Stop… grousing time!
UNITAR, the United Nations’ Institute for Teaching and Research, released this week their latest report update on e-waste trends, titled Global E-waste Monitor 2024.
They note how the rate of e-waste recycling is now being outpaced by e-waste generation by a factor of five, as consumers are consuming more per annum than ever before. They note the gap between what’s consumed and what’s being recycled is widening, it and appears to be worsening through at least 2030: at current trends, it will be closer to a factor of 6.5-to-one.
The report is abundant with infographics and can be easily prepared for teaching aids.
The executive summary, meanwhile, got my especial notice [emphases, both bold and bold-italic, mine]:
Rates of effective e-waste recycling, proportionally, run highest in Europe (42.8 per cent), followed by Oceania and, third, the Americas (30 per cent). Africa is lowest (0.7 per cent), but: a) the continent consumes roughly one-sixth what the Americas do and one-seventh what Europe do, despite being more populous; Africa’s low-recycle rate appears to be impacted further by organized crime activity shipping e-waste from other continents clandestinely [see report summary footnote]; and c) may be using electrical and electronic products for significantly longer than elsewhere (i.e., upcycling, maintaining, etc. — with truly dead equipment going straight to e-waste without much in the way of the quote-unquote “urban mining” of reclaiming precious and rare earth metals embedded in e-waste.) The latter is inferred; the former two are unambiguous.
Regulars on the EIM forum have been pretty good at driving home this persistent issue, many times over, of Apple engineering Macs to be increasingly more difficult to service and repair since at least the premiere of the Retina MacBook Pros — with Apple delivering a general defence on how most components within are recyclable and also tightly integrated with current designs (which yes, reveal the product of some thirty-plus years’ experience of designing and engineering laptops and also reconfiguring laptop components to create desktop Macs like the Mac mini, Mac Studio, and iMac).
So yah. I know this post is singing to a small choir. Reviewing evidence-based findings of e-waste getting (predictably) worse and not mitigating has me, again, side-eyeing the multi-trillion-dollar corporation which once engineered a reasonably modular, parts-replacebale, highly extensible unibody MacBook Pro whose form factor was succesful enough to be kept available for sale for eight years. I’m also aware some of the unibody and rMBP designers and engineers left Apple to join start-up frame.work to create a modular-based system for laptops premised on the same aluminium unibody foundation.
Said corporation now reject that objective, and their sway compels other major tech companies follow in kind if they wish to be competitive.
Between that and the community of folks continuing to use early Intel Macs (and, yes, even Hackintoshes) and finding it’s not especially cumbersome to set up and use, idk, Sonoma on a mid-2007 iMac (with Penryn CPU upgrade) and to do so nearly as smoothly as running earlier macOS/OS X builds on the same? I’m marking my disappointment — in vain, like a train — once more.
And so it goes. :|
Maybe a useful discussion might come of this, idk. But th report is a good read-through if you have the moment. Cheers.
UNITAR, the United Nations’ Institute for Teaching and Research, released this week their latest report update on e-waste trends, titled Global E-waste Monitor 2024.
They note how the rate of e-waste recycling is now being outpaced by e-waste generation by a factor of five, as consumers are consuming more per annum than ever before. They note the gap between what’s consumed and what’s being recycled is widening, it and appears to be worsening through at least 2030: at current trends, it will be closer to a factor of 6.5-to-one.
The report is abundant with infographics and can be easily prepared for teaching aids.
The executive summary, meanwhile, got my especial notice [emphases, both bold and bold-italic, mine]:
Rates of effective e-waste recycling, proportionally, run highest in Europe (42.8 per cent), followed by Oceania and, third, the Americas (30 per cent). Africa is lowest (0.7 per cent), but: a) the continent consumes roughly one-sixth what the Americas do and one-seventh what Europe do, despite being more populous; Africa’s low-recycle rate appears to be impacted further by organized crime activity shipping e-waste from other continents clandestinely [see report summary footnote]; and c) may be using electrical and electronic products for significantly longer than elsewhere (i.e., upcycling, maintaining, etc. — with truly dead equipment going straight to e-waste without much in the way of the quote-unquote “urban mining” of reclaiming precious and rare earth metals embedded in e-waste.) The latter is inferred; the former two are unambiguous.
Regulars on the EIM forum have been pretty good at driving home this persistent issue, many times over, of Apple engineering Macs to be increasingly more difficult to service and repair since at least the premiere of the Retina MacBook Pros — with Apple delivering a general defence on how most components within are recyclable and also tightly integrated with current designs (which yes, reveal the product of some thirty-plus years’ experience of designing and engineering laptops and also reconfiguring laptop components to create desktop Macs like the Mac mini, Mac Studio, and iMac).
And yet — that Apple also pair otherwise-repairable components within, cryptographically, contradicts the sincerity of their defence. This isn’t a revelation. That other companies — competitors — frequently follow Apple’s lead to compete directly, we’ve been witnessing a decrease in repairable devices not only with Apple, but also with laptop, all-in-one, and mobile products made by Apple competitors. This is also not news.
The cryptographic component, in spite of the questionable claim this makes Macs less appealing to steal, doesn’t really hold water when even trivial parts like hall-effect sensors, keyboard assemblies, and displays don’t have any meaningful relationship with the personal data stored on, say, a MacBook Air. Moreover, were those components not paired cryptographically, Macs would not be much more appealing, as a theft would require a new logic board. Salvageable parts might be worth something, but this is only the case when Apple, by contract, have vendors which supply components (like LG’s and Samgung’s displays) to agree not to sell those replacement parts on the repair/third-party market, in perpetuity — even after an Apple product is “obsoleted”.
To no one’s surprise around here, I’m posting this from one of the scores of Mac models which Apple designate as “obsoleted”. It’s also one of the many obsoleted models which can run a patched versions of the current three macOS builds: my steadfast late 2011 13-inch MBP. Others on here have had remarkbale results running even less powerful, less-appointed Macs from the same era on the currently-supported macOS builds.
That community patching projects to side-step Apple’s official terminus got underway, in earnest, back in 2016, from Sierra to present day (with earlier work to get Mountain Lion on Lion-capped systems meriting honourable mention), highlights the problematic of Apple obsoleting OSes once one build drops from the “supported ‘trinity’” and obsoleting models at the very moment no jurisdiction on the planet holds them liable for continuing parts availability and service support (i.e., California, France and, I think, one other nation-state).
The problematic is it accelerates consumption and e-waste generation, and coaxes (some rather large) competitors to follow.
I’m aware the quiet part of Apple’s loud, “our products are almost entirely recyclable” and “our products are cryptographically secure”, is: “shareholders who have so healthily benefited from iDevice and App Store fee revenue would revolt at our commitment to sell fewer Macs, iPads, etc. per annum, were we to design them to last, be serviceable for far longer, and also to have current OS support for years, even into a second decade. So we don’t, and we won’t — unless regulators compel us to. Should that improbable fate actually happen, we’ll manage a workaround for it.”
I’m probably going to start referring to this more often as compelled consumption — in that once an Apple consumer is brought within the walled garden (does anything actually grow in there?) and finds themselves compelled to upgrade their hardware as Apple dictates as the price of not being pushed out, they get left with scant choice beyond either acquiesing or, more disruptively, dropping the commitment and disrupting their productivity as they migrate from the garden’s thorny bounds to somewhere else.
The cryptographic component, in spite of the questionable claim this makes Macs less appealing to steal, doesn’t really hold water when even trivial parts like hall-effect sensors, keyboard assemblies, and displays don’t have any meaningful relationship with the personal data stored on, say, a MacBook Air. Moreover, were those components not paired cryptographically, Macs would not be much more appealing, as a theft would require a new logic board. Salvageable parts might be worth something, but this is only the case when Apple, by contract, have vendors which supply components (like LG’s and Samgung’s displays) to agree not to sell those replacement parts on the repair/third-party market, in perpetuity — even after an Apple product is “obsoleted”.
To no one’s surprise around here, I’m posting this from one of the scores of Mac models which Apple designate as “obsoleted”. It’s also one of the many obsoleted models which can run a patched versions of the current three macOS builds: my steadfast late 2011 13-inch MBP. Others on here have had remarkbale results running even less powerful, less-appointed Macs from the same era on the currently-supported macOS builds.
That community patching projects to side-step Apple’s official terminus got underway, in earnest, back in 2016, from Sierra to present day (with earlier work to get Mountain Lion on Lion-capped systems meriting honourable mention), highlights the problematic of Apple obsoleting OSes once one build drops from the “supported ‘trinity’” and obsoleting models at the very moment no jurisdiction on the planet holds them liable for continuing parts availability and service support (i.e., California, France and, I think, one other nation-state).
The problematic is it accelerates consumption and e-waste generation, and coaxes (some rather large) competitors to follow.
I’m aware the quiet part of Apple’s loud, “our products are almost entirely recyclable” and “our products are cryptographically secure”, is: “shareholders who have so healthily benefited from iDevice and App Store fee revenue would revolt at our commitment to sell fewer Macs, iPads, etc. per annum, were we to design them to last, be serviceable for far longer, and also to have current OS support for years, even into a second decade. So we don’t, and we won’t — unless regulators compel us to. Should that improbable fate actually happen, we’ll manage a workaround for it.”
I’m probably going to start referring to this more often as compelled consumption — in that once an Apple consumer is brought within the walled garden (does anything actually grow in there?) and finds themselves compelled to upgrade their hardware as Apple dictates as the price of not being pushed out, they get left with scant choice beyond either acquiesing or, more disruptively, dropping the commitment and disrupting their productivity as they migrate from the garden’s thorny bounds to somewhere else.
So yah. I know this post is singing to a small choir. Reviewing evidence-based findings of e-waste getting (predictably) worse and not mitigating has me, again, side-eyeing the multi-trillion-dollar corporation which once engineered a reasonably modular, parts-replacebale, highly extensible unibody MacBook Pro whose form factor was succesful enough to be kept available for sale for eight years. I’m also aware some of the unibody and rMBP designers and engineers left Apple to join start-up frame.work to create a modular-based system for laptops premised on the same aluminium unibody foundation.
Said corporation now reject that objective, and their sway compels other major tech companies follow in kind if they wish to be competitive.
Between that and the community of folks continuing to use early Intel Macs (and, yes, even Hackintoshes) and finding it’s not especially cumbersome to set up and use, idk, Sonoma on a mid-2007 iMac (with Penryn CPU upgrade) and to do so nearly as smoothly as running earlier macOS/OS X builds on the same? I’m marking my disappointment — in vain, like a train — once more.
And so it goes. :|
Maybe a useful discussion might come of this, idk. But th report is a good read-through if you have the moment. Cheers.
