Technology

I really hope neither Apple nor any other repair shop simply casts electronic components in the bin. My expectation in both cases is that the components are recycled, at least for precious metals.

Oh, you're a sustainable Apple user? Show me your reflow oven.

Mother earth advertising beg to differ /s

Ooooh. I have a story for this.

I was a student at Purdue and one of the freshmen "engineering hype" lectures had people from industry come say why they're so cool, etc. Now, this was specifically an electrical and computer engineering course, not the whole engineering school. These are the people who tore apart their various electronics for fun and made cool stuff using parts from RadioShack (RIP).

Apple came to one. First red flag: she started with "don't tell anyone we were here". Weird, but whatever. She proceeded with her spiel and, after however long, got to the Q&A bit. Someone raised their hand and asked this: "why does Apple solder RAM into their devices". This woman said, and I quote, "It is the position of Apple that the consumer has no right to change the product after it has been sold". With a straight fucking face. Jaws dropped. There was a solid 10 seconds of silence while all these nerds (I include myself here) processed such a blatant anti-consumer (and anti-us if we're being honest) statement. This was in 2010 (+/- 1 year).

She finished up and left a few minutes later. No doubt some of my classmates went on to work for them, but it set my passionate hatred for Apple in stone right there. Don't care how nice their devices are, even if my husband uses his apple devices all the time (the walled garden works well for his needs), I will never purchase an Apple product for myself.

Can't vs won't. I have no doubt that they could do it, but apple didn't get to be one of the most powerful companies in the world by doing the thing that is cheaper for the user.

They have, but they are not in charge. Apple's goal is to make money; everything else comes as an afterthought.

It's moreso so that they can ensure you can't repair it at all. They'll tell you you need to spend way more money than you need to, then conveniently point you to the upgraded model on the show floor.

I'm just absolutely floored that people still spend so much money on this garbage.

Meh, the ice cream machine is a different thing. I haven't figured out fully how it benefits McD's, I suspect there's little profit margin on ice cream, but having the machine at all still brings (hopeful) people in who buy something else. A bait-and-switch.

McD's uses the same machine as many other places, but they have the temp variance much tighter, so much tighter that after the daily cleaning cycle, it takes hours to get back to temp.

Then (and this is probably what you're referring to), if the machine has a code, the franchise is required by contract to use the repair service that comes with the machine lease.

There's an indedependent dev who wrote a code reader/reset tool for the machines, and McD's isn't happy about it.

I'm not clear how doing the maintenence this way benefits McD's, unless they own the servicing company, and it doesn't appear that they do.

In the end, it means McD's will often not actually have ice cream available. But these are franchises, so it would hurt the franchise most directly. Seems there'd be a potential legal issue here, if it could be proven.

Pumps more millions into a cringe advertising campaign with some mother earth bullshit or so. Yeah sure we love her but let's force more ewaste down her throat. 😂