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- cross-posted to:
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Apple Shrunk the iPhone’s Carbon Footprint. There’s a Way to Shrink It Even Further | Ensuring users can hang onto their phones as long as possible would help reduce the biggest source of emissions…::Ensuring users can hang onto their phones as long as possible would help reduce the biggest source of emissions: producing phones in the first place.
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But…. The Sacred Profits!?
I mean, Apple has been ahead of the competition when it comes to phone longevity. The 6S got its final OS update last year. Android phones from 2015 aren’t getting first-party support in 2020, nevermind 2022. It’s nice that some Android manufacturers are finally saying that they’ll offer longer support for their devices, but I’ll believe that once said support is actually here.
I’m supposing my Pixel 6 isn’t covered by said promise of support either.
if you’re european, the fairphone lineup is a great option. the FP2 was released around 2016 and just ended sofware support in 2023. plus i believe they’ll try to sell them in the US.
What about the poor shareholders??
As long as they can keep people on the platform, they keep the cash from the app store flowing.
But how will we earn trillion dollar profits and justify each others 8 figure secret bonuses?
As much as I prefer the open core of the Android OS, it’s silly to focus on Apple on this, since Apple phones generally last much longer than their Android counterparts.
Hard, fixed, unforgiving legal requirements about length of support-patches and not breaking advertised software-based functionality on internet-connected devices you sell would solve multiple problems:
- It would prevent shitty unsecured devices from corrupting the internet
- It would discourage companies from manufacturing e-waste devices that they cannot reasonably support long-term
- It would allow end-users to keep devices far longer
- It would force software teams to focus on maintainability of their older versions and backportability of bugfixes, meaning a stronger trend towards codebase-compatibility.
Basically, clarify the legal warranty concept: Hardware has whatever crappy 1-year or 2-year warranty is mandated. But software that is tightly coupled to that hardware and bundled with it has a 10-year warranty. Why? Because software does not rot. It does not decay. It is only killed. Either by external actors hacking it, or by the owners shutting down the server side of it, or by incompatible patches being deliberately installed into it that cause it to break. Which means the normal excuses of entropy and electromechanical wear do not apply here. It breaks because it was killed.
This is the compromise approach. Mobile devices are horrible for breaking old APIs. I’m not saying that they need to release the new, upgraded versions of new software for their old devices indefinitely. I’m just saying they must keep the old software running on their old device with its advertised featureset for an extremely long period. That means keeping the lights on at the server farm and keeping security running. This is only an extreme burden if you want to make new software and abandon the old software. Which, realistically, is how software works - we want to make a new enhanced mobile client that has new features, but those new features require a new API with the server, and that means breaking the old API sometimes, which means breaking the old client. That’s where supporting old software is hard.
But to be clear, that’s taking something that was working, and killing it.
When that is coupled to a physical device that would become e-waste, that should not be legal. At least not within the physical lifespan of the hardware. And most electronic devices will run happily for a decade if we only let them.
I agree with this in principle.
However this would only make Apple stronger and android weaker.
Apple already does 6 years of updates, whereas android manufacturers are lucky to provide 2 years. Imposing such terms of android manufacturers will make them leave the market - thus reducing competition.
But then people won’t buy the new iPhone with even less carbon footprint!!
That’s not how capitalism works. Why do you hate America and Apple pie?
Reduce, reuse, recycle in that order. Using less of something we’ll always have a way bigger impact than recycling it or reusing it. This goes for electronics or anything else.
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Force manufacturers to offer official replacement parts for 10 years with no profit margin, at least for common repairs like batteries, displays/glass, cameras etc. (basically everything except the logic board I guess).
Do the same for software updates and enforce compatibility (i.e. don’t lock out users of the new Apple Watch because they have on older iPhone for example).
Not going to happen because it’s “not feasible” to manufacture hardware for 10 year old devices or whatever.
Force manufacturers to offer official replacement parts for 10 years with no profit margin, at least for common repairs like batteries, displays/glass, cameras etc. (basically everything except the logic board I guess).
I don’t think this solves the root problem.
Let’s say you buy an entry-level phone. You bought it pretty late in life, so the $200 phone was only $150 for a brand new phone! 2 years later you drop it and its screen is broken.
The phone was already worthless when you dropped it. The device was past its support lifetime. It’s $40 on eBay.
And a replacement screen+digitizer? Sure, so let’s say “at cost” they charge like $50 after shipping. Then another $40 for labour for an expert to do the job. You’ve now spent twice what the phone was worth.
Imho the real problem is the modern glue-sealed phones and short support-lifetimes. I did repairs on old pre-glue devices and it was easy. I’ve swapped out laptop keyboards, replaced screens, etc. I’ve had old devices that last forever, the only real flaw that appears is short battery life.
If you made phones easy to open, swapping out batteries and screens would be easy, and that would naturally create more demand for affordable swappable parts. But right now, that’s an “expert only” operation because heat-gunning a phone is difficult and dangerous to get right - I’ve killed more than a few devices attempting it (the alternative was the dumpster so it was zero-risk).
Just because replacement parts (and repair services) are available doesn’t mean every repair for every type of damage to the device is economically viable for the consumer. So, it doesn’t solve “the problem” in every case, but it does still improve the situation. Sure, every now and then phones would need to be replaced, I don’t think that’s something that needs to be stopped completely.
For example, I passed my iPhone 8 on in the family and it’s now 6 years old. Mainline software support just ran out (it didn’t get iOS 17) and the battery is on its last breath. Swapping the battery would cost 79,-€ from Apple. This is close to what the phone is selling for used (256 GB version), albeit with dying batteries as well, so a phone with a brand new battery would be worth a bit more I guess. So yeah, it’s not really worth it to get the battery replaced. But say it was 39,-€ instead of 79,-€, it would be a lot more viable all of a sudden. Not only would it be half as expensive as a used iPhone 8 - and buying used involves certain risks - the iPhone 8 would probably be worth more used because buyers would be willing to pay more when they then have to spend less on replacing the battery, which many people probably take into account when placing a bid on old phones. Add to that that full software support would probably add even more value to the used phone.
Of course, the iPhone 8 was I think about 969,-€ new in its 256 GB variant back in 2017. A 200,-€ phone probably would sell for next to nothing after 6 years. It probably wouldn’t even exist in the first place, as the manufacturer would likely sell a similar phone for more money if they had to provide 10 years of repairs and software support. But this article is about the carbon footprint of going through devices quickly, and not about offering dirt cheap phones.
I’ve already discussed my Software Laws policy, but for the hardware side:
Simple and nasty law. Make a symbol. An ugly symbol, like the ♻️, or the UL symbol. That symbol says "this device contains a battery that contains toxic chemicals and must be disposed of properly. Make it clear: the symbol must be externally visible on the back of your beautiful iphone. Big 2-inch mess bigger than the corporate logo.
But you can make it easily removable! Just let the user pop it right off! They learned that the device contains an e-waste battery, and now they know.
But the trick: It shall be illegal to make the symbol easier to remove than safely removing the battery. Does removing the battery require a heatgun and pry-tools? Then so does the e-waste symbol. Does the battery require a screw-driver? Then so does the e-waste symbol.
Implementation can be trivial, if the back-panel has both the e-waste symbol and provides access to the battery. Then replacing the back solves both problems! Or taking off the flat part of the back and flipping it over, hiding the e-waste symbol.
Sure, but if that works, who is buying the new iPhone?
They already can and the dumb battery laws ain’t going to change shit. The majority is still going to get a new phone every two years.
my dad is debating buying a new phone because the battery’s cooked on his SE 2nd gen. the laws make a lot of sense for “set and forget” customers.
He can go get it repaired. Your father is also clearly an edge case.
he is not. anyone older than 30-40 years often just want to keep their phones. hell, even my mom had the same huawei p20 lite up until 2022.
We need to create more e-waste and dump all of our Lightning cables and old phones, so that we use USB-C to save the environment, or something.
You sound unintelligent
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