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How Apple is known as an environmentally conscious company while [[ 1 == 1 ]]; do 1. Make products near impossible to repair. 2. Do not allow parts t
by dba7dba 10y ago
How Apple is known as an environmentally conscious company
while [[ 1 == 1 ]]; do
1. Make products near impossible to repair.
2. Do not allow parts to be available for purchase for repair.
3. Brick product if repaired.
4. Advertise like hexx that Apple is a environmentally conscious company.
done
- PhantomGremlin 10y agoWhat really bugs me about this is the hypocrisy. E.g. take Al Gore, self styled environmentalist, and author of books like An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It. He's on the Apple Board of Directors and has been on it for many many years. He's willing to take their money, but he's also willing to look the other way when it comes to actual environmentalism, rather than the appearance thereof.
- WrtCdEvrydy 10y agoThe truth is, no company wants the risk. All it takes is one of these recyclers to skimp out on basic drive formatting once and you get an article about how you can buy cheap macbooks and harvest them for data. Look at what happened with printers (HP's bottom line took a hit there), where you could buy a printer that had like 500,000 pages printed out of it for pennies.
- brianwawok 10y agoYou can't basic drive format a SSD. You must shred or melt or explode to be safe.
- umanwizard 10y agoNo, you can just issue a secure wipe command to the drive. If the firmware isn't buggy, your data will be unrecoverable.
- WalterBright 10y agoJust write over the data. If it really took 7 overwrites to erase data, then manufacturers would be selling 7T drives instead of 1T drives.
- DanBC 10y agoYou can't do that with SSDs because of wear leveling and weirdnesses with bad blocks. I think you can issue Secure Erase commands which do work.
- WalterBright 10y agoYou have a good point with the bad blocks. But just writing to all the free space on the disk should cover the wear leveling issue. I was mainly referring to the old wives' tale that data could be recovered unless it was overwritten 7 times. I've never heard of anyone recovering data that had been overwritten just once. I do understand, however, that there is no visual indication that the data has been erased, and that can be disconcerting. In that case, a ball peen hammer liberally applied should satisfy anyone.
- brianwawok 10y ago> You have a good point with the bad blocks. But just writing to all the free space on the disk should cover the wear leveling issue. I don't think you have a good mental model of how a SSD works. let me try and help. Say you buy a SSD with 100 GB of space. It is really a 110 GB or 120 GB drive. You can only use 100 GB of it. During use, the drive will often "see" a bad sector, and remap it on the fly to one of the spare sectors it has on the device. When doing this - it does not wipe or do anything fancy to that "Bad" sector. So over time, small chunks of data get left behind in "Bad" sectors. You can format every single byte of visible space, but that will not touch "bad" sectors. Your format would only hit the 100 GB of space, it would totally ignore the 10 or 20 GB of spare or bad capacity. So if someone gets your freshly wiped SSD, they can dig up all of the bad sectors and see what is there. Maybe nothing, maybe a part of a file that has your production credentials. The police and NSA have tools to do this fairly automatically. I suspect organized crime would as well. Just writing some 0s to a SSD is NOT a safe way to wipe it.
- gfosco 10y agoThis happens a lot, especially in politics... People say they're passionate about something, and you want to believe them, but they don't actually give a shit. We could all use more skepticism, and we need to actually hold people/organizations to their claimed intents. So, props to Vice for reporting on it.
- y0ssar1an 10y agoHow is this environmental hypocrisy? The shredding is being done by recyclers.
- dba7dba 10y agoMANY of the Apple products that were dumped by customers could've been rescued and reused easily if repair was a reasonable option.
- PhantomGremlin 10y agoThe article claims that Apple forces recyclers to do the shredding. Read some iFixit teardowns of Apple products. Apple goes out of their way to make their computers very hard to repair. The environmental cost to repair a computer that is only a few years old is insignificant compared to building a new one. But that wouldn't help Apple's sales, would it?
- DanBC 10y agoWhat do you think recyclers do with phones? grinding them into dust probably helps with chemical extraction of the gold, silver, palladium, etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1UoIU6Ef-o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1UoIU6Ef-o http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-28802646 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-28802646 > [European Commissioner for the Environment Janez Potocnik] > "The business case is clear," he said, as he launched revised waste and recycling targets for the EU. "There's gold in waste - literally. It takes a ton of ore to get 1g of gold. But you can get the same amount from recycling the materials in 41 mobile phones."
- flycaliguy 10y agoMaybe he operates very "green" on the board but doesn't hold enough power.
- cmdrfred 10y agoNot to mention the private jet trips around the globe, multiple homes, and a personal level of C02 output that rivals a small rural town.
- ubernostrum 10y agoWhat really bugs me here is the misunderstanding of what "recycle" means. Like someone else pointed out, the hierarchy is "reduce, reuse, recycle". Recycling is the option for items which are no longer usable in their present state, or for which it is not economically viable to repair the item enough to make it reusable. And recycling consists of... reclaiming the materials in the item to use in making new items. Which involves destroying the item. Would you be upset to learn that drink containers (such as metal cans and plastic bottles) that go to a "recycling" center don't just get sterilized and refilled/re-labeled with new drinks? That instead they are destroyed to reclaim the metal or plastic in them, so that other metal or plastic items can be made of those materials? Would you condemn that as hypocritically un-environmental?
- Prego 10y agoAnd hippies everywhere are blogging/tweeting/facebooking about Earth Day on their Apple devices.
- maxxxxx 10y agoAdvertising and PR wins over reality anytime.
- angry-hacker 10y agoJust throw a rainbow flag and you're considered socially responsible company.
- snowwrestler 10y agoHow is this factual? 1) Apple offers repair service on all their products. 2) I can go on ifixit.com and buy parts for almost any Apple product from the last 10 years. 3) ifixit is chock full of instructions on how to install those parts. Apple software does not brick devices that are repaired. 4) True; I guess 1 out of 4 ain't bad?
- ap46 10y agoYou seemed to have skipped over the times when consumers were able to repair their products without being ripped off by OEMs.
- valuearb 10y agoYou seem locked in the times where PCs were borderline hobby kits. Nowadays they are appliances. Apples switch to sealed batteries, use of glue, etc, led to thinner, lighter and tougher devices with longer battery life