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Comment by rimliu | Hacker News Reader

Apple is not the best example. First, their products are useable and updated for a long, long time. Second, they are very recyclable.

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How can they be recycled when all the parts are glued or fused together? For example the screen and digitizer are practically a single piece.

Apple have developed specialised processes to recycle their devices. You give them to Apple, and they disassemble them and reuse the materials.

Apple devices are getting harder and harder to repair with every new generation. Replacing a keyboard on one of the 'butterfly switch' models entails replacing the entire upper half of the machine as the keyboard is riveted to the casing, compare this to the ease with which a keyboard can be replaced in most other laptops. This is made more egregious by the fact that those butterfly switch keyboards are far more prone to breakage than traditional scissor switch models. Similar problems arise with soldered-on memory, glued-in batteries and to a certain extent also the increased use of 'authenticity checks' on those spare parts which still can be replace.

I tend to use mainly older hardware of known-repairable types, Thinkpads and HP business models. I've upgraded/replaced/repaired many of these systems using parts from just about anywhere ranging from whatever happened to be lying in the spare parts stack to vague eBay imports to 'genuine' spares. CCF tubes, inverters, CPUs, memory, drives, screens, keyboards, fans, coils, batteries, you name it. This has made it possible to extend the working life of said hardware far beyond the normal 'economical' life span - e.g. the machine I'm typing this message on is a T42p from 2004. This would not be possible with current Apple hardware which would instead be 'recycled'.

I could not care less about how hard is to repair them as long as they do not need the repair. The only repair I had to do in 13 years of owning Apple products wast to replace the battery on my 2015 MB Pro. Now it is like a new.

Sure, but it was just an example to illustrate my point. They hanven't been the good at all in recycling their products until pretty recently.

They still try and keep people from actually repairing their devices which are perfectly fine in many cases. So I believe it's still a valid point even if there could be better examples.

And honestly, you write

> updated for a long, long time

Are they really tho? A few years is not a long, long time in my opinion and even if you don't buy a new one for a couple of years and it's still updated they usually make it unbearable slow so that you cannot live with it anymore and purchase a new one. It is easy to update, but nearly impossible to go back to an older version if the new version turns out to be very slow.

My father still uses a dumphone and a windows phone. They both work surprisingly well for him, especially the windows phone. I am actually pretty amazed on the longevity of the Nokia Lumia.

Making a phone last 2-4 years is not a long time. I believe many people could easily have the same phones for 10+ years if the phone makers were interested of making that happen. They aren't though and that is a bit of an issue.

Just compare a phone to most other products and you will soon notice people update their smart phone a lot more often than most other things. Sure it's an important device but not that many people would actually need the feature upgrade every version have.

Make a phone that lasts 20 years or more and I will start to believe that you are making good, long lasting products.

The issue is almost entirely software security. There's no way I could recommend someone use a Windows Phone today, and if they did, I'd strongly recommend they avoid doing things like internet banking and even logging into their email.

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