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Apple recovered 2,204 pounds of gold from broken iPhones last year

money.cnn.com

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Re: Apple recovered 2,204 pounds of gold from broken iPhones last year

#81

Post by tamana »

ericabiz wrote: post #23
abrowne wrote: post #22

Earlier 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…

How did people in that situation survive before the iPhone4 came out?

Re: Apple recovered 2,204 pounds of gold from broken iPhones last year

#82

Post by tamana »

RyJones wrote: post #62
ericabiz wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ev…

A good camera has a good lens for capturing light and color. Megapixels rarely matter. A bad lens makes bad pixels all the way up to VGA pixel size.

Re: Apple recovered 2,204 pounds of gold from broken iPhones last year

#83

Post by khedoros »

imaginenore wrote: post #75
CydeWeys wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it is unambiguous. No one uses binary prefix notation for mass.

No one uses "mega" for grams either.

Why not? It shows the relationship between itself and other metric units better than "tonne" does. It would start sounding natural if people started using it.

Re: Apple recovered 2,204 pounds of gold from broken iPhones last year

#84

Post by jasonlingx »

jdietrich wrote: post #67
ericabiz wrote: post #15

Earlier 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…

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…

> It sucks for your homeless customers, but I can't understand your outrage.

He's outraged because it sucks for his homeless customers.

Re: Apple recovered 2,204 pounds of gold from broken iPhones last year

#85

Post by astrange »

revelation wrote: post #14
taspeotis wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Step 3: Burn the whole lot down for precious metals. It seems they have a deft touch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYshVbcEmUc

So they separate out perfectly fine, working components.. and then burn them down? I'm pretty confident that recovering gold economically involves smelting and other rather destructive processes.

How do you know the devices handed in for recycling haven't had keyloggers installed in all the components?

Re: Apple recovered 2,204 pounds of gold from broken iPhones last year

#87

Post by imaginenore »

khedoros wrote: post #83
imaginenore wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one uses "mega" for grams either.

Why not? It shows the relationship between itself and other metric units better than "tonne" does. It would start sounding natural if people started using it.

Because "mega" is ambiguous. It can mean different things.

Re: Apple recovered 2,204 pounds of gold from broken iPhones last year

#88

Post by takno »

jessaustin wrote: post #68
TwoJob wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've only ever broken one screen on a phone, and that is not so broken that it is unusable. I appreciate other people break screens more often, but never breaking the screens is a fairly common situation. Given that old iPhones continue to trade at a multiple of a cheap android, you could probably pay for at least 2 screen repairs with the difference, and you would be paying for those well down the line. The economics for somebody who is not exceptionally clumsy probably still supports buying the cheap android.

That probably doesn't help the repair shop guy too much, but making the poor support his dying business model doesn't sound fantastic on the ethical scale either

Re: Apple recovered 2,204 pounds of gold from broken iPhones last year

#89

Post by MatthewWilkes »

jdietrich wrote: post #65
CydeWeys wrote: post #29

Earlier 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…

Mils really confused me when I was learning PCB design. In the UK a thousandth of an inch is not a common unit anymore, but it isn't unknown. The problem is that we call it a "thou".

Re: Apple recovered 2,204 pounds of gold from broken iPhones last year

#90

Post by [deleted] »

CydeWeys wrote: post #29
chrisseaton wrote: post #4

Earlier 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.

[deleted]
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