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> Apple is only "green" in their presentations - in reality they care more about inifite sales only. needs citation. I say this as someone who worked several

> Apple is only "green" in their presentations - in reality they care more about inifite sales only. needs citation. I say this as someone who worked several years in engineering at Apple, and they were extremely environmentally conscientious years before it was a thing.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
matrix2003 2y ago
I send all my old stuff for recycling now and get a gift card in return. They just did this for my ancient iPad that won’t even run the latest iPadOS. I go on a site, pop in the serial number, and they ship me a box for free with a return label. I basically got $45 for an incredibly slow brick, so I’d say that’s pretty good incentive for their recycling program. Sure, you could install Linux and upcycle it, but how many people are actually going to do that? I think the recycling program is actually great for the 95%+ of people and how they use their devices.
- zh3 2y ago
  Not in the UK; my iPad was unreliable from the off, eventually it was crashing 4 minutes after starting it. Trying to trade it in just got a message along the lines of "It can still have a good second life, go find a responsible recycler and give it to them. Have a Nice Day!". Unlikely to ever buy an Apple product again.
  - matrix2003 2y ago
    Are other companies much better in this regard?
    - zh3 2y ago
      It was disappointing to get unreliable hardware from a supposedly premium vendor, but it happens. It was the attitude and service that turned me off Apple though, not the hardware (which really should be more reliable than cheaper alternatives).
- hcarvalhoalves 2y ago
  Can you share the instructions on how to do that?
  - dialup_sounds 2y ago
    He's literally just talking about Apple's trade-in program. https://www.apple.com/recycling/nationalservices/ https://www.apple.com/recycling/nationalservices/
    - matrix2003 2y ago
      Yep! This is exactly it.
tjoff 2y ago
The iMac are the perfect example though. The horror of putting a DVI/HDMI port on that thing seemed so horrendous that they'd rather let the whole thing go to waste. Reading OP it seems like this has been corrected? But generation of generation of devices didn't have any sensible reason to exist. Apple is also the king of integrated batteries. First with phones, then with laptops. I'm still baffled they got away with this. Such mindless waste at an incredible scale. Being extremely environmentally conscientious while designing the packaging isn't going to offset that.
- jrmg 2y ago
  This would require additional hardware in every iMac sold. Many people (I suspect the vast majority) would not reuse the iMacs as displays. Would the total amount of extra hardware inside discarded iMacs (those not used as displays) be less than the amount of hardware saved by reuse of the others?
  - tjoff 2y ago
    Definitely. Would it affect apples bottom line if they couldn't prevent people from reusing their displays? You bet.
  - troupo 2y ago
    > This would require additional hardware in every iMac sold. Hardware that costs a few cents at Apple's volumes and adds about 1mm of thickness and 2g of weight. Also, it's standard hardware
  - alpaca128 2y ago
    > Many people [...] would not reuse the iMacs as displays. They could resell them as displays, given the resale value of Apple devices that might not be unpopular. If Apple actually cared they could easily add the hardware necessary. Would it cost them a few bucks more? Sure, but that's what choosing environment over maximum profit means. Or they could at least make it easy to modify so tinkerers can quickly turn it into a display without having to destroy the case or something.
FirmwareBurner 2y ago
>I say this as someone who worked several years in engineering at Apple, and they were extremely environmentally conscientious years before it was a thing. Then please tell us why they can't put a HDMI/DP input on the iMac to be usable as an external monitor when the internal computer dies or just to be used as a secondary monitor? Or why the SSD NAND on Macbooks needs to be soldered when a guy on youtube managed to hack an NVME connector on the motherboard to make the storage replaceable and expandable? What are the reasons other than driving more sales of new devices when old ones break? Because they're clearly not technical limitations and without any substantiated info from your side, your comment just reads more like astroturfing ("Apple is so conscious, trust me bro I worked there").
- zeusk 2y ago
  Because as a customer you should probably buy a studio display and Mac mini if that's your use case.
  - FirmwareBurner 2y ago
    "My use case" of ...*squints*... not throwing amazing and still functional monitors in the trash because the computer part in them is obsolete/dead and keep reusing them instead? How rude of me to reject Apple's marketing NPC programming and use common sense instead. How about Apple just puts the 2 cent connector & PHY, and let the users who paid for the device decide how they want to use the product. Gaslighting people with the "you're holding/using it wrong" argument today is just .. I can't even express anymore without breaking HN rules.
    - zeusk 2y ago
      and yet you continue to moan about your NPC problem when the right product for you already exists?
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
      >Gaslighting people with the "you're holding/using it wrong" argument today is just .. I can't even express anymore without breaking HN rules. Yet people who complain about this "gaslighting" from Apple continue to buy Apple products.
conradev 2y ago
It's not that they actively do bad things, it's that they only dedicate real resources in the direction of self-interest. Tim Cook likes to point to their solar investments and accessibility as examples of "doing good" when in reality the former is a good long term financial bet and the latter is generally under-resourced (or "cheap" to them). They'd use M.2 SSDs in their Macs instead of soldering flash chips to the board to allow for upgradeability, but that would seriously hurt the average profit margin on their devices and (maybe) take more time to engineer. The areas where their self-interest and the environment overlap are truly awesome, like shipping iPhones without chargers (increased margins) and in smaller paper boxes (more efficient shipping), but I don't wear rose-colored glasses about it. They'll also never let the iPad run macOS, because if people could own one device instead of two, that would be bad for their profits. They'll keep them cleanly differentiated for as long as they can. (I also worked in engineering at Apple!)
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
  You can tell they're full of shit because they can't stop tooting the green horn. It's self evident. If they made their devices repairable, easily resellable, etc. then they wouldn't have to greenwash.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    They don't strictly need to greenwash even despite the difficulties with repairing their devices. They talk about green stuff because that's what they want to be, for whatever reason.
    - mikae1 2y ago
      > They talk about green stuff because that's what they want to be, for whatever reason. How else would the conscious consumer justify another marginal hardware update?
      - ben_w 2y ago
        > How else would the conscious consumer justify another marginal hardware update? I don't even know how they do it with all of that. None of the changes between successive versions of the iPhone — ever — have felt like good value for money to me. I get new ones when the old ones break. Then again, I am a weird outlier in economic things, and I've known that since I was a teen. I'd ask if people really are so much more interested in signalling green than being green, but of course I know they do — an old flame campaigned Green in the US, despite also having a big thing about supporting the striking coal miners in the UK (that happened before she was born).
waynecochran 2y ago
It's simple. I have a old iMac w a 5K screen. I would like to just but a now Mac Mini and keep using my iMac as a monitor. Instead my 5K iMac will end up in a landfill. Which is less green.
- nextos 2y ago
  New Mac Minis are coming later on this week, apparently, and they will also have M4 CPUs.
- 7speter 2y ago
  You could put Linux on it and use it as a sort of jukebox, or any multitude of other things. You could also send it to me if you aren't interested in doing any of that :)
  - mlyle 2y ago
    I use Linux on mine. It's a bummer that the magic to send over 2 eDP tiled at 5k resolution was never open-sourced, so you can only send 4k and it ends up slightly blurry.
  - waynecochran 2y ago
    I'd love to put Linux on it, but one of the main reasons I use Linux is for CUDA programming and you can't even put an nVidia card in a Mac these days.
kev009 2y ago
The citation is common sense.. if your business is consumerism, you are by definition the opposite of "green". Putting some idiots on stage every year to carefully gesticulate to soft music about how "green" creating immense amounts of industrial waste are and thinking it is real is getting high on your own supply.
- 7speter 2y ago
  It's green as long as you give them your previous Apple product and buy a new one to replace it.
  - kev009 2y ago
    That's not how entropy works.
- Daz1 2y ago
  Define "consumerism"
  - kev009 2y ago
    There is very little change from one iPhone to the next but very much marketing which underscores the true intentions. The business model is built on a revolving demand cycle that is unrelated to long term thinking, maintainability, efficiency, nor sustainability. One may argue well that Apple is better than the other players in the field but it doesn't undercut the overall impact of producing incredibly complex and rapidly obsoleting assemblies. It's not just soldering some chips to a board and snapping it together, each individual component potentially has global impact as the raw materials and finished pieces move into their final form. The magnitude of what is going on is not immediately intuitive unless you are an insider or read a well researched book like "The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone" The fundamental problem, which is out of sight out of mind from the consumer, is how much energy is required to produce and move assemblies around. See also the automotive industry, where the "green" thing to do is drive and maintain older vehicles for a long time. And to be honest, this doesn't bother me that much, but if I'm not on the take as an engineer I have no particular qualms punching through the bullshit smokescreens as a customer of a company that takes my money. The attention and empathy fatigue of the bullshit does take away from things that do matter such as national versus international manufacturing.
tsunamifury 2y ago
Classic apple worker, missing the forest from the trees. You were bamboozled into making your products greener while forcing customers to buy more and more of them. Come on are you really that unaware?
talldayo 2y ago
If you need a citation to understand, then nothing will get through to you. Apple glued in their batteries before "it was a thing" and implemented parts pairing DRM "before it was a thing" too. Whatever era you worked at Apple during, the company is changed now and has been changed for over a decade. Their modern rhetoric proves they detest the Reduce, reuse, recycle hierarchy that defines how "green" is and has been defined. You can prove that Apple is anti-green through basic examination of their modern business model: - They deliberately limit the functionality of devices unsupported by their first-party services (eg. App Store and Safari) which prevents reduction of new hardware required. Third-parties are prevented from offering serious and lasting alternatives. - They've systematically prevented repair of both their laptop and phone hardware, obviating the "reuse" part of the cycle. In their current scheme, independent repair shops are deliberately and unnecessarily cut off from the parts they need to repair Apple hardware at-cost. - Their stance towards recycling is asinine and insidious. Since store owners can't recycle partially-broken hardware as donor boards and users can't extend the use of their devices once iOS stops supporting them, Apple graciously offers to take your valuable hardware for free and destroy it for parts or materials for their own benefit. Users aren't expected to want any better and instead are supposed to thank Apple for pocketing their broken hardware to pay for Carbon Credits and Mother Nature spotlights. Apple's "serious" dedication to the environment is a joke, and the cracks have been showing for a while. They prioritize obstinate and unnecessary proprietary features instead of differentiating themselves through natural competition on their merits. If it wasn't for regulatory concern Apple would continue abusing the environment and people like you would keep defending Apple regardless. This is bad. I expect better.
rty32 2y ago
Citation: MacBook Pro with 8GB memory, starting at $1,599, on sale right now.
tomcam 2y ago
With respect, then, why do you think iPhone or iPad batteries can’t be replaced by the average user after a decade and a half?
- Schiendelman 2y ago
  Waterproofing. It really is that simple. The math would never work out trading that for easy replaceability. And every average user can get a shop to replace their battery.
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    The old Samsung Galaxy S5 was waterproof and had a user-replaceable battery, so your argument doesn't hold water.
    - Gigachad 2y ago
      Waterproofing isn't a yes/no feature. Modern phones are way more waterproof and dust resistant than the S5. The plastic back on the S5 would quickly develop cracks that would let water in.
      - shiroiushi 2y ago
        Sure, it wasn't perfect, but it showed that it can be done, and it's not particularly difficult either. An improved design could have a metal back panel instead of plastic, it could use screws instead of plastic snaps, etc. (And with most people using cases, who cares about visible screws?)
    - qup 2y ago
      If it's waterproof and you get the water on the inside, it should in fact hold water
    - Schiendelman 2y ago
      It was really not waterproof. It was IP67, which is far from the IP68 almost all phones have today. https://phandroid.com/2014/04/21/galaxy-s5-ip67-meaning/ https://phandroid.com/2014/04/21/galaxy-s5-ip67-meaning/
harywilke 2y ago
I remember, long time ago in 1990, when apple switched to brown boxes for environmental reasons.
nimchimpsky 2y ago
[dead]
guappa 2y ago
Planned obsolescence is bad for the environment.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

matrix2003 2y ago

I send all my old stuff for recycling now and get a gift card in return. They just did this for my ancient iPad that won’t even run the latest iPadOS. I go on a site, pop in the serial number, and they ship me a box for free with a return label. I basically got $45 for an incredibly slow brick, so I’d say that’s pretty good incentive for their recycling program. Sure, you could install Linux and upcycle it, but how many people are actually going to do that? I think the recycling program is actually great for the 95%+ of people and how they use their devices.

zh3 2y ago
Not in the UK; my iPad was unreliable from the off, eventually it was crashing 4 minutes after starting it. Trying to trade it in just got a message along the lines of "It can still have a good second life, go find a responsible recycler and give it to them. Have a Nice Day!". Unlikely to ever buy an Apple product again.
- matrix2003 2y ago
  Are other companies much better in this regard?
  - zh3 2y ago
    It was disappointing to get unreliable hardware from a supposedly premium vendor, but it happens. It was the attitude and service that turned me off Apple though, not the hardware (which really should be more reliable than cheaper alternatives).
hcarvalhoalves 2y ago
Can you share the instructions on how to do that?
- dialup_sounds 2y ago
  He's literally just talking about Apple's trade-in program. https://www.apple.com/recycling/nationalservices/ https://www.apple.com/recycling/nationalservices/
  - matrix2003 2y ago
    Yep! This is exactly it.

tjoff 2y ago

The iMac are the perfect example though. The horror of putting a DVI/HDMI port on that thing seemed so horrendous that they'd rather let the whole thing go to waste. Reading OP it seems like this has been corrected? But generation of generation of devices didn't have any sensible reason to exist. Apple is also the king of integrated batteries. First with phones, then with laptops. I'm still baffled they got away with this. Such mindless waste at an incredible scale. Being extremely environmentally conscientious while designing the packaging isn't going to offset that.

jrmg 2y ago
This would require additional hardware in every iMac sold. Many people (I suspect the vast majority) would not reuse the iMacs as displays. Would the total amount of extra hardware inside discarded iMacs (those not used as displays) be less than the amount of hardware saved by reuse of the others?
- tjoff 2y ago
  Definitely. Would it affect apples bottom line if they couldn't prevent people from reusing their displays? You bet.
- troupo 2y ago
  > This would require additional hardware in every iMac sold. Hardware that costs a few cents at Apple's volumes and adds about 1mm of thickness and 2g of weight. Also, it's standard hardware
- alpaca128 2y ago
  > Many people [...] would not reuse the iMacs as displays. They could resell them as displays, given the resale value of Apple devices that might not be unpopular. If Apple actually cared they could easily add the hardware necessary. Would it cost them a few bucks more? Sure, but that's what choosing environment over maximum profit means. Or they could at least make it easy to modify so tinkerers can quickly turn it into a display without having to destroy the case or something.

FirmwareBurner 2y ago

>I say this as someone who worked several years in engineering at Apple, and they were extremely environmentally conscientious years before it was a thing. Then please tell us why they can't put a HDMI/DP input on the iMac to be usable as an external monitor when the internal computer dies or just to be used as a secondary monitor? Or why the SSD NAND on Macbooks needs to be soldered when a guy on youtube managed to hack an NVME connector on the motherboard to make the storage replaceable and expandable? What are the reasons other than driving more sales of new devices when old ones break? Because they're clearly not technical limitations and without any substantiated info from your side, your comment just reads more like astroturfing ("Apple is so conscious, trust me bro I worked there").

zeusk 2y ago
Because as a customer you should probably buy a studio display and Mac mini if that's your use case.
- FirmwareBurner 2y ago
  "My use case" of ...*squints*... not throwing amazing and still functional monitors in the trash because the computer part in them is obsolete/dead and keep reusing them instead? How rude of me to reject Apple's marketing NPC programming and use common sense instead. How about Apple just puts the 2 cent connector & PHY, and let the users who paid for the device decide how they want to use the product. Gaslighting people with the "you're holding/using it wrong" argument today is just .. I can't even express anymore without breaking HN rules.
  - zeusk 2y ago
    and yet you continue to moan about your NPC problem when the right product for you already exists?
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    >Gaslighting people with the "you're holding/using it wrong" argument today is just .. I can't even express anymore without breaking HN rules. Yet people who complain about this "gaslighting" from Apple continue to buy Apple products.

conradev 2y ago

It's not that they actively do bad things, it's that they only dedicate real resources in the direction of self-interest. Tim Cook likes to point to their solar investments and accessibility as examples of "doing good" when in reality the former is a good long term financial bet and the latter is generally under-resourced (or "cheap" to them). They'd use M.2 SSDs in their Macs instead of soldering flash chips to the board to allow for upgradeability, but that would seriously hurt the average profit margin on their devices and (maybe) take more time to engineer. The areas where their self-interest and the environment overlap are truly awesome, like shipping iPhones without chargers (increased margins) and in smaller paper boxes (more efficient shipping), but I don't wear rose-colored glasses about it. They'll also never let the iPad run macOS, because if people could own one device instead of two, that would be bad for their profits. They'll keep them cleanly differentiated for as long as they can. (I also worked in engineering at Apple!)

2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
You can tell they're full of shit because they can't stop tooting the green horn. It's self evident. If they made their devices repairable, easily resellable, etc. then they wouldn't have to greenwash.
- ben_w 2y ago
  They don't strictly need to greenwash even despite the difficulties with repairing their devices. They talk about green stuff because that's what they want to be, for whatever reason.
  - mikae1 2y ago
    > They talk about green stuff because that's what they want to be, for whatever reason. How else would the conscious consumer justify another marginal hardware update?
    - ben_w 2y ago
      > How else would the conscious consumer justify another marginal hardware update? I don't even know how they do it with all of that. None of the changes between successive versions of the iPhone — ever — have felt like good value for money to me. I get new ones when the old ones break. Then again, I am a weird outlier in economic things, and I've known that since I was a teen. I'd ask if people really are so much more interested in signalling green than being green, but of course I know they do — an old flame campaigned Green in the US, despite also having a big thing about supporting the striking coal miners in the UK (that happened before she was born).

waynecochran 2y ago

It's simple. I have a old iMac w a 5K screen. I would like to just but a now Mac Mini and keep using my iMac as a monitor. Instead my 5K iMac will end up in a landfill. Which is less green.

nextos 2y ago
New Mac Minis are coming later on this week, apparently, and they will also have M4 CPUs.
7speter 2y ago
You could put Linux on it and use it as a sort of jukebox, or any multitude of other things. You could also send it to me if you aren't interested in doing any of that :)
- mlyle 2y ago
  I use Linux on mine. It's a bummer that the magic to send over 2 eDP tiled at 5k resolution was never open-sourced, so you can only send 4k and it ends up slightly blurry.
- waynecochran 2y ago
  I'd love to put Linux on it, but one of the main reasons I use Linux is for CUDA programming and you can't even put an nVidia card in a Mac these days.

kev009 2y ago

The citation is common sense.. if your business is consumerism, you are by definition the opposite of "green". Putting some idiots on stage every year to carefully gesticulate to soft music about how "green" creating immense amounts of industrial waste are and thinking it is real is getting high on your own supply.

7speter 2y ago
It's green as long as you give them your previous Apple product and buy a new one to replace it.
- kev009 2y ago
  That's not how entropy works.
Daz1 2y ago
Define "consumerism"
- kev009 2y ago
  There is very little change from one iPhone to the next but very much marketing which underscores the true intentions. The business model is built on a revolving demand cycle that is unrelated to long term thinking, maintainability, efficiency, nor sustainability. One may argue well that Apple is better than the other players in the field but it doesn't undercut the overall impact of producing incredibly complex and rapidly obsoleting assemblies. It's not just soldering some chips to a board and snapping it together, each individual component potentially has global impact as the raw materials and finished pieces move into their final form. The magnitude of what is going on is not immediately intuitive unless you are an insider or read a well researched book like "The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone" The fundamental problem, which is out of sight out of mind from the consumer, is how much energy is required to produce and move assemblies around. See also the automotive industry, where the "green" thing to do is drive and maintain older vehicles for a long time. And to be honest, this doesn't bother me that much, but if I'm not on the take as an engineer I have no particular qualms punching through the bullshit smokescreens as a customer of a company that takes my money. The attention and empathy fatigue of the bullshit does take away from things that do matter such as national versus international manufacturing.

tsunamifury 2y ago

Classic apple worker, missing the forest from the trees. You were bamboozled into making your products greener while forcing customers to buy more and more of them. Come on are you really that unaware?

talldayo 2y ago

If you need a citation to understand, then nothing will get through to you. Apple glued in their batteries before "it was a thing" and implemented parts pairing DRM "before it was a thing" too. Whatever era you worked at Apple during, the company is changed now and has been changed for over a decade. Their modern rhetoric proves they detest the Reduce, reuse, recycle hierarchy that defines how "green" is and has been defined. You can prove that Apple is anti-green through basic examination of their modern business model: - They deliberately limit the functionality of devices unsupported by their first-party services (eg. App Store and Safari) which prevents reduction of new hardware required. Third-parties are prevented from offering serious and lasting alternatives. - They've systematically prevented repair of both their laptop and phone hardware, obviating the "reuse" part of the cycle. In their current scheme, independent repair shops are deliberately and unnecessarily cut off from the parts they need to repair Apple hardware at-cost. - Their stance towards recycling is asinine and insidious. Since store owners can't recycle partially-broken hardware as donor boards and users can't extend the use of their devices once iOS stops supporting them, Apple graciously offers to take your valuable hardware for free and destroy it for parts or materials for their own benefit. Users aren't expected to want any better and instead are supposed to thank Apple for pocketing their broken hardware to pay for Carbon Credits and Mother Nature spotlights. Apple's "serious" dedication to the environment is a joke, and the cracks have been showing for a while. They prioritize obstinate and unnecessary proprietary features instead of differentiating themselves through natural competition on their merits. If it wasn't for regulatory concern Apple would continue abusing the environment and people like you would keep defending Apple regardless. This is bad. I expect better.

rty32 2y ago

Citation: MacBook Pro with 8GB memory, starting at $1,599, on sale right now.

tomcam 2y ago

With respect, then, why do you think iPhone or iPad batteries can’t be replaced by the average user after a decade and a half?

Schiendelman 2y ago
Waterproofing. It really is that simple. The math would never work out trading that for easy replaceability. And every average user can get a shop to replace their battery.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  The old Samsung Galaxy S5 was waterproof and had a user-replaceable battery, so your argument doesn't hold water.
  - Gigachad 2y ago
    Waterproofing isn't a yes/no feature. Modern phones are way more waterproof and dust resistant than the S5. The plastic back on the S5 would quickly develop cracks that would let water in.
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
      Sure, it wasn't perfect, but it showed that it can be done, and it's not particularly difficult either. An improved design could have a metal back panel instead of plastic, it could use screws instead of plastic snaps, etc. (And with most people using cases, who cares about visible screws?)
  - qup 2y ago
    If it's waterproof and you get the water on the inside, it should in fact hold water
  - Schiendelman 2y ago
    It was really not waterproof. It was IP67, which is far from the IP68 almost all phones have today. https://phandroid.com/2014/04/21/galaxy-s5-ip67-meaning/ https://phandroid.com/2014/04/21/galaxy-s5-ip67-meaning/

harywilke 2y ago

I remember, long time ago in 1990, when apple switched to brown boxes for environmental reasons.

nimchimpsky 2y ago

[dead]

guappa 2y ago

Planned obsolescence is bad for the environment.