Apple recovered 2,204 pounds of gold from broken iPhones last year
money.cnn.com
money.cnn.com
Something that we just started seeing in robotics at the beginning of 2015, dedicated disassembly robots. They should be able to replace much of the disassembly done in places like China or Ghana where containers of old electronics have been dumped. In terms of a project that helps the world I would totally invest in such robots.
[1] (Warning its Mashable) http://mashable.com/2016/03/21/apple-liam-recycling-robot/#f...
Just garbage reporting.
The main benefit of gold is that it's more stable than copper, so it's a good material for connector contact surfaces, but the bulk of the contact should be something else like copper or steel, depending on the relative importance of electrical or mechanical properties.
Other communities talk about radiation risk in terms of radiotion you get from a banana.
It's about as useful as double-decker buses or football fields.
Short ton: 2000 lb.
Imperial (UK) long ton: 2,240 lb.
Longweight ton: 2400 lb.
I'm in the boat business where a register ton is 100 cubic feet.
There are more, especially once you get to other types of pounds.
Likewise, confusion between "mills" (millimetres) and "mils" (thousandths of an inch) are an exclusively American problem.
The American adherence to customary units is a constant annoyance for electronics engineers - an 0603 resistor could measure 0.6mm x 0.3mm or ~1.5mm x ~0.76mm
A resistor measuring ~0.6mm x 0.3mm is an 0201. (2 1/100ths of an inch by 1 1/100th of an inch.) The standard doesn't make sense in SI units, but it's the standard.
http://www.newark.com/chip-smd-resistors/resistor-case-style...
The metric/imperial split is a constant nuisance. Most board houses and PTH packages use mils, but the vast majority of SMT IC packages are specified in millimetres. Board layouts almost always necessitate switching between imperial and metric units; Layout software includes features to manage this. Wire gauges are a total mess - AWG, SWG and mm are all in common use. Standard pin headers and derivative connectors are 0.1" pitch (2.54mm), but JST connectors are 2.5mm pitch. Conversion errors have caused countless production problems.
EDIT: Correction, all except for the number for recovered steel.
[1] http://images.apple.com/environment/pdf/Apple_Environmental_...
Also, the gold was not just from iPhones. Macs and iPads are included in that number. What a weird non-story. It would be interesting to know the cost of the recycling program to know if the materials recovered paid for the program.
A "business" is a money-making hobby.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+tonne+of+gold+in+cub...
A gallon of gold is 75lbs, almost 10x as dense as water, and worth about $3million
[1] http://www.ebay.com/itm/10x-Water-Damage-Warranty-Sensor-Ind...
Step 2: determine it costs too much to repair "broken" iPhones (see step 1).
Step 3: Burn the whole lot down for precious metals.
What an enormous win for the environment and recycling! There are plenty of companies that will already do step 3, but pretty much nobody other than Apple has the opportunity to do something about the vastly more important step 2.
It seems they have a deft touch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYshVbcEmUc
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone_recycling
"Because the U.S has not ratified the Basel Convention or its Ban Amendment, and has no domestic laws forbidding the export of toxic waste, the Basel Action Network estimates that about 80% of the electronic waste directed to recycling in the U.S. does not get recycled there at all, but is put on container ships and sent to countries such as China.[6][7][8][9] Guiyu in the Shantou region of China, and Delhi and Bangalore in India, have electronic waste processing areas.[6][10][11]"
http://edition.cnn.com/2013/05/30/world/asia/china-electroni...
http://www.cnet.com/news/the-environmental-pitfalls-at-the-e...
Would be interesting to see a real follow-up, rather than just some PR-numbers from Apple.
I'm pretty confident that recovering gold economically involves smelting and other rather destructive processes.
You want to talk about phones that are not repairable? Let's talk about ANY HTC phone. They're total crap to repair.
The worst, though, are the cheap MetroPCS and Cricket Android phones--the ones you've probably never heard of but that we get calls about every day, like HTC Desires, Samsung Galaxy Core Primes, and a whole line of tiny LG phones with odd model numbers. THOSE phones are completely unrepairable--not because we can't get the parts, but because the repair, which runs $80 or so to fix a broken screen, is almost twice what it costs to just buy a new phone.
These phones are unabashedly sold to poor and even to homeless people, who then get the choice of desperately trying to continue using them when they inevitably break, or ponying up another $50 to buy a new one. It's a way, way worse model than iPhones, and one the HN community probably isn't familiar with (I didn't know anything about this until I started running a repair store.) It's a pretty disgusting market.
But is it really "disgusting" that a phone is cheaper to replace than repair because it is extremely cheap to begin with? Following that argument, they would solve the problem by raising the price of the new phone.
Then it breaks. And since the software is usually so crappy on it, there's no consistent way for them to have backed it up. Sometimes the contacts are on the SIM card--sometimes not. Sometimes they've backed up to the Google cloud; sometimes they didn't understand what that was, so they just hit "skip" when it asked them to set up that account.
So when that phone breaks, they've lost EVERYTHING. Now I know there are some folks on HN, because I've been around here long enough, who would say "They should just learn how to back it up!" And to that I would say, who is teaching them? Can you? These people are sometimes barely literate, often only with a high school education (or less.) We can't expect them to understand what a "Google cloud" is. And heck, even as technical people, many of us don't back up stuff properly, especially personal items.
So when that phone breaks, they've lost a lot. Personal photos of their kids. Important contacts. The calendar that reminded them where that job interview next week was.
Many of these same folks would be far better served buying a used iPhone 4S, which is $55 to fix when a screen breaks. But the difference between $50 for a Cricket HTC Desire and a $100 iPhone 4 could be a week or two--a week or two during which they cannot survive without their phone. That's why I say it's a disgusting market.
The part where I will disagree with you slightly is this wasn't just a problem of the barely literate, or even technical people overlooking backups. When we did user studies it was essentially everyone that came in - none of them had off-device backups, or knew how to share. The number of people for which "sharing photos" meant holding up the phone with a picture on the screen while the other person took a picture of the phone was depressing. The sharing UI was totally opaque to them. I see this on Instagram today, where people take pictures of the display on a DSLR in order to share the photos.
I apologize for the rant. I acknowledge this is a religious hobby-horse for me. At the aforementioned startup one of the stats that killed me was the average views of a picture once taken was essentially 0 - pictures go to SD cards to die. No better for phones. At the time Facebook was getting three or four Flickrs a week, and the stats were still pretty grim. We have to better serve customers, but I don't know what that looks like. Verizon offers a cloud-like service for contacts and photos (I have this on my Samsung U365 flip phone), but it's a pain to set up and unclear when it will cost you extra.
Bonus story: smart guy I worked with bought a really nice new camera, they default picture size was too big (too many pixels, too large files) to attach to emails, so he did the obvious thing: set the default resolution of the camera to something low enough to fit. WHY OH WHY BUY A 5 MEGAPIXEL CAMERA THEN SET THE DEFAULT RESOLUTION TO VGA? Because resizing everything was a PITA. Another unhappy customer experience. We (the industry) need to enable our customers, not frustrate them.
Seriously though it reads as if that shop has fair repair charges, and it's simply easier (thus cheaper) to repair an iPhone than some no-name android. This conforms to my experience with other sorts of equipment. You'll always pay more when the case has panels attached by screws, rather than two plastic shells that can only be mated once.
That probably doesn't help the repair shop guy too much, but making the poor support his dying business model doesn't sound fantastic on the ethical scale either
> The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
> Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
> But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
> This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
https://thebillfold.com/to-terry-pratchett-who-gave-us-sam-v...
By your definition, these phones would only be "repairable" if they were vastly more expensive to buy. Does it really help low-income customers if the cheapest phones available are several hundred dollars?
These phones are primarily intended for the developing and middle-income world, where lower labour costs make them perfectly economical to repair.
He's outraged because it sucks for his homeless customers.