E-Waste Empire
theverge.com
theverge.com
At first, I was shocked that Americans can throw away 1 year old and even half year old goods in the dumpster. In 2.5, years time I managed to make enought money of my commission selling refurbished cellphones to Russia through Alibaba to move to Canada and enrol into college.
People used to furnish their entire apartments with other people's trash in Japan in the 1980s.
Memories.
The word you're looking for is 'Sperrmüll'. And I agree, it's good fun to hunt for treasures.
My things from when I left home I've had since I was a kid in the 80s, my kitchen table and chairs were given to me by my sister when she bought a new one for their house, my entertainment centre was given to me by a friend when he was moving across the country, and my couch was given to me by a friend a few months ago when he bought a new one.
I really need a new bed and a new chair for the living room (both date back to the 1970s), but otherwise my furniture is in decent shape. I could use a new computer desk as it got a bit damaged in the last move I made, but it's not too bad.
Refurbished iPhones were a killer business:
1. A less than a year old phone with a defect (dumped by end users, Honhai, Apple's QC contractors) was sold for 20 to 30 USD;
2. Re-equiping a phone without charger, driver disk, or retail box did costs less than one dollar;
3. "Out-of-dumpster" phones, cleaned, and sorted by the level of "brokennes" were sold wholesale for around $50-60 USD a kilogramm;
4. "Recovered" ifones (bought out by recyclers from end users) were sold from 50 to 200 USD depending on level of wear;
5. A "full-service" that includes change of all external casing parts to new, non-original ones, reflashing, new battery, resoldered clean ports, new memory chip for phones with failing or degraded NAND flash, and bubble-wrap packaging did cost around 10 to 15 USD for small quantity orders;
6. A phone refitted to market grade A2 (identical to a phone from assembly line with less than 3 non-original parts) can be sold for up to $300 a piece.
If they were worried about their image in that regard, then maybe they shouldn't have made products that people would throw away after 1 or 2 years.
I would not sell my products at exhorbatant prices in the hope that my customers would think expensive = quality. I would not try to control the perceptions of my product by hiding information from my customers.
IMO building shit products and then trying to trick your customers into thinking it isn't shit, is not the best stratergy. I would just try to do the best that I can and let my products/services speak for themselves.
Many companies would not do that because all they care about is their bottom line, even at the risk of pissing off their customers.
I personally do not do business with or recommend any company that I have found to be deciptive about what they are actually offering their customers, because I hate a lack of transparency. I don't want to spend ages wading though a company's bullshit just to figure out if their product actually does what they claim it does. So if I ran my own company I would never do that to any of my customers/clients/users.
Am I really an entitled, spoilt asshole, because I expect some transparency from companies about their products and services?
Edit: just to be clear, I am not saying that Apple makes shit products, nor am I saying they make good products. But the instant I see a company do some PR shit to make their products seem better than they are, I instantly lose any respect for their products. If your product cannot stand on its own merit, then is it really a good product?
I guess it's these frustrations that move humanity forward, but we shouldn't forget to look back and see how far we've come.
But electronics manufacturers in general seem to be opposed to this idea, preferring that people dispose of products after a few years and buy something new, and often taking measures to actively discourage people from fixing their devices. Not only is this anti-consumer, it further promotes e-waste.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPjp41qeXe1o_lp1US9TpWA
And surprisingly, it can actually be cheaper to send scrap to China than a US smelter because of the imbalance of trade. The ships would be mostly empty on the return tip if not for scrap materials being sent back. Circle of life.
I work at OpThrift (https://opthrift.com) where we help people buy high-quality used laptops, and startups throwing equipment away is one of our biggest supply sources. Half of the time, they don't even care about what price they get and just want us to get the devices out of their office.
Do you offer any non-mac laptops by any chance? I've put in a request.