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Apple Forces Recyclers To Shred All iPhones and MacBooks (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Apple released its Environmental Responsibility Report Wednesday, an annual grandstanding effort that the company uses to position itself as a progressive, environmentally friendly company. Behind the scenes, though, the company undermines attempts to prolong the lifespan of its products. Apple's new moonshot plan is to make iPhones and computers entirely out of recycled materials by putting pressure on the recycling industry to innovate. But documents obtained by Motherboard using Freedom of Information requests show that Apple's current practices prevent recyclers from doing the most environmentally friendly thing they could do: Salvage phones and computers from the scrap heap. Apple rejects current industry best practices by forcing the recyclers it works with to shred iPhones and MacBooks so they cannot be repaired or reused -- instead, they are turned into tiny shards of metal and glass. "Materials are manually and mechanically disassembled and shredded into commodity-sized fractions of metals, plastics, and glass," John Yeider, Apple's recycling program manager, wrote under a heading called "Takeback Program Report" in a 2013 report to Michigan Department of Environmental Quality. "All hard drives are shredded in confetti-sized pieces. The pieces are then sorted into commodities grade materials. After sorting, the materials are sold and used for production stock in new products. No reuse. No parts harvesting. No resale."
I really like when my personal data gets recycled and reused, by someone else!!!
That is debatable. Having used Linux for around 13 years, and OS X for about 4, I personally find Linux easier to use. The number of times I've struggled to make something work in OS X, even something as simple as turn off mouse scroll wheel acceleration and make the mouse movement less jumpy.
OS X is probably easy to use if you're happy with the default configuration and all your applications can be installed via drag and drop, but the moment you start trying to do something else, or want a different music player to iTunes, then that user friendliness just seems to dwindle away. I still don't know how to make my mouse feel right, or stop many applications from looking horrible on a retina display. I find aptitude much easier than the mix of Mac Ports and manual installation / updating.
Frankly, if I didn't need access to Microsoft products for collaboration purposes and hadn't been given a MBP by my work, then I'd happily use Linux full time (btw no, I'm not an application developer or full time programmer, just a university researcher).
Posting anon as I'm a certified Apple repair technician. But I hate them. So much.
The design choices they continue to make with each generation are getting progressively more anti-consumer for no good reason. Glued-in batteries. Keyboards that are part of the chassis and require full disassembly of the entire laptop plus $150 for the part. When keyboards and batteries are some of the most commonly-replaced items in the laptop. Soldered in memory, which is unnecessary... no Apple laptop is thinner than a SODIMM.
And what the fuck is with their proprietary SSD modules? Everyone else is using standard M.2 NVMe. But Apple? Nope... they have their own version which not only has a LARGER connector, but is proprietary and incompatible. Doesn't perform any better, but they can charge to 5-10 times more for it.
Make no mistake about it: these are 100% without question decisions made to ensure early obsolescence and prevent users from making decisions that are financially in the user's best interest. Instead, Apple gets more money out of their mindless cult zealots who would rather be raped for the sake of owning a fashion statement versus a quality tool.