that Windows devices often offer superior performance at a more affordable price. 

At the end of the day, choosing between laptops comes down to a whole host of factors that are deeply individualized. However, shoppers in the market for a new device would be wise to do research to be aware of the hidden facets of the products they purchase instead of being sucked in by shiny logos and falling for marketing materials. Although Apple used to urge its customers to “Think different,” they should still strive to make rational choices that provide value while protecting the planet.