Apple and planned obsolescence
Discarded technology lines my junk drawers and among them an iPod Nano, 2 iPod touches, and 2 iPhones. And I know that I’m not the worst Apple culprit. How many do you have?
As a product designer, designing and creating to enhance the future is all I think about. However, it is important to remember that we are not simply creating products for our fellow humans. We need to rely on the ecosystem and nature to provide us with the land, water, food and nutrition we need to survive. The one thing designers cannot design is nature. The world was about before humans and will be about after we are gone, so we must ensure our creations and not causing damage to our environment.
It is a responsibility everyone should take but as a designer, an influencer, it always has to be on the top of our mindsets. One big brand comes to mind when I think of unsustainability and waste, Apple. For “the first company to cross the $1 trillion mark in market capitalization” you would have thought they would have put a little bit more effort into saving the planet’s ecosystem.
Apple is not all bad. Their inspiring slogans and touching adverts have been around for years. Apple’s “Think Different” campaign in 1997 is still seen as one of their most inspiring videos. Steve Jobs himself was the master of dreaming big and portrayed this through his company. He is prided on helping and inspiring new generations to “think different” and come up with new, different ideas.
The company Apple has continued to keep inspiring with their new classroom and educational hardware and by promoting events such as celebrating women day all month.
The thing that lets Apple down is its lack of care for sustainability. Although they may well have just inspired the next sustainability expert, which is a bit ironic.
I have 5 unused Apple products in a drawer in my house. Do I use them? No. Do I need them? No. Am I attached to them sentimentally? No. Then why do I keep them? Because I don’t know what to do with them!
The reason behind why I have and renew so many products is down to clumsiness and advancements in technology. I’m a very clumsy person and the majority of my broken phones are down to being dropped or water damaged, which is definitely my fault. But what I don’t understand is why I can’t just replace the damaged part. For me the iPhone 5c was Apple’s best product. I could replace the battery, and the screen and I did so several times. When you type “iPhone 5c repair” into Google, a DIY YouTube video comes up before any repair companies. But don’t tell Apple because they don’t like it when people play with their products. This why they’re making it almost impossible to open and fix their phones. Granted some of their reasons behind this is down to safety issues and the fact that their technology is so advanced and small that it may be impossible to fix without a robot or a micro lab. iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens called the iPhone X “the pinnacle of electronic engineering…the most thought out, carefully designed product in the history of the world.” I’m not faulting this statement. Look at the technological advancement Apple has made since the first Macintosh 35 years ago.
However, another reason why I have so much Apple junk is planned obsolescence, when a product is purpose built to have a certain restricted lifespan, often shorter than the component parts can actually provide. And Apple do this so customers must buy a new product, often a newer and more expensive one. Apple has been particular scrutinised over the last 2 years as Europe cracking down on stopping planned obsolescence. Apple was even fined €10m by Italy for their planned obsolescence according to the guardian. In particular they are accused of deliberately slowing down older phones when new models or updates come out. Apple’s defence was so they can counteract problems in aging lithium-ion batteries, essentially a safety feature. But do we believe this? Surely if it was a safety feature they would not be hiding the effects and it would be public knowledge. Safety is essential to good product design feature and one that no one can fault, so if it was true would it be such big news.
Planned obsolescence does have a hugely valid upside. New products are often better and have new features. These features need research, funding and testing which all have costs. Planned obsolescence means that the company can continue to obtain funds needed to carry out the research. 14.2 billion USD were spent on research within Apple last year, all this behind the scenes, and customers don’t realise they’re paying for more than just material and manufacturing costs. We may still be looking at the first Macintosh if planned obsolescence was not put into practice.
As mentioned before planned obsolescence can be very bad for the environment. Often broken objects get thrown away and not recycled, especially if they have multiple components which must be separated to be recycled. Taking the iPhone again, the case, the screen and even the battery are all widely recycled materials… if you take them apart. But Apple have made their products almost impossible to do so. The materials going into landfill and the chemicals grow and damage the world around us. Is damaging our future really the price to pay for trying to develop it? A balance needed to be kept between developing products to last and work while not wasting materials.
On a positive side to things at Apples company’s annual Worldwide Developers’ Conference in June 2018, Apple announced to do something about their planned obsolescence. Maybe its only after the fine, or it’s finally getting through to them how much it annoys us, but their new IOS update is not going to slow down old models. In fact, it’s going to rejuvenate models all the way back to 2013. Faster app opening times and better battery life is promised. It only took them 16 iPhone models. Lisa Jackson, Apple’s Vice President of Environment, said “because they last longer, you can keep using them, and keeping using them is the best thing for the planet.” Duh!
Apple are an extremely innovative company that believes anything is possible. And they have proven that with great designs and engineering. They just need to stop looking at what could happen and start looking at what is happening to realize that we’re at a global sustainability and global warming crisis and it’s not the time to be developing technology if its causing harm to our planet. There will be no planet to develop if we don’t stop and think.
