Notably, to me, they have recovered 4x as much steel as aluminum, suggesting to me that a significant part of their recycling operation is on non-Apple PCs and or quite old Apple equipment since the bulk of their current products (for in some cases 10 years) are composed of aluminum.
Apple recovered 2,204 pounds of gold from broken iPhones last year
61–70 of 93 posts
Re: Apple recovered 2,204 pounds of gold from broken iPhones last year
#62Earlier 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…
I worked at a now deceased photo-sharing startup, and the stats were so bad. Most photos never left the device, meaning people had all of these important life moments in only one place. Lose or break your iPhone? All of baby's first whatevers, gone forever. Pictures of your mom's last weeks? Gone to the ether.
The part where I will disagree with you slightly is this wasn't just a problem of the barely literate, or even technical people overlooking backups. When we did user studies it was essentially everyone that came in - none of them had off-device backups, or knew how to share. The number of people for which "sharing photos" meant holding up the phone with a picture on the screen while the other person took a picture of the phone was depressing. The sharing UI was totally opaque to them. I see this on Instagram today, where people take pictures of the display on a DSLR in order to share the photos.
I apologize for the rant. I acknowledge this is a religious hobby-horse for me. At the aforementioned startup one of the stats that killed me was the average views of a picture once taken was essentially 0 - pictures go to SD cards to die. No better for phones. At the time Facebook was getting three or four Flickrs a week, and the stats were still pretty grim. We have to better serve customers, but I don't know what that looks like. Verizon offers a cloud-like service for contacts and photos (I have this on my Samsung U365 flip phone), but it's a pain to set up and unclear when it will cost you extra.
Bonus story: smart guy I worked with bought a really nice new camera, they default picture size was too big (too many pixels, too large files) to attach to emails, so he did the obvious thing: set the default resolution of the camera to something low enough to fit. WHY OH WHY BUY A 5 MEGAPIXEL CAMERA THEN SET THE DEFAULT RESOLUTION TO VGA? Because resizing everything was a PITA. Another unhappy customer experience. We (the industry) need to enable our customers, not frustrate them.
Re: Apple recovered 2,204 pounds of gold from broken iPhones last year
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are few fruits that vary so much in size and shape as does the banana. Has anyone actually suggested using that as a standard for anything?
Some online communities use "banana for scale". Other communities talk about radiation risk in terms of radiotion you get from a banana. It's about as useful as double-decker buses or football fields.
The banana used for such measurements is your typical grocery store banana.
Re: Apple recovered 2,204 pounds of gold from broken iPhones last year
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Traditional measurement is not quite so simple. (All pounds avoirdupois.) Short ton: 2000 lb. Imperial (UK) long ton: 2,240 lb. Longweight ton: 2400 lb. I'm in the boat business where a register ton is 100 cubic feet. There are more, especially once you get to other types of pounds.
So what is a tonne in British pounds?
Re: Apple recovered 2,204 pounds of gold from broken iPhones last year
#65Earlier 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.
It's only a problem in the US. The Commonwealth ton is only 1.6% larger than the tonne, so the distinction is usually insignificant. Most of the world has no knowledge of either the short or long ton.
Likewise, confusion between "mills" (millimetres) and "mils" (thousandths of an inch) are an exclusively American problem.
The American adherence to customary units is a constant annoyance for electronics engineers - an 0603 resistor could measure 0.6mm x 0.3mm or ~1.5mm x ~0.76mm
Re: Apple recovered 2,204 pounds of gold from broken iPhones last year
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are few fruits that vary so much in size and shape as does the banana. Has anyone actually suggested using that as a standard for anything?
Some online communities use "banana for scale". Other communities talk about radiation risk in terms of radiotion you get from a banana. It's about as useful as double-decker buses or football fields.
I hear well made bananas are also useful for terrorizing atheists. [1] Something about how they don't squirt in your face.
Re: Apple recovered 2,204 pounds of gold from broken iPhones last year
#67Step 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…
That's a problem of labour costs rather than design. It sucks for your homeless customers, but I can't understand your outrage.
By your definition, these phones would only be "repairable" if they were vastly more expensive to buy. Does it really help low-income customers if the cheapest phones available are several hundred dollars?
These phones are primarily intended for the developing and middle-income world, where lower labour costs make them perfectly economical to repair.
Re: Apple recovered 2,204 pounds of gold from broken iPhones last year
#68Earlier 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…
so, make the phones more expensive so it makes financial sense to repair them? rather than making the repair less expensive?
You're responding to someone who runs a repair shop...
Seriously though it reads as if that shop has fair repair charges, and it's simply easier (thus cheaper) to repair an iPhone than some no-name android. This conforms to my experience with other sorts of equipment. You'll always pay more when the case has panels attached by screws, rather than two plastic shells that can only be mated once.
Re: Apple recovered 2,204 pounds of gold from broken iPhones last year
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's only a problem in the US. The Commonwealth ton is only 1.6% larger than the tonne, so the distinction is usually insignificant. Most of the world has no knowledge of either the short or long ton. Likewise, confusion between "mills" (millimetres) and "mils" (thousandths of an inch) are an exclusively American problem. The American adherence to customary units is a constant annoyance for electronics engineers - an…
I think the SMD resistors are well standardized.
A resistor measuring ~0.6mm x 0.3mm is an 0201. (2 1/100ths of an inch by 1 1/100th of an inch.) The standard doesn't make sense in SI units, but it's the standard.
Re: Apple recovered 2,204 pounds of gold from broken iPhones last year
#70> Copper is super-cheap, but it moves electrons too slowly for some of the most important computing tasks. Just garbage reporting.
Their tech journalists, the lowest of the low. I wouldn't trust these people to be able to push a mop.