He was talking about putting a "durability" tag on clothing and other items which point out how long they will last. For instance, for clothes, how many wash cycles can this shirt take? How long before the materials start to breakdown? This would be on all clothing and textile items and then you can let the consumer decide if they want the less expensive shirt that lasts 10 washing cycles, or the more expensive one that lasts 50 or 100 cycles.
He also talked about the paradox of the secondary smartphone market. Apple's products are a great example. The iPhone takes a bit of work to to even change the battery, so now the life of the phone is almost exclusively tied to the battery and how long it lasts. Most people just toss it when the battery goes bad and upgrade to the newest version.
For the people who can actually change the battery, it's created an entire secondhand market for their products. One that is incredibly useful to consumers and the techs who are able to keep the phone going once the battery dies. For Apple, it's almost an affront to their practice of voiding warranties if you open the phone up and actively discouraging the whole notion you should be able to repair your own phone instead of having to upgrade it once the battery is dead.
It was a really cool interview and Adam brought up a lot of other interesting things about our "disposable" culture.
The fixed battery increase the overall durability and reduces materials over a design where there was a compartment that could be opened.
Apple does battery replacements inexpensively relative to the cost of the device, and they supply batteries to 3rd party repair shops.
They have also explicitly declared their intent to increase useful life of their devices as much as possible.
The mantra that their devices are intended to be disposable itself becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because it leads to the exact behavior of consumers prematurely replacing devices rather than simply having the batteries replaced.
> Apple does battery replacements in expensively relative to the cost of the device, and they supply batteries to 3rd party repair shops.
How long does such a replacement take, and why would someone need to leave their phone in the hands of a third party in the first place?
Back when most phones had replaceable batteries, it was just a matter of ordering a battery online and plopping it in. The extra materials needed for a battery door or lid are negligible (and significantly less toxic to manufacture than PCBs and electronics) compared to throwing away the phone outright.
Extra materials are not negligible - at the scale of the iPhone, even 1% of additional material is vast.
In any case, is not only the extra materials that are the problem, it is that phones with a battery compartment are much more fragile, harder to waterproof, etc, and so they fail sooner anyway regardless of whether the battery is changed.
Battery compartments are a red herring. It is already easy and economical to replace an iPhone battery.
People discarding otherwise serviceable phones because they have been misinformed about the ease of battery replacement is the real problem.
When you spend 100% of your time in a technical field, and deal with people who are technically savvy, you think everybody is capable of "easily" replacing a battery, or knowing that it can be done relatively easy.
There are millions of people who are completely unaware that getting your battery replaced is an easy thing for someone who knows how to do it. What do most non-technical people do when their iphone battery starts dying a lot faster? They don't google, "iphone battery repair" or look for a local repair shop to do this, they take it right back to the Apple store. What do you think the Apple store employee is going to tell them? "Hey this battery is dead, you should probably just upgrade the phone."
I don’t have to speculate about what the Apple employee is going to do.
I have been into the Apple store.
What the employee actually does is to run a diagnostic and offer a battery replacement service.
The reason people don’t know this is partially due to having been misinformed by people like you.