Stop shipping hardware products that are only “beautifully designed”

http://www.wellsriley.com/blog/2012/stop-shipping-hardware-products-that-are-only-beautifully-designed/

by brendanlim • 14 years ago

29 32 14 years ago

mirashii• 14 years ago

As is true with most things, this is a case of where consumers need to vote with their wallets. While it would be great if the world ran on great intentions and thinking for the future, the reality is that money talks today, and today is the most important of all days, because nobody knows if they'll be around tomorrow.

NonEUCitizen• 14 years ago

"PCBs (Printed Circuit Boards) are guilty too – recyclability is incredibly low (and very expensive) and they do not decompose. Why can’t use a biodegradable material instead of silicon?"

PCBs are NOT made of silicon. Integrated circuits are (but not their packages). PCBs are usually FR-4 material:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printed_circuit_board

wells-riley• 14 years ago

Thanks for enlightening me... updated my post accordingly.

dgreensp2• 14 years ago

I don't see how "built to last" means "built out of cardboard." I can't find the original Rob Walker piece, but it sounds like it's talking about timeless quality vs. empty fashion, not about the environment.

An iPhone lasts a long time, and the author should be comforted that not everyone can afford to buy a new one every time Apple bumps the version, naturally limiting Apple's ability to fill landfills with barely-used iPhones by launching new product features.

The net footprint of a big company like Apple is surely complicated, as there are many ways to offset one's impact. I'm no expert, but Apple has a whole website on their strategy (http://www.apple.com/environment/) that shows they are making an effort, perhaps a large one.

wmf2• 14 years ago

No, he's saying that products that are destined to be obsoleted quickly should not be built to last. If something is disposable, make it look disposable. Of course, that's not going to happen.

dgreensp2• 14 years ago

Even if all our electronics were redesigned to biodegrade overnight if left outside in heavy rain, what's the point in making them look disposable?

mindslight• 14 years ago

tldr - Admirer of gadget fashion design ponders wastefulness of consumer culture. Wants for token "recycling" to soothe his conscience. Looks at conceptual art projects as if they're close to practical technology. Finishes up penance and walks away thinking that he has earnestly evaluated his own wastefulness.

herval2• 14 years ago

More like "please stop copying Apple's advertisement style". This is getting so out of hand that in Nexus Q case, for instance, you get this beautiful "ad-documentary" with a lot of people saying hyperbolic catch-phrases and not a single clue on what's the product all about...

rimantas• 14 years ago

Apple's advertising style is showing how device works—at least in case of iPhone and iPad.

herval2• 14 years ago

I mean the visual style - the cameras, use of background music, people reciting "beautiful", "astonishing", "marvelous" things staring at some point right/left of the camera, etc. As I said, they missed the most important aspect here: showing what the product actually does...

antidoh• 14 years ago

"why not embrace the throwaway culture and just make everything easy and practical to throw away?"

Because enough people say the following:

"I, for one, love my shiny new iPhone each year. No amount of (my own) preaching is going to get me to keep my iPhone 4S when Apple announces the iPhone 5 this year."

gnaffle3• 14 years ago

I don't think most people say that. Tech geeks certainly do, but they're a minority. And in any case, most people don't have the money to buy a new smartphone every year.

If Apple had an opt-in program where you could upgrade the screen, battery and logic board of your phone for $100, most people would opt for that.

astrodust2• 14 years ago

The problem with products is not that they're made from materials like aluminum or silicon or glass but that these materials are combined in ways that make it very difficult to extract them from the finish product when recycling.

Apple has gone a long way to making parts that are more "pure", where, for instance, the chassis of new computers is milled from a solid piece of metal that, once removed, can be shredded and reformed with no more difficulty than a drink can. The same goes, in principle, for the glass.

The plastics in most computers are made from an exotic blend of materials and are not easily reprocessed.

What we need more than cardboard computers is standards on how to manufacture products so they can be unmanufactured in the end and rebuilt into other things. The goal here is for 0% loss in the recovery cycle. Anything below 100% is not, by definition, sustainable.

If that sounds impossible, consider that the natural ecosystem in which we all live tends towards a 100% recycling rate. There are very few natural byproducts that do not have a recovery path. For instance, most trees produce enormous amounts of "garbage" in the form of leaves but these are almost immediately recycled.

Given that the natural world has been doing this for literally billions of years, there is much to be learned.

A great book on this subject is Cradle to Cradle (http://www.mcdonough.com/cradle_to_cradle.htm) which proposes radically re-thinking our industrial cycle.

eswangren• 14 years ago

Interesting that you bring up Apple here considering the fact that it's latest products cannot be recycled due to design decisions (I.e., melding the glass display onto the frame)

bcherry• 14 years ago

Current recycling techniques cannot (supposedly) deal with this, but it's likely that new methods could be developed which could. Ideally, Apple's designers would actually work directly with recycling centers to develop a strategy for efficient recycling of their product. This could even be done later on, when the existing product is replaced with a new version.

astrodust2• 14 years ago

A clean separation of materials is not required at the recycling facility, at least in theory, as most of the recycling methods being explored involve shredding the product up front and separating the resulting bits.

The recycling process becomes extremely complicated when the composition of the materials is non-uniform. The common worst offender in this regard is plastic bottles with several different types of plastic layered together. The opposite is a glass bottle with a metal cap.

Provided you can smash and pulverize a product into sufficiently fine pieces you can separate it by material.

drone• 14 years ago

To be clear: yes, you can make circuits out of all sorts of cool stuff. But, you can't make the high-speed, high-performance, ultra-compact circuits required to meet the demands of the products out of just anything. I'd love to see one doing layout for a big fat BGA device oscillating at 1.5GHz on a lasagna noodle, much less getting down to sub-6-mil traces, or 4+ layers.

Pray tell though, what affordable semi-conductor material is there out there to replace silicon, that is readily recyclable and achieves the same target?

I fear, too many people want their cake and to eat it too - you want the latest and greatest capabilities (want, not need), but you want them to make it in a way which it will not function, so that you can feel good about it. ("You," being the standard consumer, not any one person in particular.)

dougabug• 14 years ago

"They’re all designed and engineered in-house [...]"

Isn't the Nexus 7 hardware designed by Asus?

jasonwatkinspdx• 14 years ago

If we charged for inputs and wastes properly, that would pressure economic chains from both ends to minimize environmental impact.

We don't. For inputs we generally charge the cost of digging something up out of the dirt, and for outputs we charge the cost of burying something under the dirt. We shouldn't be surprised our economies have become a wasteful race of pleasurable consumption.

We're forcing our descendants to subsidize our lifestyle.

gnaffle3• 14 years ago

Please, don't conclude that Apple (and now Google) products aren't recyclable because of a quote from Wired citing some "friends from the recycling industry".

One thing I do know is that iPhones and other Apple products have high resale value, that there's an industry thriving on selling replacement screens, batteries etc.

This wouldn't be the case if most people considered these devices crap and obsolete the day a new product was introduced.

From my experience, people keep their Apple products for many years, often giving them to other family members when they upgrade themselves. If they weren't built to last, this would be impossible to do.

The real landfill fillers are the crappy plastic phones that get scratced and damaged.

gms77774• 14 years ago

Don't confuse recyclable with reusable.

I think your mental timescale here is a bit too small. "Built to last" means what? 10 years, optimistically. That means that in 10 years, those products will still be sitting in a landfill...for hundreds of millions of years.

There are choices that hardware designers can make that will help mitigate this at least to some extent, but unfortunately, it appears as if we are moving further and further away from this (the glass glued to the display being one example).

tbrownaw• 14 years ago

That means that in 10 years, those products will still be sitting in a landfill...for hundreds of millions of years.

Not true. Worst case, they end up in a museum when an archaeologist finds them in a couple thousand (not million) years.

grecy2• 14 years ago

> Don't confuse recyclable with reusable.

Remember, of the three things we're all supposed to be doing, recycling is the absolute worst.

Followed by reuse, then reduce.

It could be argued that making a device reusable is actually better than making it recyclable.

The consumers of this world seem to be caught up in this "recycle it" craze. Somehow it's fine to churn through 30 plastic water bottles a week, because they are going in the recycling.

In reality, the water bottles should be gone entirely.

gnaffle3• 14 years ago

If people recycle them, they won't be in that landfill. And many countries (at least in Europe) now recycle all garbage. Even stuff glued together can be separated and be recycled.

Making long-lasting, more expensive products certainly decreases the amount of devices that end up in landfills.

And isn't the "glass glued to the display" simply one less piece of glass that needs to be recycled? The previous solution was a display unit with a thin piece of glass, and then a bigger protective piece of glass in front of that. (Please correct me if I'm wrong here).

MaxGabriel• 14 years ago

Per the Wired quote, Apple will recycle products you take to the store (edit: or mail to them), and offers either a gift card or 10% discount if you do so.

gms77774• 14 years ago

Wow, I never knew that. Thanks for sharing.

Link to the program for anyone interested: http://www.apple.com/recycling/

X-Istence• 14 years ago

I honestly think that in due time (1+ years from now) someone will have figured out a way to recycle those new Apple tech toys. Glue melts, glass and aluminum has different melting points...

I honestly think that people are making a bigger deal out of it than it is. Also, the better something is designed the longer I will personally want to use it. Make stuff out of cardboard, but if it starts falling apart it will end up being thrown out sooner rather than later. My family still uses and owns the iBook G4 I purchased in 2004...

Stop shipping hardware products that are only “beautifully designed”

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