It's Apple's reputation that gets tarnished by this.
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.
We should care more about the sustainability of environment, consumer benefit and consumer rights and not the reputation of rich megacorporations.
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."
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.
I think we all know the answer to this.
I guess we can't buy used or salvaged cars either now. Can't have manufacturers' reputations tarnished. What a load of crock.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
For example you could start by banning the sale of all used cars.
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.
I don't think this company is necessarily selling working iPhones.