Apple’s ‘Recycled’ Macs Aren’t What They Seem

<i>Apple’s business model practically guarantees waste. Rolling out new, updated products and software each year makes perfectly functional tech obsolete and encourages consumers to toss electronics stuffed with heavy metals every few years.</i><p>So because Apple releases new software and hardware every year, that means that the phone I’m already using immediately stops working?<p><i>Such “planned obsolescence” is one reason Apple and rivals like Samsung, with its unending parade of new Galaxy phones, make so much money.</i><p>If Apple wanted to “obsolete” their phones, they would not update older phones, allow old devices that can’t be upgraded to download “the last compatible version” (it works back to my iPad 1 from 2010), etc.<p><i>For instance, the company uses proprietary screws that make it tough for consumers to tinker with their devices. It has also spent some of its considerable resources lobbying against “right to repair” legislation that would make it easier for third-party shops to fix your gadgets, creating roadblocks for consumers who would rather keep their old devices than buy new ones.</i><p>Or you can just take your phone to an authorize repair center. There is nothing I own that I could fix myself besides the one desktop I have.

The way I see it is that phones produced by Apple have the same weight and roughly the same material content as any other phone. Apple provides current software for their phones at least 5 years and these phones tend to get updated and handed down. There are good reasons to believe (see Asymco&#x27;s blog) that the active lifetime is longer than most of competition. Which leads to my conclusion that the ecological footprint of an iPhone may well be smaller by a factor of 30-50% than any competitors phone irrespective of manufacturing differences where I believe Apple is at least on par.

&quot;Apple isn’t the only tech company contributing to this problem. In fact, the company may generate less e-waste than other tech firms&quot;<p>People love to hate on Apple, if other companies are worse than them why aren&#x27;t they the target of the criticism. A lot of the time it seems Apples mistake is to be successful.

<i>&quot;But [Apple] has conspicuously not promised to collect all its recycled aluminum from its own dross...&quot;</i><p>Apple&#x27;s keynote says their recycled aluminum is a new special alloy. I know nothing of such things, but it occurs to me that recycled laptops would need different processing from say recycled aluminum cans.

&gt; So because Apple releases new software and hardware every year, that means that the phone I’m already using immediately stops working?<p>In apples case, yes. You might very well be able to install the latest iOS on your 2010 iPad, but why bother? It&#x27;s going to be so slow that you&#x27;ll want to throw it out the window. Do t want to update? Good luck reinstalling your applications after a wipe because they all require the latest iOS api version and you can&#x27;t install previous versions.<p>Let&#x27;s not pretend that Apple&#x27;s business model isn&#x27;t built on people throwing out all their idevices every few years and rebuying everything altogether whenever Apple dictates that the old connector isn&#x27;t good for you anymore or that micro USB is for losers.

Can I actually &quot;flag&quot; this story? I am not even sure if this could be classified as Fake news, but they are wrong and not true on so many front, and you don&#x27;t even need to be an industry expert or insider to argue against it. I fully support the right to repair, but that doesn&#x27;t mean you could try to spin a false story.<p><i>&quot;The announcement “makes Apple sound noble and sustainable when any manufacturer that needs to buy aluminium is also buying 75 percent recycled content without making any special effort,” Gordon-Byrne says.<p>and it’s hard to see how Apple’s announcement amounts to a significant environmental victory if it’s not creating incentives to dramatically increase the amount of recycled aluminium on the market.&quot; </i><p>If it was <i>that</i> easy every other manufacturer could have done it ages ago. It is only remaining 25% right? Others now has an incentive to copy it, 100% recycle Aluminium. And what Apple announced is actually an Aluminium Alloy, my wild guess is that 100% recycled aluminium couldn&#x27;t be as good as with the mix pure aluminium, hence Apple needs to create &#x2F; search an alloy for it.<p><i>&quot;But with 1.3 billion active devices worldwide (and countless more in landfills), Apple is still responsible for a huge amount the world’s dangerous electronic junk.&quot;</i><p>Out of the 1.3B iPhone Sold since launch, more than 65% &#x2F; ~850M are still in active use. 400M iPad sold since launch, conservative estimate of ~250M in use ( I could bet my money it is closer to 300M if not more ), and 100M Mac User out of ~170M Mac sold last 10 years.<p>Total e-waste of 450M iPhone, 150M iPad, and 70M Mac. That is roughly 530M Pound of e-waste over the course of 10 years.<p>And Apple manage to recycle 90 Million pounds of their own product in 2015 alone on their first year give back programme. 2016 and 2017 they have managed improved their recycling speed and efficiency with faster Robots, without mentioning total recycled numbers. Even if they did not increase their total recycled product, over 4 years time that could be 360M total recycled e-waste.<p><i></i> 360M out of 530M Pound ! <i></i><p>Both estimate are in lowest &#x2F; worst case scenario.<p>And in case the author doesn&#x27;t know, there are current roughly 3.2B of non Apple Smartphone in use. Out of a total of ~7.2B produced over the last 10 years, mind giving me some thoughts where are these 4B Smartphones?<p>Note: Most of the numbers are on top of my head, but they should be fairly accurate and not off by +&#x2F;- 10% up to end of 2017. Feel free to correct if I am wrong.

Well, the same as 99% of anything &quot;ecologists&quot; say and do... Nothing new or newsworthy here.