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Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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