Apple Forces Recyclers to Shred All iPhones and Macbooks | Hacker News Reader

Apple Forces Recyclers to Shred All iPhones and Macbooks

motherboard.vice.com

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One day I entered in one of the labs in a previous company and found a few piles of "old" macbooks pro ready to trash. I would say easily around 500' They seemed quite new to me so I asked if I could get a bunch and reuse parts to make a working one.

They told me I could get all I wanted. So I took 10. I arrived home and all of them were functional after formating and reinstalling. My family and friends got very happy with seminew laptops for free.

I guess is not only about recycling or shredding, is as well about giving a second, third or fourth life to our goods... And lets be honest. Recycling is a very wasteful process. If we want to be eco friendly we should consume less, thats the only way.

There is a reason "recycle" comes last in "reduce, reuse, recycle". But not consuming is bad for the economy, so the invisible hand does its best to prevent reduction and reuse.

> But not consuming is bad for the economy, so the invisible hand does its best to prevent reduction and reuse.

That 'the invisible hand' (by which I assume you mean the free market) prevents reuse is simply not true. In a competitive free market you would have companies that would specialise in reuse. For Apple's products that is exactly what happens: there are actually quite a few companies selling refurbished second hand Apple products (e.g. [1] and [2]), including Apple itself [3]. Of course, regulation sometimes gets in the way: India's prime minister Modi is preventing Apple from selling second hand iPhones in India in an attempt to get them to start producing products in India.

The free market has many short-comings. Preventing reuse is not one of them.

[1] https://leapp.be/nl

[2] https://www.forza-refurbished.be/?gclid=CNb63IaEutMCFSEG0wod...

[3] https://www.apple.com/shop/browse/home/specialdeals/mac

[4] http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/hardware/tim-cook-k...

From [4]: > The government is in-principle against allowing import and sale of second-hand phones in India to prevent dumping of hazardous electronic waste, said a person familiar with the matter. But it might take a more favourable view of the proposal if Apple agrees to manufacture in India. "Local manufacturing will be the thrust of the PM's message to Cook," the person said.

Free market doesn't prevent dumping of hazardous waste in developing countries.

So if I understand it correctly, if Apple manufactures in India, the Indian government would take a more favourable view of 'dumping of hazardous electronic waste'? It sounds like a pretext to me.

I agree that the free market doesn't prevent dumping of hazardous waste in developing countries.

Maybe in a competitive market with no externalities and perfectly rational consumers, aka fantasy land. Here in the real world people are easily influenced by ads, durability is less important than price, and environmental destruction is not factored into the cost of a product.

Companies make money by selling stuff. If every item you needed would be built to last and people wouldn't throw away perfectly good things because the design doesn't match the designs they see on TV anymore, many companies would go belly up.

Not so. In your theoretical world the market dynamics would simply be different. Companies in the real world can choose to make products vastly more reliable and long lasting and not go belly up (as you put it). Indeed, they used to. Now they just prefer a more subscription-based model (where consumers buy a new one every so often) because it cash flows easier, and it's easier to manipulate the customers perception of true cost. So "belly up" weakens your argument. You'd be much closer in simply saying companies might make less. Though, I'm not sure that's true either. My dad used to own and operate a company selling VERY high-end, long-lasting seat covers for cars and trucks. He charged A LOT, and had a three month waiting list.

So...

Low durability = low price = many sold High durability = high price = fewer sold

But mathematically you could still make the same under either approach.

It's not bad for the "economy" except for a too narrow definition of "economy". This is the broken window fallacy.

"Not consuming" is actually great for the economy.

Imagine you could produce a car that never needed repairs and would last a million miles and cost the same to build as current cars. You'd free up tons of mechanics and auto-workers to build and repair other things. Actual economic output would go up, more and better things would be made.

Well apparently not all people want to be eco friendly.

Most people I know would rather buy a new low/mid range product than a used/refurbished device that was high end when it was released. It's mind boggling - you'd rather get a creaky piece of shit locked down cheap NEW laptop than a high quality business grade used one, because... it hasn't been used before?

I believe that if a device was gently used and hasn't failed, the chance of it failing after 1-2 years is actually lower than with a new one. I don't know if it's true, but it's been my experience.

But then again, my relationship with tools is weird - if I get them, I clean and rebuild them, so they're mine. No one else gets to use them. They're almost like pets. And I don't care how many people used them before me...

> It's mind boggling - you'd rather get a creaky piece of shit locked down cheap NEW laptop than a high quality business grade used one, because...

Yes but not only that, for laptops it comes down to priorities. I know plenty of people who are better served with Chromebook with 8 hour battery life than a refurb high end one with 2 h battery.

> I believe that if a device was gently used and hasn't failed, the chance of it failing after 1-2 years is actually lower than with a new one. I don't know if it's true, but it's been my experience.

True for some devices and not true for others.

> They're almost like pets. And I don't care how many people used them before me...

It's unhealthy to think about tools that way, off course rebuilding your tools increases their emotional value. If your rebuilds of tools are good, not very custom and things are not expensive, try to give them away to friends and family, it usually increases your satisfaction, lowers materialistic attachment and can make you more creative.

If I give away my tools, I can't use them any more without borrowing them back. If I keep my tools, I can make all manner of things to give away, or not, just as I choose. The buddha might not approve, but the buddha is dead.

To be fair it's only in the last couple of years that second hand devices haven't been complete dogs in terms of performance.

I only buy old ThinkPads, I avoid all the horrific shit Lenovo is doing to them, and get solid Linux support.

The problem here is that for example in Poland the market is flooded with post-enterprise laptops from Germany/UK/France, and while yes, those laptops get second life in this market, almost all of them will end up in landfills, not recycled fully. So basically Germany "recycles" their IT equipment by selling it to other markets where it's not certain the equipment will be recycled once it dies fully.

Note this seems to be not about independent recyclers that Apple forced to shred their products. It's rather companies that Apple specifically hired to shred products that were returned to Apple, and Apple didn't want to refurbish.

While it's still a waste, it's not as outrageous as I first thought.

Old Apple parts are worth quite a bit. If yours is broken, part-it out. Even a Macbook Air.

I was able to part-out my old Macbook air (with broken battery and power adapter) and put toward the proceeds and ~US$200 toward the latest's model:

Apple just has that tight control over its parts pre- and post- use.

Indeed - 13 years ago, I had a side-line buying junk PowerBooks on eBay for very little ($100-$200), cobbling them together into perfectly working machines, and then selling them on for $1000+. I only ever tied up ~$2000 at a time, and would sell working parts I had no use for on, and even broken parts, as someone will want it, even if not for much. Never did any deep repairs, just part swapping and replacement.

As an added bonus I always had a snazzy laptop, as I'd sometimes hang on to a high spec machine for a few months before selling it on.

From what I can see on eBay today, it's still an eminently viable cottage industry.

Where do you sell an older Mac at a good price?

Ebay, I've never had any trouble disposing of old computers.

I might be missing something, but seems to me like the products are still recycled, but as raw materials, not as full devices.

This makes sense, given data is almost certainly bound to be present on phones etc.

Maybe there's a more nuanced way to do this, but this doesn't seem all that bad.

OTOH, having these phones go through a refurb program and selling them probably involves a fair amount or resource use as well.

Forcing recyclers to shred perfectly fine phone components makes sense because data is bound to be present 'etc'.

My "Hacker" "News" moment of the day.

Who said they are "perfectly fine"?

Also, it's not up to you, the costumer decided to deliver the device for recycling and not for scrap.

Reusing is more efficient than recycling can ever be.

The resources used to refurb and resell are a tiny fraction of those required to go from raw material (recycled or mined) to a new phone.

As far as data goes, soft tools will stop anyone but the NSA. If you're worried about the NSA you don't toss your phone in a collection box.

Yes, you are missing something.

> Maybe there's a more nuanced way to do this, but this doesn't seem all that bad.

Like removing the flash storage first, maybe...?

With all the human labor that'd take, you'd pay more for refurb than for new.

I find it highly unlikely that human labor is necessarily required to remove the backplate of an iPhone, remove flash storage and recycle the rest. But let me know if I'm wrong - the entire example is extremely contrived in any case.

It'd be a hell of an expensive robot, and probably not all that reliable - more complex than "Liam", what with the masked hot-air rework requirement, and even that was just an ad that never actually got built. And that assumes you only need the one kind of robot, which is a bit optimistic given that sizes, shapes, internal configurations, and assembly methods tend to differ among iPhone versions. You might need several expensive robots. (And have you seen what it takes to tear down an iPhone? It is not a simple process! Special tools are required, and I don't just mean for getting the unicorn screws out.)

In any case, you'll pay much more for a refurb that's helping cover cost of the considerable labor involved in that kind of rework, whether it's expensively done by humans or done by expensive robots. With that kind of production cost, and especially with a huge upfront automation investment to amortize, it's going to be a struggle to keep the prices of refurbs from exceeding those of new product, and at that point it's no longer economical. The whole point of buying refurb is to get the same product for less money, or more product for the same money, as you'd get buying new. If you can't sell refurb at that kind of price point without taking a loss, you may as well not bother.

If only there were a way to encrypt the flash storage and then throw away the key.. Alas, one can dream.

People are acting like they're shredding last year's iPhone models. Apple products have great resell value and they're passed on as hand-me-downs often. If something got back to Apple, chances are reusing parts is not plausible. Not much you can harvest from an iPhone 3G other than the raw materials.

Some would strongly disagree that these phones don't have use. One great example is this: https://rfcx.org/

These phones are only cheap because the consumer market is giving them away (high supply). That makes them very good for specific applications and given the presense of complex sensors, battery backup, and small form factor you have a very attractive package for potentially important use cases. That's also just setting asside the idea that someone might want to use these pieces. Some third world countries may benifit from a huge influx of cheap technology every year.

Very cool link. I'm going to see if they are working in Guatemala, or if there's something similar being done there. Illegal land invasions in the national parks are a huge problem, but it's less of a detection issue and more of an enforcement/corruption issue.

I can imagine that quite a few broken phones get recycled even though 90% of the parts are still usable.

That doesn't seem likely. The most common failure points for iPhones are cracked screens, worn out batteries and broken home buttons, all of which Apple can repair. If it's something stronger like water damage, the electronics can't be relied on to be reused.

Source?

For an older device, the repair cost of a cracked screen matches the price of similar used unit, so it gets scrapped - despite all the other components being usable.

I'd always assumed that iPhones would have a high resale value too, but I find that they are surprisingly cheap. You can pick up iPhone 4S phones for £50 [0].

Then compare iPhone 5S (£120) [1] vs Samsung Galaxy S5 (£130 - 140) [2].

I really don't understand why. Perhaps there's just more people that want to buy second hand android phones.

[0]: http://second-handphones.com/all-handsets.html?manufacturer=...

[1]: http://second-handphones.com/all-handsets.html?manufacturer=...

[2]: http://second-handphones.com/all-handsets.html?manufacturer=...

Why would you expect a 6 year old phone (the 4S) to have any sort of resale value? That's incredibly old in phone years.

The Galaxy S5 was released half a year after the iPhone 5S, which might explain the price difference.

Yeah, I still have my old 4S. I don't use it because it's unusably slow, and I wouldn't pay £50 (or the equivalent in real money) for one today.

Pity. My SE feels cheap and light by comparison, and its materials don't hold up nearly as well. I don't like that, but given the strictly limited lifespan that smartphones seem to have, I suppose it's really quite apropos.

They used to - today, I think only MacBooks retain that famous resale-ability.

Probably because the iPhones are specced just enough to last a couple of years, whereas Android phones are over-specced as hell, even the Galaxy S4 had 4 cores and 2GB of RAM, which is still more than useable today...

It may sound odd, but this is standard practice in most "recycling" environments. When you recycle an aluminium can it doesn't get refilled. It gets melted into new aluminium. Even if the can is perfectly good and could be sanitized, to ensure constant quality it is best to start anew from the fundamental ingredients. Seeing a macbook shredded looks horrible, but if those bits are being properly recycled into new components then I can see apple's point. Rebuilding from the ground up is probably much easier than picking and testing every little component to ensure quality.

If you own a car, it has steel parts. Some of that steel is recycled metal from old cars. We consider it new. But would you be willing to pay the same price for a car with a chassis harvested from an older car? What level of testing would be needed for you to pay the same price as the car with a chassis built anew? If that testing costs more than a couple hundred, the logical thing is to melt.

Old cars are often used to source parts for the repair of other cars. It's common practice, which has persisted without any major problems.

Likewise, 3rd-party repair shops will often harvest parts from old phones, to replace parts in phones they are repairing. Picking and testing components doesn't appear to be a problem for them. Their customers seem to have no issue with recycled parts being used to repair their phones.

If there is demand for recycled parts, and they can be reused while still ensuring quality, what is the problem?

But apple doesn't want to sell used or refurbished phones, only shiny new ones.

It's none of Apple's business what people are doing with their phones after they bought them.

Apple sells a ton of refurbished phones and Macs. I have one.

But electronics is not just a single material. It consists of independent parts which could work fine as replacements without shredding the entire device.

A majority of comments here seem to think that literally millions of units of electronics are being shredded wastefully, instead of more meaningfully re-used. Ok, great! This is HN! Where are the calls to start a company to leverage this near-infinite supply of valuable trash through economically productive re-use? Should be very profitable, right?

Another distinct possibility is that the proportion of valuable items in this stream is too small to warrant their recovery. There are already tons of people that refurb and sell computers. It's a small market, and increasing the supply by 100x (or whatever the multiple of "wasted" recycling opportunities is) would likely distort that market into total collapse.

I take it you're being facetious. The referenced article discusses some of the contractual language that Apple uses to hinder re-use, and they aren't the only ones. The real risk of course are unscrupulous vendors who sell as 'new' things they have recovered either on Ebay or Amazon which turns around and bites the original manufacturer because the customer complains their parts are bad.

Having dealt with many of the major recycling centers in the bay area, and the resellers, and the various people in between, the maze of laws and contracts make unwinding this nearly impractical in most cases. It is pretty amazing when someone is willing to sneak a $250,000 mini-computer to you out the back of the building because the corporate "requirements" are that a perfectly serviced and operating machine be sent to shredding rather than do anything else.

Of course you really can't make a business off their largess but a number of important computer systems were saved in similar ways.

Generally there is often more value to the manufacturer that they not be recycled and so we end up with these sorts of contracts.

> A majority of comments here seem to think that literally millions of units of electronics are being shredded wastefully, instead of more meaningfully re-used. Ok, great! This is HN! Where are the calls to start a company to leverage this near-infinite supply of valuable trash through economically productive re-use? Should be very profitable, right?

There are already companies doing it. TFA talks about iThings collected by Apple themselves whose recycling Apple outsourced to others under the condition that everything will be teared down to raw materials.

Have a look here for some real recycling action: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14100989

edit:

Hell, it's right there in TFA:

"Electronics recyclers are filled with heaps of broken iMacs and MacBooks, which due to economics and the requirements of certifications are most often scrapped rather than repaired or sold," John Bumstead, a refurbisher who sells MacBooks that he salvages and frankensteins together from broken ones that he gets from recyclers that don't work with Apple, told me.

In trying to source MacBooks to repair, Bumstead says he's been turned away countless times by recyclers who say they can't sell him Apple products.

So yeah, the question is not whether recycling itself is profitable or not. The problem is that Apple apparently has sufficient profit margins that to them recycling is less profitable than shredding the old iGadgets to raw materials and reforging them into the latest shiny. Especially if it's done in China where the resulting pollution doesn't affect them as much.

It can be profitable. But yeah, the market is small. I've looked into this before - even the poorer Eastern European countries prefer new products to refurbished ones. And that seems to mirror the opinion of a lot (probably most) people.

There is an entire industry out there for re-using and repairing these electronics. The unfortunate part is that the great Apple steamroller, and many other large companies, are fighting against the right-to-repair bill. I can only imagine there are other industries which use these devices in other countries, much like the Save the Rainforest link that someone else posted on this comment thread.

Much like our previous election, people aren't showing up to voice their concerns of not having the right-to-repair their electronics. This doesn't just affect iPhone users either.. this includes farmers. Having grown up on a farm, being able to fix your own equipment is absolutely essential - no debate possible.

I kid you not, one of the arguments against the right-to-repair is that you could repair your microwave and it might blow up and harm you. What a load of bull.

If you, or anyone else, is interested I highly suggest watching this video of an owner of a repair shop in New York. This guy has travelled to defend our right-to-repair, but the problem is not enough people are fighting back.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F66BapDvpU8 https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/industry-and-app...

Will repair MacBooks for food, but for the love of god don't shred them. Just give them out at high schools or college grads. They can learn a thing or two & save BUX in the process.

There are also a number of charitable organizations trying to bring computation into underserved international communities (eg. http://www.reneal.org/). Please consider donating used hardware; it can have a tremendous impact on communities whose schools have (at best!) a single computer for hundreds of students.

It's pretty frustrating to read about older tech going to waste, instead of trying to find a new home. I imagine that there's a lot of people that'd be perfectly fine with slightly older tech, especially when the alternative is nothing.

A few years back I had an online friend working at a tech recycling center, he offered to send me a slightly used laptop he'd picked up (I think it was a Thinkpad T40p?), only requesting that I pay for shipping. Even if it was a few years "outdated" by then, after installing Ubuntu it was more than enough to get me through a few years of college.

He also sent a couple smartphones, which I gave away to friends and family who were in tight spots. And even managed to get me another laptop for an underclassman whose previous laptop died out and wasn't able to afford fixing or replacing it at the time.

Heck, I sometimes like getting access to older tech devices too, just because it lets me try out new things. For example, among the smartphones I received there was an HTC HD2, which I believe has been one of the most hackable smartphones ever.

Those old thinkpads are brilliant, by the way. I also use an old one with a new SSD. Works like a brand new laptop.

It's not totally clear to me that shreding older models of MacBooks isn't the environmental sound thing to do.

Laptops have become massively more efficient and consume significantly less electricity. It some cases it must be better to take them out of use and replace them with more efficient modern replacements.

> At some point

And instead of letting the market decide when a laptop is bound for replacement, let's force people to destroy it. Of course! Makes perfect sense! Apple is doing this because newer laptops are more energy efficient! How great of Apple! Such environment, so wow!

The market doesn't have a great track record on environmentally friendly best practices.

The market has decided.

Case 1: it was a perfectly functioning computer but the owner wanted something new. They could hand it down, donate it directly to a charity, or sell it through a company like Gazelle.

I don't think I've gotten rid of a single computer in 10 years. I have 4 pre 2009 computers that I know are still in good use after installing a fresh copy of Windows 7 on them (thanks to an MSDN license). One of those four is a 2006 era Core Duo Mac Mini. The 2008 era Core 2 Duo is being used now as a Plex Server.

Case 2: they were returned to Apple under warranty, Apple cleaned them up and sold them refurbished. Apple has been selling refurbished devices for over 10 years.

Case 3: they weren't worth selling or refurbishing.

There is absolutely nothing stopping people from reselling old Apple products. The market has every opportunity to work just fine.

If it ended up at a recycler, it is intended to be destroyed. That's what recycling means. The plastic bottles you throw in recycling get shredded too, even though they could undoubtedly be refilled and reused.

I'm trying to be at least somewhat rational. A better way to respond, would be with data.

However, you talk about letting the market decide. But what your asking for is the opposite of letting the market decide. Apple have decided, that it's better for them to request the recyclers they work with shred the laptops.

So what's the alternative? Regulation that forces Apple to not shred laptops?

There are costs related to recycling. A lot of energy, water etc. It's not totally free to retransform material. Reusing and repairing depending on age, condition of electronics is much more environment friendly. Use it as long as possible is the optimum (on computers and phones at least).

I'd wager that the electricity a normal laptop consumes over its lifetime doesn't even come close to the embodied energy of just its silicon. And that doesn't even account for all the poisonous crap you need to turn dirt into high-tech.

According to this study:

http://www.networkworld.com/article/2229029/data-center/comp...

Which states that of all the energy used by a laptop (both during use and manufacture) manufacturing represents 70% of the energy usage.

So it seems to make sense to extend the life of laptops as much as possible.

You will NEVER make up the Energy which is needed to produce a new computer by using a more efficient one. You might lower your electricity bills though.

I have found 10 fully-functional MacBook Pros (2009-2012) in my building's electronic recycling bin. I imagine that's fairly common.

One of those (MacBook Pro 2012 13" Core i7 2.9GHz 8GB RAM) became my main computer. It's sad to think it would have been shredded had I not saved it.

My laptops for the last 7 years now have all been ones I found in the trash or recycling bins. I've had two macbooks, and HP with an i7, and a decent Acer.

The stuff people trash is mind boggling, it's like they lose all powers of rational thought when it comes to valuing used electronics. A few hours of effort for $250+ on Ebay? Nah, trash it!

Perhaps I am jaded a bit on Apple, just a little, but this sounds like they want to control the entire lifecycle of their products. They want to design, manufacturer, sell, repair, and recycle. This seems basic vertical integration 101.

For people who don't understand that: In countries outside USA/western world we reuse things and repair things if they are still usable.

Shredding ALWAYS and calling your company GREEN is a LIE (to the Earth and customers) and PR joke @Apple.

I mean, this happens in the USA as well. Here in Portland we have Free Geek[1], which rebuilds computers from donations and gives them to community volunteers who help recycle them in the first place.

Anecdotally, the reuse part of recycling was pretty heavily emphasized when I was in school being taught about the importance of recycling.

[1] http://www.freegeek.org/

If it's usable, why would you recycle it? You can sell used devices. Apple even sells refurbished ones themselves. The only reason to actually recycle it is if it's broken, or so old that nobody wants it anymore.

The problem with taking stuff that's sent for recycling and harvesting it for parts instead is that's a huge quality issue. Usable devices should be re-used; if it's being recycled, there must be a reason. And unless you're going to do an exhaustive quality assurance pass on every single component of the device, you shouldn't be reselling it to other people. And doing a full quality assurance pass on every single component is not something that recyclers can really do. Apple doesn't want its users to end up with devices that have faulty parts, and the only real way to do that is to require the recyclers to actually destroy the devices instead of salvaging them.

Also, I find it really strange that the article expressly mentions that hard drives are shredded. Of course they're shredded! You don't want any risk at all of someone else recovering data off of those things. Plus the whole quality issue as mentioned above.

>The problem with taking stuff that's sent for recycling and harvesting it for parts instead is that's a huge quality issue.

Some people will accept lower quality at a dramatically lower price. I'm one of them, I buy used and broken items and repair them. That's the free market at work. Apple would prefer that I buy a new product from them thus this policy.

Now I have no problem with this policy if that's what they wish, but you can't have it and scream about how "green" you are in the same breath.

> Apple would prefer that I buy a new product from them thus this policy.

That makes no sense. You can buy used Apple devices from many places, and even Apple themselves sells refurbished devices. This move has nothing to do whatsoever with trying to prevent the purchase of used devices.

> If it's usable, why would you recycle it? You can sell used devices. Apple even sells refurbished ones themselves. The only reason to actually recycle it is if it's broken, or so old that nobody wants it anymore.

Because reselling old electronics involves finding buyers, which is not a zero-effort endeavor. Or maybe you're a company that is replacing a fleet of devices with upgraded models, and it will literally cost you more money in paid staff time to sell it than it will to just hand it off to a recycler.

> And unless you're going to do an exhaustive quality assurance pass on every single component of the device, you shouldn't be reselling it to other people.

Why not? Plenty of people buy old cars that haven't undergone an exhaustive QA pass. They run fine; some people even repair them themselves.

Gazelle makes that real easy.

As far as used cars, some of the major metro areas require you to get an emissions test to renew your tag. If the check engine light comes on or the OBD signals certain errors you can't renew.

Apple isn't selling anything that doesn't pass QA tests.

I tend to agree that in the US we're particularly bad about replacing things rather than repairing them. We're also bad about inventing, marketing, selling & buying products that trade convenience for waste in the first place. It's certainly not black and white though, these behaviors are global, and plenty of Americans care and try to reuse before recycling.

> Shredding ALWAYS and calling your company GREEN is a LIE (to the Earth and customers) and PR joke @Apple.

While always shredding is a bit unfortunate, this seems a little hyperbolic to me. Shredding for recycling is still recycling. It's worse than re-use and better than landfill. Lots and lots and lots of companies use the landfill, and Apple is certainly greener than that.

It'd be worth examining the recycling efficiency too, which is getting better every year. Apple's aiming for many parts to be manufactured with 100% recycled material. Not there yet, but if that were true, then what is the waste from shredding vs re-use? There's energy, which could come from renewable sources. What else?

Apple refurbishes and re-sells devices that pass testing.

Devices that don't pass testing it always recycles. It's unclear if it's method of recycling is the best or not, because this article is one-sided and vague.

I wonder how many others also have such strong negative reactions to this sort of mass destruction. It is hard to explain the feeling, but regardless of the product or manufacturer, seeing something which most certainly took a lot of effort to design and create brutally pulverised almost makes me want to cry.

On the other hand, maybe a lot of other people love seeing things destroyed, as evidenced by the popularity of shredder videos on YouTube, or maybe it's interesting in the same way as car crashes and other disasters.

Considering hand-me-down computers are such a common thing where I am, it makes me quite angry. We often piece two or more broken computers together to give to a student.

This may extend he computer's usable life but what happens to those computers once the student is done with them?

In my affluent neighbourhood, computers are often dumped at the roadside. Our council does have a recycling program for e-waste but I'm not sure of the transparency of the operation in terms of what percentage ends up in landfill.

I'm not condoning Apple's actions from the re-use point of view here but in the longer term, shredding computers at an industrial scale may be better for the environment than having a graveyard of 20 year old computers buried in a massive hole at the municipal tip.

They get recycled just years later after more value is extracted out of them. We teach our students that electronics and batteries have special recycling procedures.

I did most of my work for a couple of years on an expensive gaming rig found out by the dumpster. The RAM had been removed but everything else was still there (including a hard drive with a bunch of porn and virus).

Replaced the dirty drive, new RAM and it was far better than any machine I could justify buying at the time.

The article's conflation of things being broken down into their component parts and recycled, vs things being "destroyed", is maddening and tendentious. Try not to fall for it.

The topic and language of the article makes it sound like the author, or the entity who commissioned the article to be written, stands to benefit financially from resold parts or refurbishing. The tone is too strong for something that is not a big deal, except to those who are in the business of profiting from the reuse/resale of hardware components.

Follow the money. "Won't someone think of the environment" is often a smokescreen used by those looking to seek policy changes for their own financial gain. Reading this article does not have me envisioning environmental motivations; I get the vibe of a lobbyist-like group pushing an agenda with their own financial incentive in mind.

There is an energy deficit creating workable electronics from raw materials, but that can be covered by a large flow of retail currency through an efficient sales and supply chain.

There is an energy surplus remaining after small profits have been extracted from many repurposed waste materials, especially workable electronics. Not much retail currency available, only wholesale but at least it's surplus.

However the "market" is balanced to the extreme disadvantage of the reuse/resale operators, and it looks like Koebler has been reporting things from that type of source:

Right-to-Repair https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/there-are-now-11-...

Financial incentive is not always a bad thing, especially when there's no real greed, just pursuit of excellent business opportunity instead.

Plus financial incentive is not always driven by the desire for financial gains, sometimes more so the prevention of financial losses. From the poor soul who's desperate for his gear to be fixed cheap by the neighborhood hobbyist who only needs an online factory repair manual, to the corporation that invested heavily in tonnes[0] of top-dollar goods truly having 2x or 3x workable lifetimes, they would both benefit by participating in a smaller purchase-to-resale differential that would naturally exist if the secondary market was allowed to thrive with encouragement.

Cornering the consumers into a pure retail-to-scrap scenario (with a support lifetime limit for backup) does appear to be more of a major institutional policy effort disadvantageous to consumers, compared with the Right-to-Repair operators who appear dedicated to removing as much gear as possible from the retail-to-scrap cycle and preventing future resources from being tied up within it. Consumers would theoretically benefit the stronger the right to repair.

Even when there is not much financial benefit either way, at least the environment might suffer less.

I agree, it must be a big deal.

[0] Metric

Perhaps Apple might not want used goods flowing to India (and China?) any longer as they want to begin production there and better control prices (and profits) in the market?

Each iteration of their phones and laptops tends to last a little longer as even a year or two old iPhone that has been kept in a nice case could be an effectively new product for the next person after a battery upgrade.

> MacBook hard drives can be removed and replaced.

This is not entirely true. The flash drive on the 2015 and 2016 Retina MacBooks are "soldered to the logic board" according to iFixit [1], [2]. What happens to the soldered-in flash drives if a logic board from one of these MacBooks fails and is swapped out by Apple under, say, AppleCare? is it desoldered and removed from the logic board, or does the entire MacBook logic board get shredded in one fell swoop?

[1] https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Retina+Macbook+2015+Teardown...

[2] https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Retina+MacBook+2016+Teardown...

Well a company having maximum respect for the environment would mandate a policy of maximum reuse, maximum parts harvesting, and sustainable resale channels.

On a foundation of well-built long-lasting easily-repairable product.

Only shredding the remainder of parts which could not possibly have their usefulness extended by anyone.

Especially if there was any toxicity or energy waste in the original manufacturing process.

It can be seen that the independent repairers and parts harvesters are probably performing in a more environmentally responsible way than the manufactuer. Especially from an energy balance point of view.

And on a scale that's overwhelming, the repairers need relatively stronger rights toward overcoming any imbalance in their disfavor.

A very strong manufacturer can afford to expend energy removing a vast parts resource from circulation, denying repairers a much larger multiple of available energy savings instead.

Whenever shredding has higher priority than reuse, it could be a sign of greed or other misguided management efforts taking precedence over opportunities provided by true leadership in engineering optimization. Besides having priority over the environment in any or all locations.

Who knows what other entities might also be contracting with eWaste haulers to destroy rather than resuse as many tonnes of working W7 & W8 PC's about now as a modern salvo in their maximum-waste-declaration strategy, or to further an agenda of removing all machines not having a processor with a remote management engine.

From another angle it's not unlike a nation minting and shredding its own currency for its subjects as it sees fit, to control its value relative to other established currencies, with only secondary regard for the environment if that.

Hmm, except it's mostly not their own currency they're shredding.

Which brings us to the relative environmental cost of different underlying currencies after all . . .

When you really follow the money.

From a security standpoint this makes sense. Remember GCHQ destroying the guardian laptops?

There is potentially more data on these devices than is stored on _just_ the hard-drives.

https://theintercept.com/2015/08/26/way-gchq-obliterated-gua...

https://media.ccc.de/v/camp2015-6799-how_to_destroy_a_laptop...

Does anybody follow the "Liam" Apple robots referred to in the article? Interesting tech, I wonder what an open source take-things-apart bot would look like. Download recipes and documents and end up with a pile of parts?

More on Liam: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/instead-of-a-recy...

If Apple replaced my non-working iPhone or laptop I would absolutely want that peice of hardware shredded when it left my hands. And you should too! The reality is that it's probably not cost effective for them to pull out the storage and destroy the data in a reasonable way.

However now that the apfs file system and secure enclave all but guarantee my data will not be recovered I'm okay with it being recycled.

Well this is crappy, Apple. Don't you know that reuse is way better for the environment than recycling? Maybe we should point this out to them the next time they claim to care about the environment. Uh, nope, folks, you just care about the perception you care about the environment.

Kind of off topic, but: I've been trying to shred iphones and macbooks for a while now for my art. (Much like in "will it blend") I intend to work with the shredded metal/dust as a pigment. Does anyone have any pointers how to actually shred these devices?

Seems dangerous..

Maybe you could shred into small chunks first and then use a ball mill with heavy and hard media. Would be very time consuming and expensive and the result would be toxic, of course.

Note to be careful with the grinding media too, as you really don't want sparking in a chamber filled with aluminum powder.

http://willitblend.com has video of shredding pretty much every iphone model.

then shenzen is antipod to apple way? this 11 days ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14100989

All those devices have user data on flash or hard disk that could be recovered. I'm glad they're shredding them.

They don't have to shred the whole assembly...

A counterargument and something to ponder: we may have lost a huge amount of history, if centuries ago people always destroyed their stone tablets/parchments/etc. thoroughly after using them.

I don't think it really matters in this case since flash degrades much faster than stone tablets.

Also, I think stone tablets would be more akin to tax records or census data or great works rather than every day life of someone.

Stone tablets are more rugged than other media, but others have survived; here's an example someone else posted recently:

https://medievalbooks.nl/2015/04/17/texting-in-medieval-time...

I was thinking about this, but I don't really think it's a good argument.

Most Apple devices can already be securely erased, many laptops can easily have hard drives removed.

I think the argument only works for totally non-functional iPhones/tablets where flash recovery might be possible, but it's not possible to run the secure erase procedure.

Maybe they should start making storage removable again.

Because someone is gonna sift through all that data trying to find something useful? Lol, maybe the NSA should buy up all the used electronics...

"Rare earth" metals aren't rare. Just sayin.

Sounds wasteful

How Apple is known as an environmentally conscious company

  while [[ 1 == 1 ]]; do
    1. Make products near impossible to repair.
    2. Do not allow parts to be available for purchase for repair.
    3. Brick product if repaired.
    4. Advertise like hexx that Apple is a environmentally conscious company.
  done

What really bugs me about this is the hypocrisy.

E.g. take Al Gore, self styled environmentalist, and author of books like An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It. He's on the Apple Board of Directors and has been on it for many many years. He's willing to take their money, but he's also willing to look the other way when it comes to actual environmentalism, rather than the appearance thereof.

The truth is, no company wants the risk. All it takes is one of these recyclers to skimp out on basic drive formatting once and you get an article about how you can buy cheap macbooks and harvest them for data.

Look at what happened with printers (HP's bottom line took a hit there), where you could buy a printer that had like 500,000 pages printed out of it for pennies.

You can't basic drive format a SSD. You must shred or melt or explode to be safe.

No, you can just issue a secure wipe command to the drive. If the firmware isn't buggy, your data will be unrecoverable.

Just write over the data. If it really took 7 overwrites to erase data, then manufacturers would be selling 7T drives instead of 1T drives.

You can't do that with SSDs because of wear leveling and weirdnesses with bad blocks.

I think you can issue Secure Erase commands which do work.

You have a good point with the bad blocks. But just writing to all the free space on the disk should cover the wear leveling issue.

I was mainly referring to the old wives' tale that data could be recovered unless it was overwritten 7 times. I've never heard of anyone recovering data that had been overwritten just once.

I do understand, however, that there is no visual indication that the data has been erased, and that can be disconcerting. In that case, a ball peen hammer liberally applied should satisfy anyone.

> You have a good point with the bad blocks. But just writing to all the free space on the disk should cover the wear leveling issue.

I don't think you have a good mental model of how a SSD works. let me try and help.

Say you buy a SSD with 100 GB of space. It is really a 110 GB or 120 GB drive. You can only use 100 GB of it. During use, the drive will often "see" a bad sector, and remap it on the fly to one of the spare sectors it has on the device. When doing this - it does not wipe or do anything fancy to that "Bad" sector. So over time, small chunks of data get left behind in "Bad" sectors. You can format every single byte of visible space, but that will not touch "bad" sectors. Your format would only hit the 100 GB of space, it would totally ignore the 10 or 20 GB of spare or bad capacity.

So if someone gets your freshly wiped SSD, they can dig up all of the bad sectors and see what is there. Maybe nothing, maybe a part of a file that has your production credentials. The police and NSA have tools to do this fairly automatically. I suspect organized crime would as well.

Just writing some 0s to a SSD is NOT a safe way to wipe it.

> old wives' tale that data could be recovered unless it was overwritten 7 times.

https://www.lifewire.com/dod-5220-22-m-2625856

This is the spec where people come up with. The idea is that you write a 0 pass, a 1 pass, and then a binary switch (3-pass). People have taken it to extremes with 5 pass and 7 pass BS. Honestly, doing 0's over the drive once is probably sufficient as long as you get every single byte.

I read about that 7x stuff back in the 80's. As I recall, it was based on the idea that you could look at the disk with an electron microscope or something and it could pick up echos of the previous data.

If this actually worked, data recovery companies would make a mint recovering overwritten files. But I've never heard of anyone advertising such or ever accomplishing it.

> data recovery companies would make a mint recovering overwritten files

Data companies make mint recovering deleted files and hard drives that have been disabled by the motor or control board just failing but recovering a full file from a hard drive with a microscope would be ridiculous.

This happens a lot, especially in politics... People say they're passionate about something, and you want to believe them, but they don't actually give a shit. We could all use more skepticism, and we need to actually hold people/organizations to their claimed intents. So, props to Vice for reporting on it.

How is this environmental hypocrisy? The shredding is being done by recyclers.

MANY of the Apple products that were dumped by customers could've been rescued and reused easily if repair was a reasonable option.

The article claims that Apple forces recyclers to do the shredding.

Read some iFixit teardowns of Apple products. Apple goes out of their way to make their computers very hard to repair. The environmental cost to repair a computer that is only a few years old is insignificant compared to building a new one. But that wouldn't help Apple's sales, would it?

What do you think recyclers do with phones?

grinding them into dust probably helps with chemical extraction of the gold, silver, palladium, etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1UoIU6Ef-o

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-28802646

> [European Commissioner for the Environment Janez Potocnik]

> "The business case is clear," he said, as he launched revised waste and recycling targets for the EU. "There's gold in waste - literally. It takes a ton of ore to get 1g of gold. But you can get the same amount from recycling the materials in 41 mobile phones."

Maybe he operates very "green" on the board but doesn't hold enough power.

Not to mention the private jet trips around the globe, multiple homes, and a personal level of C02 output that rivals a small rural town.

What really bugs me here is the misunderstanding of what "recycle" means.

Like someone else pointed out, the hierarchy is "reduce, reuse, recycle". Recycling is the option for items which are no longer usable in their present state, or for which it is not economically viable to repair the item enough to make it reusable. And recycling consists of... reclaiming the materials in the item to use in making new items. Which involves destroying the item.

Would you be upset to learn that drink containers (such as metal cans and plastic bottles) that go to a "recycling" center don't just get sterilized and refilled/re-labeled with new drinks? That instead they are destroyed to reclaim the metal or plastic in them, so that other metal or plastic items can be made of those materials? Would you condemn that as hypocritically un-environmental?

Advertising and PR wins over reality anytime.

How is this factual?

1) Apple offers repair service on all their products.

2) I can go on ifixit.com and buy parts for almost any Apple product from the last 10 years.

3) ifixit is chock full of instructions on how to install those parts. Apple software does not brick devices that are repaired.

4) True; I guess 1 out of 4 ain't bad?

You seemed to have skipped over the times when consumers were able to repair their products without being ripped off by OEMs.

You seem locked in the times where PCs were borderline hobby kits. Nowadays they are appliances. Apples switch to sealed batteries, use of glue, etc, led to thinner, lighter and tougher devices with longer battery life

Anyone still remember the video of a recycling machine Apple showed off at WWDC a few years back? Turns out it was all PR

I checked, the video[1] does not say that the components are being re-used. It talks about the materials.

At some point there was some articles about how the e-waste ends up in poor countries where human labor is cheap and workers rights non-existent. Manually separating the valuable materials creates then huge health risks for those people. [2]

I don't see the "Liam" as useless PR. I believe it is quite valuable if companies are actually thinking how they can automatically dissemble the devices they have produced.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35VtY-PEPj0 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dd_ZttK3PuM

These devices are sold by the users to Apple for recycling, Apple can't do anything with them besides recycling.

Nothing to see here, conspiracy theorists.

I've never bought an Apple product in my life. This article makes me feel good about that decision.

So I assume you buy Android phones from companies that don't keep their devices updated with the latest OS basically forcing you to buy a new phone if you want the latest OS/security patches.

Apple has traditional supported iOS devices for at least 3-4 years with OS updates.

My old first generation iPad 2010 can still get older versions of current apps from the App Store.

Only when those apps haven't been pulled. Try and buy some of those apps from a fresh account. Not possible. One can literally not install GoodReader on an Ipad1 at this point.

Yes the app creator can pull an app or not allow older versions to be downloaded.

In my case, I came across my old iPad recently, reset it and was able to install Hulu, Netflix, Crackle, Google Drive, Plex, Spotify,and the CW app

Edit:

I was also able to download Apple's productivity apps -Pages, Numbers, and Keynote.

You are lucky.

There is a neat workaround for getting old apps onto an old IPad. 1) you can gift from one ipad to another, 2) you can install the older app if you have bought the newer version but it wouldn't install. I did this for a friend who bought an ipad but couldn't get Goodreader (no longer recommend) to install because they pulled the version that works on IPad1.

I think companies should be required to release the encryption keys or provide a way to install software on devices that are EoL. So many IPads got "recycled" that could have been put to better use.

I think Goodreader could do the world a great service by selling a version that installs on first gen IPads, they make pretty good budget ereaders for pdf content.

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