That's about $40 million to save you a Google search.
But how much did it cost them to recover that $40 million is gold?
Apple recovered 2,204 pounds of gold from broken iPhones last year
21–30 of 93 posts
Re: Apple recovered 2,204 pounds of gold from broken iPhones last year
#22Step 1: design iPhones to be not repairable. Step 2: determine it costs too much to repair "broken" iPhones (see step 1). Step 3: Burn the whole lot down for precious metals. What an enormous win for the environment and recycling! There are plenty of companies that will already do step 3, but pretty much nobody other than Apple has the opportunity to do something about the vastly more important step 2.
iPhones are VERY repairable. Source: I run a repair shop and iPhones are most of our business. You want to talk about phones that are not repairable? Let's talk about ANY HTC phone. They're total crap to repair. The worst, though, are the cheap MetroPCS and Cricket Android phones--the ones you've probably never heard of but that we get calls about every day, like HTC Desires, Samsung Galaxy Core Primes, and a whole l…
I agree, even as a major iOS detractor, that recent iPhones are amazingly repairable, while there's an opposite trend for many (most?) high-end Android phones these days.
But is it really "disgusting" that a phone is cheaper to replace than repair because it is extremely cheap to begin with? Following that argument, they would solve the problem by raising the price of the new phone.
Re: Apple recovered 2,204 pounds of gold from broken iPhones last year
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
iPhones are VERY repairable. Source: I run a repair shop and iPhones are most of our business. You want to talk about phones that are not repairable? Let's talk about ANY HTC phone. They're total crap to repair. The worst, though, are the cheap MetroPCS and Cricket Android phones--the ones you've probably never heard of but that we get calls about every day, like HTC Desires, Samsung Galaxy Core Primes, and a whole l…
I agree, even as a major iOS detractor, that recent iPhones are amazingly repairable, while there's an opposite trend for many (most?) high-end Android phones these days. But is it really "disgusting" that a phone is cheaper to replace than repair because it is extremely cheap to begin with? Following that argument, they would solve the problem by raising the price of the new phone.
You have to put yourself in the shoes of the poor or homeless person who walks through the door of our repair shop. They don't have enough money to buy a computer. So their entire life is on that phone: photos, contacts, documents, email. They've applied to jobs through that phone. Everything is centered around that item.
Then it breaks. And since the software is usually so crappy on it, there's no consistent way for them to have backed it up. Sometimes the contacts are on the SIM card--sometimes not. Sometimes they've backed up to the Google cloud; sometimes they didn't understand what that was, so they just hit "skip" when it asked them to set up that account.
So when that phone breaks, they've lost EVERYTHING. Now I know there are some folks on HN, because I've been around here long enough, who would say "They should just learn how to back it up!" And to that I would say, who is teaching them? Can you? These people are sometimes barely literate, often only with a high school education (or less.) We can't expect them to understand what a "Google cloud" is. And heck, even as technical people, many of us don't back up stuff properly, especially personal items.
So when that phone breaks, they've lost a lot. Personal photos of their kids. Important contacts. The calendar that reminded them where that job interview next week was.
Many of these same folks would be far better served buying a used iPhone 4S, which is $55 to fix when a screen breaks. But the difference between $50 for a Cricket HTC Desire and a $100 iPhone 4 could be a week or two--a week or two during which they cannot survive without their phone. That's why I say it's a disgusting market.
Re: Apple recovered 2,204 pounds of gold from broken iPhones last year
#24Re: Apple recovered 2,204 pounds of gold from broken iPhones last year
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree, even as a major iOS detractor, that recent iPhones are amazingly repairable, while there's an opposite trend for many (most?) high-end Android phones these days. But is it really "disgusting" that a phone is cheaper to replace than repair because it is extremely cheap to begin with? Following that argument, they would solve the problem by raising the price of the new phone.
You have to put yourself in the shoes of the poor or homeless person who walks through the door of our repair shop. They don't have enough money to buy a computer. So their entire life is on that phone: photos, contacts, documents, email. They've applied to jobs through that phone. Everything is centered around that item. Then it breaks. And since the software is usually so crappy on it, there's no consistent way for…
Great explanation.
Re: Apple recovered 2,204 pounds of gold from broken iPhones last year
#26[deleted]
Re: Apple recovered 2,204 pounds of gold from broken iPhones last year
#272204 / 90,000,000 (total e-waste) = 0.002% Also, the gold was not just from iPhones. Macs and iPads are included in that number. What a weird non-story. It would be interesting to know the cost of the recycling program to know if the materials recovered paid for the program.
61 out 90 million pounds of e-waste were recyclable materials. I think that's a more interesting number.
Re: Apple recovered 2,204 pounds of gold from broken iPhones last year
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is your recovery plan?
Plenty of tutorials on YouTube using aqua regia. That's not the issue. The issue is having enough circuit boards on hand to make it worth it.
Here's an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhuwO8AjM7k
Re: Apple recovered 2,204 pounds of gold from broken iPhones last year
#29Or 1000 kilograms for the rest of the world.
Or simply, one tonne. In fact I'd guess that the engineers, thinking in SI units, told the PR people that 'we recovered a tonne', rounding to that figure for them because it sounds neat. Then the PR people converted to pounds for older readers, which comes out as the very precise sounding 2,204. So the figure is probably rounded but then presented as being much more precise than it is.
I don't understand this whole "tonne" thing. Why overload a word that already has two other conflicting meanings (the imperial short ton and the imperial long ton) when you already have a word that is more canonical and completely unambiguous in "Megagram"? Plus it just sounds cool.
Re: Apple recovered 2,204 pounds of gold from broken iPhones last year
#30Would be equally interesting to know how much it cost them to recover that much gold from that many devices.
it is a profitable venture there are companies that recover precious metals from computer equipment