What bothers me about Apple [since 2013] is the showboating about environmentalism in their corporate marketing, but the complete disregard for such things in their designs.
Their designs since 2014 have been the least environmentally friendly out of any company; encouraging consumers to throw heavy metals into the ecosystem without the slightest hope of repair. The 2012 Mac Mini was the same chassis as the 2014 but the repairability level is next to nil. The same story is on the current line of MacBooks.
E-Waste is the largest and most harmful stream of consumer waste an Apple is leading the way. It doesn't matter how many of your data centers are running on solar panels if all of that energy is being used to destroy the environment.
From what I understand they built special-purpose robots to disassemble the past several phone versions and recover most of the content. I imagine they can recover the glass and frame from laptops; not sure what happens to the microchips.
It would be interesting to see some data about how long a typical device from each manufacturer continues to see active use, and how often they get repaired. I am skeptical that e.g. the typical consumer-owned Dell/Asus/etc. laptop stays around any longer than typical Apple laptop. Anecdotally I know a bunch of people whose PC laptops were pieces of junk when they bought them, and didn’t last more than a couple years before they threw them out for a new model, and also some people who mostly buy used 3–4 year old Apple hardware.
It reminds me a bit about the whole "biodegradable" movement. Instead of making things that essentially destroy themselves after a short time, how about simply making things last longer and be more durable? Of course that would reduce their ability to keep selling you new products. It's quite a genius idea: making things that self-destruct but are "environmentally friendly" means they get both planned obolescence and to advertise the fact that they're "environmentally conscious"...
Their designs since 2014 have been the least environmentally friendly out of any company; encouraging consumers to throw heavy metals into the ecosystem without the slightest hope of repair. The 2012 Mac Mini was the same chassis as the 2014 but the repairability level is next to nil. The same story is on the current line of MacBooks.
E-Waste is the largest and most harmful stream of consumer waste an Apple is leading the way. It doesn't matter how many of your data centers are running on solar panels if all of that energy is being used to destroy the environment.