My wife's 2017 MBP has gotten so dog-slow since Apple dropped support for it that it can't handle more than 3 Chrome tabs at a time now. The reality of Apple products is that the manufacturer sees them as eminently disposable. As early ARM macbooks age, the ability to run something, anything that isn't MacOS will be an asset. Otherwise, they're all landfill fodder.
More than half of "recycled" e-waste just gets exported to developing countries without environmental regulations where it either gets burned or buried.
The only sustainable thing you can do with a bad laptop is fix it or part it out, but for all my years taking apart fragile electronics, is it really worth the effort to take apart a device that was intentionally designed to be difficult or impossible for the owner to repair?
The last few macOS updates have really been killing performance on Intel Macs. Your 2014 is probably safe because it'll still be running an older macOS.
I have an old google nexus 7 tablet that I recently installed uboot and postmarketos on. I can ssh to it, run X apps over ssh, print directly from it. It's pretty cool.
I also have a really old iPad 2. It works perfectly HW wise, screen, wifi etc. But is effectively a paper weight due to software.
I am logged into it from my old Apple account, that was only ever used for this tablet.
I have the username and password but cannot log in as I don't know the security questions, so I can't reset the device or try to install apps. I even phoned apple but they said there's nothing they can do.
It pains me to just dump a perfectly good piece of hardware.
We have an iPhone 6 in a similar boat. It's my wife's old phone, and it'd be totally fine as a test phone for my work, but there doesn't seem to be a way to factory reset it without a passcode she doesn't know.
