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Comment by ksk | Hacker News Reader

Promoting reuse and repair is environmentalism. Preventing repair (as Apple does) generates more e-waste. There really is no way around that fact.

>What matters environmentally is aggregate device lifetime, so you get the most use out of the materials. Apple devices use a minimum of materials and have industry leading usable lifetimes. They are also designed to be highly recyclable.

Reuse and repair is FAR superior to recycle - which actually wastes a lot of energy, in addition to generating e-waste for the parts which are not recycled.

>Greenpeace rated Apple the number 1 most environmentally friendly of the big technology companies.

What good does it do? They are still harming the environment.

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> Preventing repair (as Apple does) generates more e-waste. There really is no way around that fact.

There are plenty of ways around that fact.

Preventing repair while changing nothing else generates more e-waste. But that's not what Apple does.

If you prevent repair in order to also do any or all of the following things at the same time enough, the result is less e-waste than if you didn't prevent repair:

- Use less environmentally harmful materials (e.g. on-board sockets, larger PCBs etc)

- Make the device last longer before it needs repair (reliability, longevity)

- Make the device easier to recycle

> Reuse and repair is FAR superior to recycle

It's a good goal, but it's only superior for sure if everything else is able to be kept the same to make it possible.

Some things really are better for the environment melted down and ground down and then rebuilt from scratch. I'm guessing big old servers running 24x7 are in this category: Recycling the materials into new computers takes a lot of energy, but just running the old server takes a huge amount of energy over its life compared with the newer, faster, more efficient ones you could make from the same materials. I would be surprised if not recycling was less harmful than recycling.

> What good does it do? They are still harming the environment.

When saying Apple should change they way they manufacture to be more like other manufacturers for environmental benefit, Apple being rated number 1 tells you that the advice is probably incorrect, as following it would probably cause more environmental harm not less.

>- Make the device last longer before it needs repair (reliability, longevity)

If Apple makes devices that last so long, then how come Apple's own extended warranty program generates billions of dollars of revenue? Note that this doesn't include third party repair shops. To me, this indicates a large industry dedicated to repairing Apple products - hardly a niche industry. To me, this indicates that a large amount of Apple devices need repair, something that Apple is hostile to.

Also while AppleCare is easy and convenient for the customer, Apple's "geniuses" do not do board-repair, they simply replace and throw away broken logic boards (which sometimes all they might need is a simple 10 cent capacitor). If that wasn't as bad, they actively prevent other businesses from performing component level repair by blocking access to spare parts.

> I'm guessing big old servers running 24x7 are in this category: Recycling the materials into new computers takes a lot of energy, but just running the old server takes a huge amount of energy over its life compared with the newer, faster, more efficient ones you could make from the same materials. I would be surprised if not recycling was less harmful than recycling.

If that was the case, then of course, we should recycle. Maybe we should have a case-by-case approach depending on specific products? I'm totally willing to go wherever the evidence leads us. As of now pretty much every single environmental organization promotes reuse over recycling for electronics.

>When saying Apple should change they way they manufacture to be more like other manufacturers for environmental benefit, Apple being rated number 1 tells you that the advice is probably incorrect,

I merely accepted the "number one" in good faith at face value. Digging further with a cursory Google search, things seem a lot more nuanced. That being said, I have no idea what "number one" even means without context.

https://www.fastcompany.com/40561811/greenpeace-to-apple-for...

> If Apple makes devices that last so long,

I don't want to back the idea that Apple does make reliable or long-lived devices, although I'm very happy with my 2013 MBP still. I honestly don't know how reliable they are in practice, although they do seem to keep market value for longer than similar non-Apple devices, and they have supported them with software for a long time (my 2013 is still getting updates).

And I would love to be able to add more RAM to my 2013 MBP, which has soldered-in RAM; and I would love if it were easier to replace the battery, and if the SSD were a standard fast kind that was cheap to get replacements for, and if I could have replaced the screen due to the stuck pixel it has due to a screen coating flaw. So I'm not uncritical of the limitations that come with the device.

I'm only disputing your assertion that preventing repair and reuse of parts inevitably generates more e-waste. It's more nuanced than that.

Of course wherever and in whatever ways we can find to repair, reuse and recycle we should.

But there will always be some situations, especially with high-end technology, where repair and reuse needs more extra materials, components, embodied energy and complexity (and subtle consequences like extra weight adding to shipping costs) resulting in a net loss for the environment.

An extreme example but one that's so small we don't think of it is silicon chips. There is no benefit at all in trying to make "reusable" parts of silicon chips. The whole slab is printed in one complex, dense process. As things like dense 3D printing and processes similar to silicon manufacture but for larger object components come online, we're going to find the same factors apply to those larger objects: It's cheaper (environmentally) to grind down the old object and re-print a new one, than to print a more complex but "repairable" version of the object in the first place.

> - Make the device last longer before it needs repair (reliability, longevity)

2016 MBP owners will appreciated the joke !

Very good point!

I don't want to back the idea that Apple does make long-lived laptops, only that it's hypothetically possible they do sometimes :-)

My 2013 MBP is still going strong thankfully, I'm very happy with it still after all these years.

My last 2013 MBP is still alive only because I was able to source third party battery / power connector...

Though, somehow, if I trust some argument made here, it would be better for the environment to buy a whole new laptop rather than fix the existing one... Though, I'm not doing it for the environment, I'm just cheap as f*ck.

> if I trust some argument made here, it would be better for the environment to buy a whole new laptop rather than fix the existing one

No, I don't think that argument is being made by anyone.

The argument being made is that to make the laptop more able to have replaceable components could potentially require more environmental costs up front in making that laptop.

I doubt that argument works for the power connector. I suspect that's more to do with making sure Magsafe is really solid, but it might for the battery due to the pouch design instead of extra battery casing, I'm not sure.

There's no question that if you can repair it afterwards you probably should.

By the way, literally all my other laptops either died due to the power connector failing, or I repaired the failing power connector. Sometimes I had to replace the motherboard to sort out the power connector properly, which seems like poor design.

The Apple has been the only one that hasn't failed in that way, which from my anecdote of about 5 laptops says Apple's approach has worked best from that point of view so far. Of course Apple power supply cables keep fraying and needing to be replaced, so it balances out :-)

For a manufacturer on the whole it’s a negligible issue. It’s simply a fact that Apple devices have longer average lifetimes and lower overall environmental impact than any of the other manufacturers. Hence the Greenpeace rating. If you actually care about the environment, as you claim, the choice is clear.

What you are doing is picking a single marginal factor that can make a difference in rare cases, but is next to irrelevant in practice, and raising that above the total environmental impact of the whole range of devices. That’s just absurd.

> It’s simply a fact that Apple devices have longer average lifetimes

I've used the same desktop for the 8 to 6 years, upgrading with STANDARDIZED components over the years, and my laptop from that era still works. Heck, I've got a 18 years old thinpad still working fine.

In the mean time, two MBP died on me. Try again...

Do you care about the overall ecological footprint of Apple, as Greenpeace does, or only a few specific devices in particular? How do you evaluate likely future device lifetimes and ecological footprint, cherry picked statistics or manufacturer track record?

Should I take your evaluation in thus, or trust a detailed whole enterprise evaluation by Greenpeace?

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