Apple's anti-repair and anti-refurbishment practices: Difference between revisions

|Type=Repairability, Repairability & Ownership Restriction, Digital restrictions, Planned Obsolesence, Planned Obsolescence, Service Termination

|Description=Apple's behaviors have contributed to the company's hardware being converted to e-waste, such as with removing legacy-supported software

}}Since the inception of the [[iPhone]] in 2007, [[Apple]] has contributed severely to the production of e-waste from its products by blocking consumers in various methods. This has ranged from [[Apple authorized repair|authorized repair]], to the blocking of sideloading 3rd-party software, and disposing of legacy apps and legacy appstore access.<!-- This might actually be a theme article now that I think about it...

===Greenwashing<!-- Depending on where the focus of this article will go, it may make more sense to split this into its own article -->===

Apple claims to be environmentally friendly and invests significant amounts of funds in corresponding PR campaigns,<ref>{{Cite web |title=Environment {{!}} Mother Nature |url=https://www.apple.com/environment/mother-nature/ |access-date=2025-09-15 |website=Apple}}</ref> but the reality is not quite as green.  

Customers are lead to think that their purchases and frequent replacement of their devices do not have a negative impact on the environment, which is not the case.  

Apple shares manufacturing capacity at Chinese/Taiwanese companies FoxConn and Pegatron with other companies. If Apple uses a hypothetical 20% of their manufacturing capacity, and company B, C,  D, and E also each take up 20%, and the company doing the manufacturing runs on 20% renewably generated energy, now Apple as well as companies B, C, D, and E will each publicly claim that their manufacturing runs 100% on renewable energy. In other words, each company will claim the 20% renewable energy was used for ''their'' production.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Gieselmann |first=Hartmut |date=2023 |title=Von wegen CO2-neutral – Umweltexperten werfen Apple Greenwashing vor |url=https://www.heise.de/select/ct/2023/23/2326512021124424489 |journal=c't Magazin für Computertechnik [Germany] |volume=2023 |issue=23 |pages=49}}</ref>

Apple, like many companies, regularly emphasises how environmentally friendly their packaging is and highlight advancements in this area.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Apple 2030 – We’ve reduced our emissions by over 60% |url=https://www.apple.com/environment/ |access-date=2025-09-15 |website=Apple}}</ref>

 

This deliberately distracts from the fact that only a negligible fraction of the environmental footprint of an electronic device comes from the packaging, as it is made of siginificant amounts or rare earth minerals, metals and mined components and consuming vast amounts of energy, water and fuel in manufacturing and transport.

 

Some of the environmental advancements touted by Apple could also be argued to be environmentally beneficial side effects of purely economic decisions aimed at maximizing profit, such as shipping iPhones without chargers.<ref>{{Cite web |last=Dragan |first=Lauren |date=2023-09-12 |title=iPhones No Longer Come With a Charger or Headphones. Here’s What to Get If You Need Them. |url=https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/iphone-12-charger-headphones-options/ |access-date=2025-09-15 |website=The New York Times}}</ref>

Apple sells many of their base models with storage and memory specifications that are well below the industry average, despite the memory having to do double duty as both main memory and graphics card memory<ref>{{Cite web |last=Simon |first=Michael |date=2023-11-08 |title=Apple defends 8GB of RAM in the MacBook Pro as ‘analogous to 16GB’ in a PC |url=https://www.macworld.com/article/2130974/bob-borchers-defends-8gb-ram-macbook-pro-analogous-to-16gb-pc.html |access-date=2025-09-15 |website=Macworld}}</ref>. This gives users the choice between an underpowered base model, or paying a multiple of common industry prices<ref>{{Cite web |last=Hussain |first=Imran |date=2019-12-03 |title=Apple Sells 16GB RAM for $400 – Almost 700% Higher Price Than Other OEMs |url=https://wccftech.com/apple-sells-16gb-ram-for-400-almost-700-higher-price-than-other-oems/ |access-date=2025-09-15 |website=WCCFTech}}</ref> for higher-specc'ed versions. It should be noted that the price difference for the components that Apple would pay in manufacturing are within a few cents.

This also means that if devices are factory reset to be handed to other people or to be sold on the used market, the built-in first party apps are the only ones that remain accessible.

Moreover, Apple does not appear to always test new versions of apps on old hardware, so sometimes the last update to an app breaks it for that device, sometimes due to bugs, sometimes due to increased memory requirements.[1] Since the App Store allows no downgrades, this leaves the user with an app that is unusable on that model of device. If Apple allowed either app downgrades or independent installation of apps, these devices would remain completely functional for users of those apps.