I wonder how many others also have such strong negative reactions to this sort of mass destruction. It is hard to explain the feeling, but regardless of the product or manufacturer, seeing something which most certainly took a lot of effort to design and create brutally pulverised almost makes me want to cry.
On the other hand, maybe a lot of other people love seeing things destroyed, as evidenced by the popularity of shredder videos on YouTube, or maybe it's interesting in the same way as car crashes and other disasters.
The article's conflation of things being broken down into their component parts and recycled, vs things being "destroyed", is maddening and tendentious. Try not to fall for it.
The topic and language of the article makes it sound like the author, or the entity who commissioned the article to be written, stands to benefit financially from resold parts or refurbishing. The tone is too strong for something that is not a big deal, except to those who are in the business of profiting from the reuse/resale of hardware components.
Follow the money. "Won't someone think of the environment" is often a smokescreen used by those looking to seek policy changes for their own financial gain. Reading this article does not have me envisioning environmental motivations; I get the vibe of a lobbyist-like group pushing an agenda with their own financial incentive in mind.
There is an energy deficit creating workable electronics from raw materials, but that can be covered by a large flow of retail currency through an efficient sales and supply chain.
There is an energy surplus remaining after small profits have been extracted from many repurposed waste materials, especially workable electronics. Not much retail currency available, only wholesale but at least it's surplus.
However the "market" is balanced to the extreme disadvantage of the reuse/resale operators, and it looks like Koebler has been reporting things from that type of source:
Financial incentive is not always a bad thing, especially when there's no real greed, just pursuit of excellent business opportunity instead.
Plus financial incentive is not always driven by the desire for financial gains, sometimes more so the prevention of financial losses. From the poor soul who's desperate for his gear to be fixed cheap by the neighborhood hobbyist who only needs an online factory repair manual, to the corporation that invested heavily in tonnes[0] of top-dollar goods truly having 2x or 3x workable lifetimes, they would both benefit by participating in a smaller purchase-to-resale differential that would naturally exist if the secondary market was allowed to thrive with encouragement.
Cornering the consumers into a pure retail-to-scrap scenario (with a support lifetime limit for backup) does appear to be more of a major institutional policy effort disadvantageous to consumers, compared with the Right-to-Repair operators who appear dedicated to removing as much gear as possible from the retail-to-scrap cycle and preventing future resources from being tied up within it. Consumers would theoretically benefit the stronger the right to repair.
Even when there is not much financial benefit either way, at least the environment might suffer less.
Considering hand-me-down computers are such a common thing where I am, it makes me quite angry. We often piece two or more broken computers together to give to a student.
This may extend he computer's usable life but what happens to those computers once the student is done with them?
In my affluent neighbourhood, computers are often dumped at the roadside. Our council does have a recycling program for e-waste but I'm not sure of the transparency of the operation in terms of what percentage ends up in landfill.
I'm not condoning Apple's actions from the re-use point of view here but in the longer term, shredding computers at an industrial scale may be better for the environment than having a graveyard of 20 year old computers buried in a massive hole at the municipal tip.
They get recycled just years later after more value is extracted out of them. We teach our students that electronics and batteries have special recycling procedures.
I did most of my work for a couple of years on an expensive gaming rig found out by the dumpster. The RAM had been removed but everything else was still there (including a hard drive with a bunch of porn and virus).
Replaced the dirty drive, new RAM and it was far better than any machine I could justify buying at the time.
On the other hand, maybe a lot of other people love seeing things destroyed, as evidenced by the popularity of shredder videos on YouTube, or maybe it's interesting in the same way as car crashes and other disasters.