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?
As efficient and economically scaled as Apple's supply chain operations are, I'm guessing significantly less than $40 million.
Apple recovered 2,204 pounds of gold from broken iPhones last year
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Re: Apple recovered 2,204 pounds of gold from broken iPhones last year
#32Would 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
Hobbyists too.
Re: Apple recovered 2,204 pounds of gold from broken iPhones last year
#33> Copper is super-cheap, but it moves electrons too slowly for some of the most important computing tasks.
Just garbage reporting.
Re: Apple recovered 2,204 pounds of gold from broken iPhones last year
#34I remember back when i did film photography, some people used to recover the silver from the solutions used to print onto paper (you know, from a negative).
Re: Apple recovered 2,204 pounds of gold from broken iPhones last year
#35Step 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…
so, make the phones more expensive so it makes financial sense to repair them? rather than making the repair less expensive?
Re: Apple recovered 2,204 pounds of gold from broken iPhones last year
#36Step 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…
Sounds like, "Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness"
> The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
> Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
> But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
> This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
https://thebillfold.com/to-terry-pratchett-who-gave-us-sam-v...
Re: Apple recovered 2,204 pounds of gold from broken iPhones last year
#37Or 1000 kilograms for the rest of the world.
in the US it's called a metric ton.
Re: Apple recovered 2,204 pounds of gold from broken iPhones last year
#38That's a lot of broken iPhones.
Re: Apple recovered 2,204 pounds of gold from broken iPhones last year
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Because no one has any concept of that unit of measure. They use relatable units of measure, that's where the whole banana for scale thing came from because almost everyone has a grasp on the dimensions of a banana. People know cars weight tons and so a ton is a vastly more relatable unit of measure.
Re: Apple recovered 2,204 pounds of gold from broken iPhones last year
#40> Copper is super-cheap, but it moves electrons too slowly for some of the most important computing tasks. Just garbage reporting.
For those who haven't had a physics class, that's garbage because silver is somewhat more conductive than copper, which is slightly more conductive than gold.
The main benefit of gold is that it's more stable than copper, so it's a good material for connector contact surfaces, but the bulk of the contact should be something else like copper or steel, depending on the relative importance of electrical or mechanical properties.