That's all fine and good, but once any single component of that block of embodied carbon fails the whole thing is now e-waste. Which means I guess apple is buying up carbon offsets in order to recycle that e-waste back into a new M2 or M3 mac? How much faith do you have in carbon offsets? The aluminum and rare earth elements are recycled - what about the rest of it?
A modular design means a failed SSD only sends the SSD - not the entire product - into the waste (recycle?) chain.
Apple has a lot of engineering resources, and the fact that they are not spending those resources to make a computer that will still be in service in 10, 15, or 20 years is the problem.
But just something else to keep in mind: at mass production scales certain choices that may seem less useful for repair, often greatly enhance reliability. eg soldered on componentry - such things don’t present an issue to the official refurbishment programme however they present a challenge to the incredibly small % of people who want to open their laptop for amateur repair.
I agree that choices at scale might not make intuitive sense. I just don’t believe that Apple has a true motive to minimize climate impact, and thus their choices at scale are all suspect. They certainly want to appear as tho that is one of their goals - but as long as the impact of a choice is hidden they have no reason to make the right choice.
A modular design means a failed SSD only sends the SSD - not the entire product - into the waste (recycle?) chain.
Apple has a lot of engineering resources, and the fact that they are not spending those resources to make a computer that will still be in service in 10, 15, or 20 years is the problem.