Apple says electronics recycler “illegally” reselling over 100k iPhones, iPads | Hacker News Reader

Apple says electronics recycler “illegally” reselling over 100k iPhones, iPads

9to5mac.com

78 pointsfortran7795 comments

Apple is probably legally in the right here, since the recycler violated their contract.

But Apple seems very much in the wrong here on an ethical level. If the devices have resale value, then they should be resold, not destroyed! Reduce and Reuse are both higher priorities than Recycle.

Yeah, that's what I read too. "Apple recycles perfectly usable iphones".

Having gone through this exact situation with corporate attorneys before, I can tell you there is more than one contract in force here. Believe it or not, if you tell customers you will recycle old products for them, you'd better not sell them instead.

When you told them you would recycle the old products, you actually made a contract with them. Don't call it recycling if there is any chance at all that you may instead resell. We learned that the hard way.

> Believe it or not, if you tell customers you will recycle old products for them, you'd better not sell them instead.

Legally, I'm sure you're right. But on a practical level, what do you think recycling is?

If you fish something out of the trash and reuse it, congratulations, you have recycled it in the most efficient way possible.

It's like these recyclers are "too good" at their jobs. I thought market forces were supposed to make sure of that.

The really disgusting thing is Apple coopting "recycling" for "destroying unused product to maintain brand value."

If you have an old Apple product and you want to be good to the environment, do not take it to an official Apple recycling dropoff!

I say to you: “mind throwing this battery in the recycling on your way out, I care about its harmful materials not seeping into the environment” and you say “yes” but then decide “this battery could still power my nephew’s toy car for a bit”.

But then your nephew throws it in the regular trash eventually.

You’ve broken your promise to me. If you’re also the world’s most valuable public company you’ve made that promise to your shareholders and used it to increase your brand perception. It seems reasonable that you’d like to make sure you keep it, no?

Isn't that still better than your nephew buying a brand new battery and then throwing it in the trash? Even if he only got a week's worth of use out of the old battery.

Reusing things doesn't change the overall recycling rate. It just reduces the demand for new things (which is why Apple dislikes it). Knowing how to Reduce, Reuse, Recycle (in that order!) is much better than some sort of cargo cult destruction of working devices.

The argument isn't that its better than buying a new battery, the argument is that it isn't conveyed in the contract.

EDIT: Also, knowing this happens without Apple adjusting their own terms may be grounds for fraud, so somebody has to change their language anyways.

Not quite. You now end up with an extra battery in the trash. Though you were able to get more life out of one item, you reduce the likelihood that it’ll be recycled again. So the metal parts like antennas, aluminum, that could have been reused for future devices, are now sitting in the trash after the device dies. There is a slight chance the device could be sent to recycling again after it completely dies. Let’s say Apple had assumed a 15% recycling rate, and 3 tons of aluminum in return, you now have a much lower return rate in materials than anticipated because the devices were essentially “stolen” and resold. Seems like fraud to me.

> But Apple seems very much in the wrong here on an ethical level. If the devices have resale value, then they should be resold, not destroyed! Reduce and Reuse are both higher priorities than Recycle.

I can't imagine Apple just not selling stuff that's perfectly capable of being sold as a refurbished item. My assumption is that if it's in the hands of a recycler then it's probably not meeting some kind of quality assurance standard for battery life, reliability, etc.

Apple is only selling refurbs of the iPhone X. Sure, 3 years is a long time in tech, but there are undoubtedly vast quantities of older models that are still in working condition.

Not allowing the resale of used devices should be illegal.

Not only because of the environmental impact but also because this is a way for Apple to control the market.

Reselling devices is good. Taking devices that were sent to you to be recycled and then reselling them is bad.

That's, like, your opinion, man.

In my opinion (and I see many sharing the sentiment here) if apple are gonna send perfectly usable devices for recycling instead of reselling them, then that is bad.

Hence I would argue that their right to have a contract upheld weighs lower here than literally everyone else's right on the planet to not waste resources.

We have many things you simply are not allowed into contracts. High interest loans, organ sales, you name it. Forcing someone to destroy a usable device, polluting the environment and using up resources as a result just might become one of those. I'd be in favor actually. I don't value apple's stock more than the planet. But then I also don't own any of it, so there's that...

Reselling is basically recycling. Did the contract specify they had to be munched or stripped?

In many markets it is illegal. Heck, in Europe, Valve got in trouble for not allowing the resale of used software on Steam ( https://www.polygon.com/2019/9/19/20874384/french-court-stea... )

That would kneecap first party recycling and trade-in discounts. Apple's incentive to provide those services is to reduce the size of the secondary market.

What makes that a problem? Both of those programs increase Apple's control and power in the market.

It's a problem since a large part of Apple's value proposition is positioning it's devices as luxury, high-end devices. Having obsolete and used devices generally available on the market at a large scale dilutes this brand. It's a pretty awful perspective considering the harm that this kind of consumerism does to the environment.

I have also seen this sort of behavior fist hand when a team I worked with insisted I destroy the t-shirts for an event instead of donating them to a charity since it would negatively impact the brand :/

> Having obsolete and used devices generally available on the market at a large scale dilutes this brand.

I don't think it applies in this case.

Despite its marketing, Apple very much is a mass market company and you can't really both be mass market and luxury. Also, there are already plenty of second hand iPhones on the market. So much that I seriously doubt it is supply constrained.

If I had to guess, it's probably more about avoiding competition in the SE segment than protecting the brand.

They don't want to either cannibalise their sales or make their brand suffer from "prole drift" [0]

[0]: https://archive.is/Kyyf1

The question was probably not why this is a problem for apple, but why anyone else but apple should consider it a problem.

Hey, this Times article is by James Harkin, writer for QI and co-host of 'No Such Thing as a Fish'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Harkin_(podcaster)

Edit: or not, seems there is another author sharing same name http://www.jamesharkin.co.uk/about/

From an environmental point of view, recycling should be the last resort.

Sending 100k usable devices to recycling is an absolute waste of resources. It's immoral and in contradiction with Apple's environmental commitment.

Well, very technically speaking, they did recycle those iPhones.

Why is Apples so obsessed with controlling the entirety of their devices' life cycle, anyway?

Sales. Money. Power.

Are apple still on the hook for warranty for those iProducts?

Of course not.

Apple’s concern would not be whether they are technically liable, but whether or not the cost of determining if they are liable and being scammed is more than simply destroying the items thereby reducing the probability of being scammed in the first place.

That's not their real concern anyhow. They just want to monopolize the supply by crippling the aftermarket as much as possible.

That's been their MO for over a decade. It's also why they fight the right to repair court cases and third party repair services tooth and nail ( https://www.ifixit.com/Right-to-Repair/Intro )

Lets say you buy one of these recycled phones that Apple has already deemed unfixable. Maybe it mostly works, but the screen occasionally blacks out or there's a bunch of dead pixels. Maybe the battery dies almost immediately.

It's Apple's reputation that gets tarnished by this.

Then I guess we need to double-down on allowing this, in order to normalize second-hand/recycled hardware across the society. Then Apple's reputation will be invulnerable, as any random complaint about iPhones on the Internet will be counterable by "surely you bought a third-party refurb from your local recycler".

And whatever warranty may be legally obliged to exits, it falls on that local recycler (or maybe they explicitly have to sell it without warranty, but then the redistributors have to either also explicitly sell without warranty or take the warranty obligations on themselves).

I mean, it's not like it's a completely new development, the secondary markets have been existing for centuries, and generally either you buy second-hand from an individual in which case caveat emptor, or from a firm/some sort of legal entity, in which case it's their problem to provide some basic level of customer protection, but definitely not on the original producer.

I’m wondering if you could just engrave into these devices that they were “reclaimed” or “recycled” so that it’s clear that Apple no longer is on the hook but people can still use if they choose to do so.

They will just have to further disable the phones before sending them for recycling. Doesn’t seem like a big problem.

Basically nobody is selling recycled iPhones as if they were new. Apple has an impressive amount of control over their retail channels and buyers aren't idiots.

The problem for Apple isn't that people would think their refurb iPhones were new, it's that Apple simply doesn't want poor people to have them because it might hurt their sale of 700$ computer wheels if they don't seem like a luxury brand. As a bonus, if they destroy all the broken devices, repair shops have no access to replacement parts and so there's nobody to challenge them when they tell you to buy a new 1000$ phone because yours has an "irreparable" bent flex cable pin.

You don't need to do anything fancy. Just say it is not new. People do that all the time with practically every physical item.

Why is Apple's reputation more important than the profits of a recycling company?

Contracts aside, banning resale over something like this isn't capitalism. You either own something or you don't.

Edit: I misunderstood the article and thought that the devices were sold. Indeed a service contract for recycling should be enforced, unless health & safety reasons preclude. Apple is in the right here, I think.

What is the purpose of discussing a made up scenario? Obviously there are contract terms that Geep violated, and it even admitted it by blaming it on its employees. I don't know what you mean by capitalism, but two businesses voluntarily entering into a contract, and then litigating when one of them breaks the terms of the contract is pretty normal stuff for any society, capitalist or not.

Edit: I misunderstood the article and thought that the devices were sold. Indeed a service contract for recycling should be enforced, unless health & safety reasons preclude.

Why?

lol, imagine you paid a company to recycle old hard drives or documents and they resold them instead.

You're right. I misunderstood the article and edited my comments.

No! That is not even close to being comparable!

These devices are almost always soft-wiped before being shipped out and failing that, always 100% encrypted. Many of these were either scavenged for parts, all but one of which are entirely non-sensitive, or re-sold whole, which necessarily entails another software wipe, making recovery of ciphertext near impossible (but also, still encrypted even if you did).

"lol, imagine being so blinded by greed that you would destroy thousands of working devices, force barely-paid workers in horrible conditions to make almost identical devices out of dirty materials mined by children with guns to their heads, which you would then proceed to sell to those same consumers whose devices you just threw away for more than a month's salary."

> Indeed a service contract for recycling should be enforced, unless health & safety reasons preclude. Apple is in the right here, I think.

With current law: Very likely.

But should it be that way? Should it be allowed to order the destruction of perfectly good devices people really want?

Apple's reason for wanting this is "we can extract more money that way", which sounds like an inefficiency of an unfree market to me, actually.

I realize the irony of arguing against my prior IMO incorrect position, so it goes. Given it's a freely entered into contract I don't consider it our place to allow or disallow it. Apple's reason is a legitimate one, since it owns those devices, that's the cornerstone of property rights.

The argument about social good may sound good but unnecessary coercion is incompatible with a free society. IMO the better way to fix this is to create better incentives for re-use, such as tax credits. Coercion should always be a last resort.

Or they are devices that were traded in (https://www.apple.com/shop/trade-in) for a new iPhone and are still working fine, but Apple wants destroyed so that they don't erode their market?

This is really the critical question here: Are these phones actually unfixable? If they are, reusing them will only cause more problems (not to mention burning more fossil fuels as they are shipped to consumers and then shipped back within a few months for recycling a second time). If they aren't, then recycling is the wrong destination for these units.

Well if they were unfixable, the company surely wouldn't have been able to re-sell them, would it?

A refurbishing company whose phones die within a few months wouldn't survive for long, and that's generally not how hardware defects work anyways. Things you can "patch up" only temporarily are very uncommon, so these devices would probably get an extra year of life at the very least, offsetting any possible shipping "cost".

And even those that can't be repaired in the Archimede's ship sense, would go to shops like Rossman Repair Group that would use them for parts in fixing other damaged devices. Even if they only use one dead phone to fix one damaged one, that is still a net positive than if the damaged one would've had to be fully replaced.

From the article it seems they're far more concerned with not getting their cut of the resale profits.

> It's Apple's reputation that gets tarnished by this.

We should care more about the sustainability of environment, consumer benefit and consumer rights and not the reputation of rich megacorporations.

It's a fake argument anyway. People perfectly understand that when they buy a used car, it could have had damage from the previous owner or other wear and tear. Is this common-sense somehow magically forgotten when Apple is concerned?

> Is this common-sense somehow magically forgotten when Apple is concerned?

I think we all know the answer to this.

> People perfectly understand that when they buy a used car, it could have had damage from the previous owner or other wear and tear.

Sure, some people do. Other people will have a problem with whatever they happen to be using, find the first logo or name on it, and go complain at that entity through any communications channel they can find, totally ignoring them saying, "Yes, I understand your used Ford Taurus won't start, but you've called the number of the company that makes the aftermarket stereo system you installed."

Yeah and maybe some people blamed Obama when their car wouldn't start, or people blame the restaurant when they spill hot coffee over themselves. There's a lot of things "some people do". With all due respect to those "some people", there is a limit to how much we coddle "some people" at the expense of generating more e-waste. Apple (and everyone else) should be held accountable for the damage they're causing to the environment by preventing repair of their products.

Do you expect Microsoft to ban Firefox and Chrome because "some people" might call up their helpline when Firefox and Chrome have bugs? At some point, it gets ridiculous.

Like this guy https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/11/14/i-have-toyota-corola/ ?

Car manufacturers and models also have a reputation regarding how well they hold up over time - Which is brilliant. It should be much more in the collective consciousness (Apple is actually quite good in this regard).

What a silly reason to ruin the environment! Apple (and to be fair most electronics companies) are already designing irreparable land-fill-ready devices. We have companies who are willing to do the hard work of repairing/refurbishing them to prolong their life-span, only to have Apple block them.

Apple already sells refurbished phones. Presumably the phones they send to the recycling company they've deemed unrepairable to their standards.

I don't think this company is necessarily selling working iPhones.

Yeah, repair companies often buy these broken devices so they can salvage parts. Its really sad that they're forced to do this as Apple forces third-party parts manufacturers to only sell parts to them. Its ironic, since Apple doesn't do board/circuit repair anyway, they just replace the entire mainboard, generating even more e-waste.

> It's Apple's reputation that gets tarnished by this.

I guess we can't buy used or salvaged cars either now. Can't have manufacturers' reputations tarnished. What a load of crock.

> It's Apple's reputation that gets tarnished by this.

Hail corporate.

What about all the water that got tainted when the semiconductors were made, all the people who were hurt when the minerals were mined, all the energy that was expended... Apple have sold the product once and made their money, they do not get to decide when that object's useful life is up. If anything, they should be forced to open it up more, to make it even more useful for even longer. If you look at what goes into making electronics, the impact this industry has, these items should be so precious. They should be made to last and be useful for decades.

Based on that logic you would have to ban all transfers of goods except retail of new goods and "authorized" resale via partners under the term the vendor allows.

For example you could start by banning the sale of all used cars.

Also if you can buy a cheap recycled iPhone that works, that's a new iPhone you didn't buy from Apple. Same reason video game industry hates used games market.

Are they perhaps booking tax benefits for having paid to have the devices recycled?

Yes, reselling is recycling. Apple redefines recycling to Will it blend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYshVbcEmUc

100K devices back in the supply stream means Apple lost on at least $30Mil of pure profit.

Good for apple.

The way this scam often works - you send your device in, they say there is a flaw and the device is not eligible for trade-in credit because it can't be re-used. Then they offer to "recycle" it for you. Then, instead of recycling they sell it. This is the consumer side of the scam.

It can also be run against manufacturer like apple. Apple can offer trade in credit to consumers, then send it to these guys who evaluate the device. If can be resold apple gets the $100 or whatever average per device from the recycler (who can then make a moderate profit selling for $150 or whatever). If it can't be resold the recycler promises to recycle it and doesn't have to pay out anything.

There seems too often to be a push on HN to support scams of almost every type. The outrage when apple worked to alert users when folks put the cheapo third party batteries in before reselling an iphone to make battery life look good for a few weeks (HN comments = total outrage when apple alerted users) is illustrative.

Do these "geep" executives sound like the role models you want to do business with? For many folks, myself included, the answer is heck no.

Reading hacker news, and the total hate towards apple for asking others to just do basic / fair things is really interesting. Following contracts and agreements is for idiots and chumps apparently. Be a scary world if the Zuckerbergs and other growth hacking developers end up in charge!

Consumer trust in apple is going to continue to go up - you just realize how slimy the rest of the tech world is - scammer after scammer after cheater.

Do you have any evidence that the contracts are structured as you describe?

Brightstar is probably one of the major US players you could look at. Take a look at their relationship with T-Mobile - they handle the trade-in piece (and reverse logistics) which is revenue generating for T-Mobile. With experience the trade-in provider can offer a fixed rate per sku / consumer reported quality once it has a sense of statistical quality of items and screening procedures for store trade-ins.

This actually looks more like a situation where apple had already assessed as not reselable under their policies - so these were perhaps all for recycling only?

I really hope this makes the news internationally because it’s shameful on Apple’s part. The best way to recycle is to reuse.

Reuse is better than recycling, so what's the problem?

Their contract may have not allowed it .. which shows how shitty the contract was.

Apple doesn't care about preventing environmental damage. Fixing/Refubing and selling is WAY better for the planet than trying to extract all the components, melt them down, and build new product.

This disposable phone world and infinite growth economy has got to stop.

Easier to do that if software requirements don't keep growing. If people were satisfied with lower resolution photos and videos, lower-quality graphics in mobile games, etc, etc, they'd find it much harder to release newer models and have such great sales numbers.

This is a complete non-sequitur and a terrible apologist argument for a bad practice. Apple is literally stopping their phones from being recycled to a willing customer base. If there was no market for those phones then this wouldn't be an issue. Also, software is, and always has been, written to satisfy the capabilities of the hardware. If the market decides to stop upgrading, software will continue to work.

Do you think these devices were sold disclosing that Apple themselves found them to be not worthy of repair? Don't think so. Of course there is a market for cheaper Apple products. There is never a market for Apple products that catch fire in your pocket.

IT's not clear to me what the difference is. What exactly are they recycling, and how. I can personally see how refurb/debugging an old iPad might be harder then just replacing all the cheaper parts (caps, PCBs, cheaper ICs) and retesting more expensive components; especially at scale.

Also, even if they are melting them down and literally recasting them: ALU has pretty good recasting credentials.

Apple does fix and refurbish their phones. Presumably the phones sent to this recycler were deemed too broken to refurbish (at least to Apple's standards.)

So 100% of iPhones older than the X are too broken to refurbish? That does not check out.

Please use the original title rather than editorialize: Apple catches electronics recycler illegally reselling over 100,000 iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches

The original is highly editorialized. It's too partisan.

I'd say that title rewrite was within the site guidelines because the original was arguably baity and it doesn't seem particularly editorialized.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

That title is too long. I did what I could to shorten it and keep the spirit of the title.

At face value, it seems like Apple is choosing not to reuse the devices. Apple determined that the devices were beyond repair and needed to be recycled for a reason (Potentially safety-related reasons). Geep decided to reuse them anyway, disregarding any potential safety reasons that Apple found not to be repairable. As much as I'd like to say that Apple is in the wrong here, I trust Apple's quality control guidelines over some device recycling company executives trying to make some extra cash.

Safety? You mean like the latest Apple update that has many laptops running at 100% CPU because of Apples's poor software testing?

How exactly does a bug in a background process, which then executes within the same thermal performance limits as any other demanding task, present a safety issue? Product quality? Sure. Safety? How?

Except that exact same argument applies to Apple. Making it harder to reuse perfectly serviceable existing hardware simply puts an invisible hand on the balancing scale toward "buy the new shiny thing"

I think we are overestimating how much scale tipping consumers need in order to want to buy the shinny new thing. Also, we don't know the full story on either side, so our arguments are both valid.

Its the other way around. Apple determined it was detrimental to their bottom line to repair and resell devices older than Iphone X. Devices with cracked screens, requiring battery/ charging port/ case/ button replacement, of fully working traded in https://www.apple.com/shop/trade-in ones. What do you think happens to perfectly working iphone 8 plus worth ~$300 after its been traded in? Its not being resold https://www.apple.com/shop/refurbished/iphone , it goes into a blender https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYshVbcEmUc

Why are we assuming that these are usable devices? Apple recycled them for a reason. They are obviously cosmetically fine and so people bought them. Who knows what is going on with those devices and what issues they will create for the user.

Apple recycles motherboards in need of a Fuse replacement.

One of the reasons Apple does this is to block repair companies from buying broken Apple products to stock up on parts. They choke the repair supply chain by forcing parts manufacturers to only sell to them.

> Apple also notes that the number of stolen and resold devices must logically be greater than 103,845 since iPads and Apple Watches are only Wi-Fi compatible and cannot be noticed on carrier networks.

How is that a logical necessity? It's noting other than extrapolation.

> it was obligated to have recycled

>when it was supposed to take them apart and recycle the components

afaik Apple "Recycle" agreements stipulate grinding stuff down to dust. No taking apart, no recycling components, pure destruction.

I wonder what that contract said. "These devices are to be recycled in a way that creates the maximum amount of CO2"

“These devices may not be resold or refurbished.” Maybe?

Nice.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com