Apple makes great phones. Now make them last.
The tech giant’s position on Right to Repair is bad news for consumers and the environment
As the dominant force in the U.S. smartphone market, Apple is here to stay. The recent announcement of the iPhone 12 was met with all the fanfare and excitement that we’ve come to expect when Apple launches a new product. The company has earned a loyal customer base that will happily replace its old iPhones with new iPhones when the time comes. But for both consumers who don’t always have an extra few hundred bucks and for environmentalists, that time comes too soon and too frequently.
According to a U.S. PIRG Education Fund report, the environmental cost of manufacturing a new smartphone is staggering. It took 75 pounds of ore and 220 pounds of water to produce a single iPhone 6, the latest model for which we have information, and Americans buy 161 million new smartphones every year. Because each phone carries such a hefty resource toll, empowering consumers to repair their devices is the most impactful step that tech companies can take to help the environment.
If Americans got even one more year each out of their smartphones, the reduction in both carbon emissions and demand for raw materials would be equivalent to taking 636,000 cars off the road and reducing manufacturing material demand by 42.5 million pounds per day.
On many other fronts, Apple is an industry leader when it comes to environmentally friendly business practices. Initiatives including carbon neutrality, sourcing recycled materials and funding the restoration of carbon sinks that absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere — think Colombian mangroves or Kenyan grasslands. Be that as it may, the tech giant continues to waver on a key issue: the Right to Repair.
By greatly limiting repair options and withholding important resources such as manuals, tools and diagnostic software from independent fix-it shops, Apple puts its customers in a bind.
It’s not really in Apple’s best interest financially, in the short term at least, to make it easy, because more repairs means fewer new phones to sell. However, ease of repair also means less frivolous use of natural resources, which lowers carbon emissions and is good for all of us in the long term. Apple says it plans to use 100% renewable energy throughout its manufacturing process by 2030, but its own position and lobbying against Right to Repair undercuts that effort.
You don’t need to be a tech writer to know that where Apple leads, others will follow. A quick browse through iFixit’s repairability scores shows a concerning trend away from repairability throughout the industry since the dawn of the Smartphone Age. iFixit generally rates Apple’s iPhones better than most of the competition, but those grades are still mediocre.
For a company of Apple’s stature, the question isn’t, “Does it have a way to make things better?” It does. By changing its repair policies and reversing its lobbying efforts against Right to Repair laws, Apple can lead the mobile phone industry down a path of sustainability and environmental stewardship. The question is: Does Apple have the will?
