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Apple to Recycle your iPod for Free
rdarden writes "After you get your dough from the recent iPod settlement, why not recycle your old iPod at an Apple retail store (US only). Starting today, that worthless hunk of environmental unfriendliness can be turned into a 10% discount on a new iPod (purchased at the same time)."
It's funny how rewording something can make shit sound good.
"We will recycle your iPod for free!" doesn't sound like half as much a ripoff as "I'll buy your iPod for $30"
You could sell it on eBay for well over $100. Which sounds better to you?
No hardware vendor makes money from secondary sales ('used' sales) of their hardware. This is also a good tactic from the DRM angle for Apple. It's a benefit to them to 'lock' each individual iPod to an individual.
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>that worthless hunk of environmental unfriendliness
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Actually between the screen and battery (I personally have a dead iPod with a perfect battery) there are still many a useable part on those old pods. Hold buttons, dock connectors, all sorts of parts. Even if gutted outright for internal Apple refurbishing the 10% will surely be recouped if not moreso.
And the rest will be responsible recycled.
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
All of the hazardous material is handled domestically! Excellent news. So the engineering is outsourced (or partially), the manufacturing is done else where, but the really dangerous work- the stuff that impacts the environment the most- is done stateside by US workers. Globalism rocks.
There are about a billion ways you can replace the battery for about $50, so I'm not sure what the big deal is here. Even Apple will do it for $99.
Since a new iPod with similar functionality is $250-$299 (depending on how important extra storage space is to you), I'd say battery replacement is normally going to be worthwhile.
Unless you have an iPod broken for some other reason, I think the recycling is a bum deal.
D
The cracks about "why not just sell it on ebay" aside, this is a very good program.
Manufacturing computers and consumer electronics is a messy process, and the rapid speed of upgrades ensures that many tons of computer equipment are entering landfills regularly. Many of the components in computers are quite toxic. On a smaller scale, I'm sure the same is true of the iPod.
Apple's recycling program is probably worded as broadly as it is so as to avoid confusion, but the important part is that they don't exclude iPods that are utterly broken and irreperably from the program. That means that assuming you can get it to them, they'll put it in the recycling program no matter how badly bashed up it is.
Incidentally, Apple, IBM, and probably a few other manufacturers have recycling programs in place for computers. Many of them require you to pay the company to take your old, beat up jonx.
Most of them were actually sold to people who like to have an easy way to listen to music, but good job making up your own stereotype.
Apple making it easier to recycle ipods is not going to save the rainforests, and noone expects it to, but that doesn't make it a bad idea, or a worthless one.
Your cynicism does not make you look smarter than the any ipod owner, sorry.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
Ipod is an ugly,
subjective
overhyped,
like everything else
expensive,
also subjective
unreliable,
simply not true
disposable
name me one consumer electronic that's not
piece of junk
only when it's broken and you can't fix it and then apple will let you use it for a discount.
I've got boxes and boxes of broken equipment from the last 20 years and every single piece in there was the newest, best, thing on the market when it came out. I also have equipment that is that old that still works... but what's the point in that? It's old.
Please post in 5 years and let us all know how your Create Muvo FM TX 512MB is doing. (PS. it sure is a lot easier to say 'iPod')
"Art is not eternal" - Pablo Picasso
Well, obviously your replaceable batteries are wonderful, and I'm sure you dispose of them safely and properly every single time. No environmental damage from your MP3 player, no-siree-bob.
That's why there are third parties that also replace the battery, for far less. As long as Apple, which has high overhead, is not trying to suppress these companies or the knowledge that they exist, I see nothing wrong with this.
It's just like Apple RAM. You can buy RAM for your Apple computer at purchase for exorbitant prices, in part because they're greedy, and in part because their labor costs to install stuff is very high. So when I bought my G5, I bought it with the standard RAM and upgraded it with third-party RAM. All is well and I saved a bundle.
Apple fans are Apple fans because Steve Jobs personally sweats over the location of every pixel on our screens, making an honest effort to produce as beautiful and wonderful an environment as can be made. Sometimes he fails; sometimes he succeeds, but you know he's there determined and always doing his best to improve things.(*)
Nobody else has this obsessive determination. Not Bill Gates, not the developers of Gnome or KDE. Steve does. Apple users realize that because of this, things are always going to be a bit more expensive than they are in the Windows or Linux world, but there's going to be a chance of true designer greatness, something no other operating system even tries to measure up to.
So if you want to know why we're happy bowing to the Great Steve, that's it. He works for us, really hard, to try and make wonderful things. Everyone else wants to make purely money. Sure, Steve wants to make money, and he does. But he REALLY want to make wonderful things.
And he does.
If you want wonderful things and you understand this difference, well, Apple has no competition.
D
(*) Yes, I know he doesn't do the actual work. I picture him as having enormous horrible meetings with everyone having anything to do with MacOS X, and every position of stuff on the screen being discussed to the pixel. Those meetings are no fun for the participants, but amazing stuff comes out of them.
Planned obsolesence? Is this instead of using the magic batteries everyone else has that last forever?
Sure, it would be nicer to get inside the case without having to use some sort of industrial clamping device, but I don't think Apple did that as a timed self-destruct mechanism.
Then, why do you suppose that Apple designed the iPod that way?