[AnthonyMouse]

> For the average consumer this is great and encourages sustainable reuse of the core materials throughout the iPhone lifecycle and generally means there is no good reason for iPhones to bloat up landfills or anything.

But they do though.

A lot of this stuff is corporate PR. For example, recycling aluminum is the default -- it costs less than mining it. You don't get credit for that, it's saving you money and you were going to do it anyway. And the reason it's so cheap is that you can source it from things that are basically pure aluminum, like aluminum cans, even though they're then making something out of it that has to go through a complicated process to separate the diverse materials from each other again.

They have a recycling program for their old devices, but to use it you have to buy a new one. And there's a reason for that -- it's not otherwise cost effective to do it. It's a promotion to drive new sales, because the process is complicated and inefficient.

Because they're trying to turn the device back into raw materials after gluing and soldering them all together. Which is why they go into the landfill unless someone is subsidizing it.

Whereas the best way to "recycle" a piece of electronics is to continue using it as a piece of electronics. Allow the memory or storage to be upgraded to extend its usable life. Have modular parts to minimize the materials necessary to replace before it can go back into service after being damaged, and minimize the cost of such repairs to increase the number of repairs that are economical before a new device has to be manufactured.

[Klonoar]

> It's a promotion to drive new sales, because the process is complicated and inefficient.

There is no reason it cannot be both reasons and I find your take overly and needlessly cynical.

[AnthonyMouse]

It isn't both because they do PR about building a robot that can disassemble iPhones, but there are only two of them in the world and even if they were run nonstop they could only recycle 1% of the iPhones Apple manufactures in the same amount of time.

In the meantime most of the iPhones people trade in are sent to third party "recyclers" who don't recover nearly as much of the materials and are contractually required to shred the devices without recovering functional parts for reuse, even though that would reduce the amount of ewaste by several fold -- once for the device already on its way for the shredder, and again for each of the devices that could have been repaired from its operational parts.

It's a cynical take because it's a cynical marketing ploy.

[Klonoar]

> It isn't both because they do PR about building a robot that can disassemble iPhones, but there are only two of them in the world.

This falls under the category of "you need to be linking something that proves it".

[AnthonyMouse]

> Apple is only operating two Daisy models—one in the Netherlands and another at the company’s Material Recovery Lab in Texas—that each process up to 1.2 million iPhones per year. Achieving circularity may seem futile considering how Apple sells 200 times as many iPhones annually...

https://www.surfacemag.com/articles/apple-daisy-ewaste-iphon...