The scrap part is the worst of this. Nice single use laptops on 3 year turnover cycles? No thanks. Unless Apple is responsible for turning the left overs into usable objects and not diverted to e-waste.
In the article they outline a pretty decent way to overcome this through apple themselves which I'd be much happier with.
It's also a remarkably effective e-waste creation program. But I don't see the sense in creating more (probably poorly controlled) e-waste as a solution to this problem.
A safe has a pretty extremely effective security feature that prevents the kinds of thievery at the scale of Apple devices: namely, mass. A secondary contribution of course comes from the tendency to be placed deep inside a building.
Apple devices wouldn't sell at all if they tried to implement this kind of security.
In the article they outline a pretty decent way to overcome this through apple themselves which I'd be much happier with.