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Comment by internet2000 | Hacker News Reader

internet2000

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.

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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'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...

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.

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