They’re pretty good at reduce as well. Apple made a big deal in their presentation this week about how they optimise their products to be durable and last a long time. As of last year, the average lifespan of iphones was 4 years 3 months old, with the average age still trending upward:
Anecdotally, their computers are typically used for quite a bit longer than that.
The energetic cost of recycling raw material is much worst than reusing parts.
If they did that they’d have user replaceble batteries, that being the prime component to fail first in a phone.
While they don’t have user-replaceable batteries, their batteries can be replaced. Surely they’ve done studies that have shown that people purchase thinner phones, that those sorts of devices are seen as desirable by a large portion of the buying public. Because of that, they design their devices towards being thin, but also being robust, strong, water resistant, and a whole host of other concerns. As such, repairability, something Apple has, admittedly never been good at, especially third-party or user repair, takes a back seat to those other concerns, hence the battery that can’t be switched out by the user, but instead requires a dedicated repair by the manufacturer or an authorized third party repairer.
Can I buy them throught the BB store?
But Apple products are made from moonbeams and unicorn tails and cobwebs and leprechaun gold and fairy farts and magic pixie dust.
Surely, when the magic wears off, they go straight to silicon heaven.
This is a very misleading summary of a misleading article. The data was pulled from mandatory e-recycling states and the requirement is that the company collect X quantity of recyclables. In the one example shown of the 847,000 pounds, less than 10% (70,000) were computers and of those since less than 10% of computers sold annually are Macs that means less than 1% of all of the material collected in their recycling program is even Apple product. Phones aren’t even on the report since they account for so little of the recycled e-waste.
I believe Seamus is again creeping back to the Doctorow School of Outrage, rather than the Frauenfelder School of Wonderment. I definitely prefer the latter to the former.
This post seems designed solely to generate outrage. For what purpose, I’m not sure.
That’s true! It’s meaningless, because Apple isn’t doing that, but it’s true.
What they’re doing is recycling old, dead components and depreciated devices, grinding the glass and melting the metals, and building new devices from them, rather than those old, dead devices going into landfills.
Making the battery removable without tools is an engineering trade off. It makes it easy to replace the battery, yes, but it makes other things harder. Apple looked at the number of people who actually buy a new battery before they buy a new phone, and decided to put the battery behind some screws instead, which enables:
Also you should note that on every single Iphone, getting to the battery involves unscrewing two screws and sliding up the cover. It got a bit more tricky as they moved the slidey bit around to the front to make it easier to replace the screen as well, and more recently waterproofing has added complications, but fundamentally, for every iphone ever made, battery replacement is a quick and easy operation if you have the tools and the skill - once you crack open the phone, the battery is right there. I have read that for many android phones that don’t have a swappable battery, replacing the battery is a longer and more difficult process.
Lot’s of apple lovers in this thread it seems.
Apple’s products are expressly manufactured to be as unrepairable as possible. Also they strongly discourage re-using old apple stuff.
See years of Ifixit teardowns.
Bunch of greenwashing hypocrites, Apple.
Well put!
We should hold polls and award awards.
Actually, I would still be using my original macbook G4 if Apple supported older operating systems. I’m currently very happy with an old Macbook Pro except that I won’t be able to replace the battery myself. But I dread the day when its OS is no longer supported by Apple. These constant upgrades seem like a form of planned obsolescence to me. I can still ride a pre-war Dutch post bike, I still wear clothes I bought in 2002, I can still use an Olivetti typewriter built in the 60s, but Apple forces me to scrap my old computer even though it’s got years of good use left in it. Seems wasteful to me.
Apple’s products are disposable, and there’s no way to recover the energy and labor that went into producing them. Grinding them up is basically making high-grade ore for the smelters.
Wish they’d shut up about being environmentally responsible, when their goal is to maximize their profit.
There are two camps in the computer industry when it comes to OS compatibility. One camp says that you should always make things backward compatible, even if that means you are constantly having to work around ancient ways of doing things and obsolete standards. The other camp says that backward compatibility is worth sacrificing in order to be able to conform to modern standards and to enable newer, better, more powerful ways of doing things.
Microsoft has been the poster child of the backwards compatibility camp for a very long time. As long as you don’t install x64 Windows, you can still run Visicalc or Word 1.0 for DOS on a modern Windows machine. The downside of that Windows still carries around a bunch of ancient subroutines and systems that are only there because programs written 20 or 30 years ago require them. All that backwards compatibility requires extra programmer time to support and maintain, extra RAM/CPU/storage/battery power to enable it, carries baggage of extra bugs and vulnerabilities, and holds the OS back because so many parts of it are still running on old code that is not designed to take advantage modern hardware. Software design forced upon you in an era of megahertz and megabytes becomes a millstone around the your neck in an era of gigahertz and gigabytes.
Apple has always been the poster child of the forward-looking camp. When a new, better standard comes along, they are eager to throw out the old as soon as realistically possible. That lets them always use the most power efficient methods of doing things, always take full advantage of the hardware, never have to deal with maintaining legacy code, etc, etc.
As with so very many things in the technology industry, these two approaches are sadly all to often treated as mutually exclusive and pursued with religious fervour, even when it would make far more sense to strike a balance between them. Microsoft makes its job much, much harder by continuing to carry the torch of compatibility for ever more ancient code. Apple could implement an emulation layer or a set of compatibility shims or something to enable old software to run on their newest and greatest OS (they have in fact done this in the past for running PowerPC apps on Intel machines), but they don’t because they are members of Church Forward Looking and regard legacy software as something unclean to be avoided whenever possible.
Ah yes, that old hypocritical routine of re-using old parts and recycling your products. Darn them and their actual environmental responsibility!
Yes, they should really stop talking about the major, industry-leading steps they’ve made towards sustainability, and stop making money as well. Good advice.
I have an iPhone 6+ that I bought a month after the launch. The battery condition check in iOS 11 shows its battery condition to be 80%. That’s after, what, four, five years old now? It’s probably still good for another three or four years or so.
^^^This, this this.
My MBPs have lasted a long time, but I had to replace each of them because of a lack of OS updates. Same for my perfectly functioning HP inkjet printer, and even my Epson printer - the manufacturers stopped making drivers for my OS (and the open source driver available didn’t support full quality, making the printers usable only for draft printing.) And the same for my Android phones.
The complaint seems to be that Apple requires that you recycle their devices in the manner they dictate, and not resell or re-use.
The idea that BB would complain about improper disposal, due to customer data, is also specious. There are only certain parts that would need to be destroyed, if confidentiality were a concern.
That’s impressive. 
I think our current epson printer is doing okay, but every previous printer i’ve owned has been only replaced due to hardware failure*
*one notable exception being explosion, literaly, as in a flame spurt out the back as some critical power delivery component shorted out.
