After criticism, Apple talks about AirPods recycling program

According to Airpods They are treading the path to possibly becoming Apple's most successful product in the decade, but also critiques of targeted wireless phones are emerging, especially their disposable nature or battery that lasts no more than a year and a half without serious loss. significant capacity.

At the beginning of the month, the VICE He has published a lengthy article encapsulating all these problems and, furthermore, analyzing AirPods from the point of view of social semitics or, in other words, counteracting the three faces of the product: that of class and status, that of manufacturing by condition factories. subhuman in emerging countries is that of the disposable artifact, the components of which will remain on the earth undecayed for many centuries after their owners perish.

The article is very interesting and worth reading in fact, so many people read and passed on its content that even Apple, notoriously selective about the stories and reports that commented through its press office, decided to pronounce.

In a statement sent digital magazine Onezero, Apple decided to focus on the environmental aspects pertinent to AirPods. The company has not denied that the headphones are basically disposable and impossible to repair, and also admitted that the loss of capacity of their batteries is real and significant, adding, however, that these problems are currently unavoidable given the current state of the technologies applied there.

The company also noted that the problems presented by the article of VICE They are not exclusive to AirPods and are repeated in basically any modern electronic device which, in the opinion of this writer, seems to evidence a certain lack of understanding of Ma regarding the larger thematic of the text, but a divus.

IFixit Disassembled AirPods

At one point, Apple is very emphatic in its response: The article never underlines that the company maintains a recycling program for AirPods, as it has for its entire product line. You can deliver your old headphones to Apple stores or your recycling partners, or even in the United States, request that Ma devices be shipped free by a carrier.

Apple has put the Onezero Contact Wistron GreenTech, one of the company's recycling partners who take care of disassembling / reusing parts of AirPods. The magazine's findings, however, were not very encouraging: there is, like the iPhone, a specific machine to take apart the AirPods and ensure maximum use of the components; the tiny headsets are grossly opened out by factory employees with hand tools, removing recyclable parts (battery and drivers and discarding the rest.

More disappointing to realize that Wistron herself confirms that the deficit process, the costs involved in dismantling and recycling, does not cover the gains generated by the reuse of valuable materials such as cobalt. Apple itself pays the company to cover recycling costs, but there is no guarantee that this payment (and therefore practice) will remain in the future when the amount of discarded AirPods begins to increase as the phones get older.

Ultimately, the reminder is that even sending your AirPods out for recycling doesn't mean that they will magically be replaced in nature as environmentally friendly materials. And, as Kevin Purdy of iFixit recalls, the disposable nature of the headphones isn't exactly inevitable: just look at Samsung Galaxy Buds, which are easily detachable and got a good grade on the site's repairability index (six, unlike the note). zero received by the AirPods).

Since Ma loves to be an environmentalist, wouldn't it be a case of going back to the drawing board and thinking of alternatives to make (and increasingly ubiquitous) AirPods more planet-friendly? Leave your opinions below.

via AppleInsider