

Stop shipping hardware products that are only “beautifully designed” - brendanlim
http://www.wellsriley.com/blog/2012/stop-shipping-hardware-products-that-are-only-beautifully-designed/

======
drone
To be clear: yes, you can make circuits out of all sorts of cool stuff. But,
you can't make the high-speed, high-performance, ultra-compact circuits
required to meet the demands of the products out of just anything. I'd love to
see one doing layout for a big fat BGA device oscillating at 1.5GHz on a
lasagna noodle, much less getting down to sub-6-mil traces, or 4+ layers.

Pray tell though, what affordable semi-conductor material is there out there
to replace silicon, that is readily recyclable and achieves the same target?

I fear, too many people want their cake and to eat it too - you want the
latest and greatest capabilities (want, not need), but you want them to make
it in a way which it will not function, so that you can feel good about it.
("You," being the standard consumer, not any one person in particular.)

------
NonEUCitizen
"PCBs (Printed Circuit Boards) are guilty too – recyclability is incredibly
low (and very expensive) and they do not decompose. Why can’t use a
biodegradable material instead of silicon?"

PCBs are NOT made of silicon. Integrated circuits are (but not their
packages). PCBs are usually FR-4 material:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printed_circuit_board>

~~~
wells-riley
Thanks for enlightening me... updated my post accordingly.

------
astrodust
The problem with products is not that they're made from materials like
aluminum or silicon or glass but that these materials are combined in ways
that make it very difficult to extract them from the finish product when
recycling.

Apple has gone a long way to making parts that are more "pure", where, for
instance, the chassis of new computers is milled from a solid piece of metal
that, once removed, can be shredded and reformed with no more difficulty than
a drink can. The same goes, in principle, for the glass.

The plastics in most computers are made from an exotic blend of materials and
are not easily reprocessed.

What we need more than cardboard computers is standards on how to manufacture
products so they can be unmanufactured in the end and rebuilt into other
things. The goal here is for 0% loss in the recovery cycle. Anything below
100% is not, by definition, sustainable.

If that sounds impossible, consider that the natural ecosystem in which we all
live tends towards a 100% recycling rate. There are very few natural
byproducts that do not have a recovery path. For instance, most trees produce
enormous amounts of "garbage" in the form of leaves but these are almost
immediately recycled.

Given that the natural world has been doing this for literally billions of
years, there is much to be learned.

A great book on this subject is _Cradle to Cradle_
(<http://www.mcdonough.com/cradle_to_cradle.htm>) which proposes radically re-
thinking our industrial cycle.

~~~
eswangren
Interesting that you bring up Apple here considering the fact that it's latest
products cannot be recycled due to design decisions (I.e., melding the glass
display onto the frame)

~~~
astrodust
A clean separation of materials is not required at the recycling facility, at
least in theory, as most of the recycling methods being explored involve
shredding the product up front and separating the resulting bits.

The recycling process becomes extremely complicated when the composition of
the materials is non-uniform. The common worst offender in this regard is
plastic bottles with several different types of plastic layered together. The
opposite is a glass bottle with a metal cap.

Provided you can smash and pulverize a product into sufficiently fine pieces
you can separate it by material.

------
mirashii
As is true with most things, this is a case of where consumers need to vote
with their wallets. While it would be great if the world ran on great
intentions and thinking for the future, the reality is that money talks today,
and today is the most important of all days, because nobody knows if they'll
be around tomorrow.

------
mindslight
tldr - Admirer of gadget fashion design ponders wastefulness of consumer
culture. Wants for token "recycling" to soothe his conscience. Looks at
conceptual art projects as if they're close to practical technology. Finishes
up penance and walks away thinking that he has earnestly evaluated his own
wastefulness.

------
dgreensp
I don't see how "built to last" means "built out of cardboard." I can't find
the original Rob Walker piece, but it sounds like it's talking about timeless
quality vs. empty fashion, not about the environment.

An iPhone lasts a long time, and the author should be comforted that not
everyone can afford to buy a new one every time Apple bumps the version,
naturally limiting Apple's ability to fill landfills with barely-used iPhones
by launching new product features.

The net footprint of a big company like Apple is surely complicated, as there
are many ways to offset one's impact. I'm no expert, but Apple has a whole
website on their strategy (<http://www.apple.com/environment/>) that shows
they are making an effort, perhaps a large one.

~~~
wmf
No, he's saying that products that are destined to be obsoleted quickly should
_not_ be built to last. If something is disposable, make it _look_ disposable.
Of course, that's not going to happen.

~~~
dgreensp
Even if all our electronics were redesigned to biodegrade overnight if left
outside in heavy rain, what's the point in making them _look_ disposable?

~~~
wmf
It's more "honest". (Note that I'm not saying I agree with this argument.)

------
gnaffle
Please, don't conclude that Apple (and now Google) products aren't recyclable
because of a quote from Wired citing some "friends from the recycling
industry".

One thing I do know is that iPhones and other Apple products have high resale
value, that there's an industry thriving on selling replacement screens,
batteries etc.

This wouldn't be the case if most people considered these devices crap and
obsolete the day a new product was introduced.

From my experience, people keep their Apple products for many years, often
giving them to other family members when they upgrade themselves. If they
weren't built to last, this would be impossible to do.

The real landfill fillers are the crappy plastic phones that get scratced and
damaged.

~~~
gms7777
Don't confuse recyclable with reusable.

I think your mental timescale here is a bit too small. "Built to last" means
what? 10 years, optimistically. That means that in 10 years, those products
will still be sitting in a landfill...for hundreds of millions of years.

There are choices that hardware designers can make that will help mitigate
this at least to some extent, but unfortunately, it appears as if we are
moving further and further away from this (the glass glued to the display
being one example).

~~~
grecy
> Don't confuse recyclable with reusable.

Remember, of the three things we're all supposed to be doing, recycling is the
absolute worst.

Followed by reuse, then reduce.

It could be argued that making a device reusable is actually better than
making it recyclable.

The consumers of this world seem to be caught up in this "recycle it" craze.
Somehow it's fine to churn through 30 plastic water bottles a week, because
they are going in the recycling.

In reality, the water bottles should be gone entirely.

~~~
gms7777
And if we were limited to choosing between reducing, reusing or recycling,
then perhaps we would want to scrap recycling all together. But we're not. I
would argue that making a device that can be reused and recycled is better
than both.

I'm not saying there is a problem with having items that are reusable (on the
contrary, its great. The longer the lifecycle of an object, the less overall
objects we produce). I'm just saying that while we are trying to limit the
amount of "product" that is produced (the net effect of reusing and
recycling), we also need to keep an eye on how to get rid of all this
"product" once we are done with it.

Besides recycling is just another form of reusing, is it not?

~~~
grecy
>And if we were limited to choosing between reducing, reusing or recycling,
then perhaps we would want to scrap recycling all together. But we're not.

We're not "limited" to doing any of those three things. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
is all about choices. What we "should" be doing. What's "best". We should
"aim" to reuse rather than recycle.

> Besides recycling is just another form of reusing, is it not?

Recycling uses exponentially more energy, especially when you're talking about
glass and aluminum.

~~~
gms7777
> We should "aim" to reuse rather than recycle.

I don't see why this is a XOR situation. Ideally, we would be reducing
production, and what we do produce would be readily reusable AND (eventually,
when we have gotten past the useful lifecycle of an object, and every object
has one) recyclable.

------
jasonwatkinspdx
If we charged for inputs and wastes properly, that would pressure economic
chains from both ends to minimize environmental impact.

We don't. For inputs we generally charge the cost of digging something up out
of the dirt, and for outputs we charge the cost of burying something under the
dirt. We shouldn't be surprised our economies have become a wasteful race of
pleasurable consumption.

We're forcing our descendants to subsidize our lifestyle.

------
X-Istence
I honestly think that in due time (1+ years from now) someone will have
figured out a way to recycle those new Apple tech toys. Glue melts, glass and
aluminum has different melting points...

I honestly think that people are making a bigger deal out of it than it is.
Also, the better something is designed the longer I will personally want to
use it. Make stuff out of cardboard, but if it starts falling apart it will
end up being thrown out sooner rather than later. My family still uses and
owns the iBook G4 I purchased in 2004...

------
antidoh
"why not embrace the throwaway culture and just make everything easy and
practical to throw away?"

Because enough people say the following:

"I, for one, love my shiny new iPhone each year. No amount of (my own)
preaching is going to get me to keep my iPhone 4S when Apple announces the
iPhone 5 this year."

~~~
gnaffle
I don't think most people say that. Tech geeks certainly do, but they're a
minority. And in any case, most people don't have the money to buy a new
smartphone every year.

If Apple had an opt-in program where you could upgrade the screen, battery and
logic board of your phone for $100, most people would opt for that.

------
herval
More like "please stop copying Apple's advertisement style". This is getting
so out of hand that in Nexus Q case, for instance, you get this beautiful "ad-
documentary" with a lot of people saying hyperbolic catch-phrases and not a
single clue on what's the product all about...

~~~
rimantas
Apple's advertising style is showing how device works—at least in case of
iPhone and iPad.

~~~
herval
I mean the visual style - the cameras, use of background music, people
reciting "beautiful", "astonishing", "marvelous" things staring at some point
right/left of the camera, etc. As I said, they missed the most important
aspect here: showing what the product actually does...

~~~
sp332
Here are the ads Apple ran for the new iPhone. All of them show the device
being used. <https://www.apple.com/iphone/videos/>

------
dougabug
"They’re all designed and engineered in-house [...]"

Isn't the Nexus 7 hardware designed by Asus?

