Tim Cook Promotes Sustainability at Ceres Gala in New York City

[m4mario]

I like a lot of what Apple are doing regarding the environment, but they fall far too far short on the first step of the 3 Rs: Repair, Reuse, Recycle.

What do you mean? Apple has many stores and authorized centers for repair. No other company provides repair services that match Apple. You are stuck with unauthorized repair shops that often miss the mark with other brands. You many be unhappy with the cost, but once repaired, customers confidently treat their apple product like it is new and use it for much longer.
Apple’s controlled approach to quality repairs, makes sure there are no frankenstein Apple products out there and thus the reuse and recycle happens a lot more with Apple products than any of the competing products.

 

[Moonjumper]

What do you mean? Apple has many stores and authorized centers for repair. No other company provides repair services that match Apple. You are stuck with unauthorized repair shops that often miss the mark with other brands. You many be unhappy with the cost, but once repaired, customers confidently treat their apple product like it is new and use it for much longer.
Apple’s controlled approach to quality repairs, makes sure there are no frankenstein Apple products out there and thus the reuse and recycle happens a lot more with Apple products than any of the competing products.

Things such as special heads on bolts are designed to make it more difficult for third party repairs. This means extra tools than otherwise would not need to be manufactured. Glueing stuff in means extra glue needed for repairs. I can see some justification for mobile devices to have things secure (although bolts would be better), but not desktops.

Expensive repairs by Apple can make it uneconomic to repair older devices. Preventing easy battery, hard drive, and RAM changes in newer Macs causes problems for some of the more common failures. How many Mac Minis are out of action because a repair is too expensive and/or too much hassle (I only recently got an authorised repair centre near me)? Older models with the same machine format allowed the RAM and hard drives to be replaced by the user. How many more of them remain in use? (and also because their lifespan can be extended with more RAM and drive space/speed)