The iPhone is hard to recycle, difficult to repair, and rendered needlessly obsolete by software updates — but Apple wants us to believe it's "zero waste."
A new ad published to YouTube earlier this week implores customers to switch to an iPhone on the basis of Apple's supposed environmental bonafides. "iPhone is assembled in facilities that send Zero Waste to landfills," the copy under the ad reads. "Life’s easier when you switch to iPhone. Switch today."
Frankly, this is nuts.
If "zero waste" is true about the iPhone's assembly, it certainly isn't about everything that happens after. In fact, it's easy for old iPhones to become waste themselves, because Apple makes it difficult to repair or recover the valuable components that make them work. Critical materials like cobalt, recently in headlines following a report that Apple will attempt to buy it directly from miners, are in limited supply but very difficult to recover from the gadgets they're used in. There won't always be "new" resources for use in our electronics, which should make companies ensure old devices last as long as possible.
But they don't.
The iPhone is built with proprietary screws and requires special tools to open. If you get that far, you'll find the device's innards remarkably sealed-in and complex to dismantle, which accounts for the iPhone's thin, appealing design. The upshot is that iPhones are hard for the average person to repair, and Apple has lobbied against proposed legislation that would make tools and instructions more accessible. That legislation would ensure a longer lifespan for consumer electronics, either by supporting independent repair shops or helping individuals get the information they need to fix the gadgets they paid for and own.
Worse, Apple has a vested interest in accelerating the upgrade cycle. It's the most profitable company on the planet, and it remains so because it gets people to buy so many new devices every single year. Apple has sold over 1 billion iPhones in total, with more than 216 million sold last year alone. There's no need for Apple to release a new slate of iPhones every single year — materially, the iPhone 8 is very similar to the iPhone 7, which was itself an incremental update to the iPhone 6S — but conditioning consumers to expect a shiny new thing, with shiny new branding, every single Fall has proven lucrative.
And that's just the start. Apple has been known to tweak old iPhones in ways that could arguably spur updates. It admitted late last year to secretly slowing down old iPhones in response to aging batteries, which it's being sued over, and it was also caught disabling iPhone 6 and 6 Plus devices that had been repaired by third parties. Major iOS updates land every fall, and they tend to remove a generation of iPhones from compatibility. For example, iOS 10 was compatible with the iPhone 5 and 5C, but iOS 11 is not. When your software stops working, you get new hardware.
In sum: Combine a greedy business model with dwindling resources and you get needless waste.
Of course, Apple — which didn't immediately respond to a request for comment — isn't alone in any of this. Many electronics companies lobby against "right to repair" bills, many gadgets are sealed shut with unique screws, and many, in fact, do quite a bit less to even appear as environmentally responsible as Apple does.
But perhaps no other has the gumption, the sheer deluded conviction, to put forth the insane notion that a constant churn of smartphones is anything but bad news for our planet when there is so much evidence to the contrary.
Buy an iPhone if you want, but don't buy Apple's "zero waste" claim.
Topics iPhone
