Apple encourages the destruction of mint MacBooks while pretending to be green

Please don't encourage this type of "activism". A Mac becoming completely useless when the previous owner did not intend to part with it is a feature. It's a brilliant feature. As someone who had a Mac stolen in the past, only to be met with inaction from the authorities when I handed then over the location of my stolen laptop ("it's a large building, what do you want us to do?"), I'm more than glad to see Apple take matters into their own hands.

So a particular business model that relies on bulk buying second hand supplies of "don't ask don't tell" material will no longer work for Apple products, with the upside that in the near future, every laptop thief will stop bothering stealing Macs unless they intend to sell them for scra. Boo fucking hoo? Am I meant to feel sorry for this?

On top of all of it, the nerve of co-opting the "sustainability" and "green" movements so you can keep moving around your maybe-stolen goods as you always did is disgusting. You can recycle it just fine, the lithium is still there. Oh, sorry, what you meant by "recycling" was actually "selling stolen goods"?

The refurbishment market is close to the theft laundering market. The fix is for Apple to make an easier pipeline for used product to be returned to them for refurbishment.

The hype around this is bizarre and, IMO, inauthentic/inorganic.

Nobody in their right mind wants to go back to the bad old days when carrying an Apple product was an open invitation to being mugged; to when you couldn’t let you phone or laptop out of sight because it would be nicked in the blink of an eye; when losing your corporate phone or laptop was a major security disaster.

And besides which, AFAIK, Apple will gladly take back your device, disassemble it into its component parts, and recycle everything it can, as parts for repairs or melting down all the valuable metals.

I don’t think you see Samsung, Lenovo, Dell, or even Microsoft offering the same facility.