Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Assembly line production is highly efficient The highlevel production may be, but rare-earth mining is incredibly dirty (and some of them, if not sourced from fair trade, directly fund warring groups), and IC manufacturing isn't exactly environment friendly too, lots of nasty chemicals used there.
There's quite a bit of work into recycling those, and Apple has already has the means of recovering much of it - pity people don't generally return their used phones to them, though. Your replacement battery is unlikely to be recycled better than when it's done in an automated manner on a fairly large scale. Of course Apple can get away cheap because of that "people don't even try to recycle" thing. Forcing the indus…
I decide on my own what I want, which is to fix the damn thing if it's fixable and not spend 1000$ on a new one. And to fix it is "far better" than to recycle it, or to have it artificially slowed without explanation and deceived into buying a new one.
Apple is not the company I once admired. Time passes, MS is slightly more ok and Apple is bad. Weird. I wouldn't have guessed in the early 2000's.