Or simply, one tonne. In fact I'd guess that the engineers, thinking in SI units, told the PR people that 'we recovered a tonne', rounding to that figure for them because it sounds neat. Then the PR people converted to pounds for older readers, which comes out as the very precise sounding 2,204. So the figure is probably rounded but then presented as being much more precise than it is.
But since this gold, did they actually measure the weight in international troy ounces, then convert (correctly or otherwise) to avoirdupois pounds, then maybe another incorrect or correct conversion to kilograms and metric tonnes?
I don't understand this whole "tonne" thing. Why overload a word that already has two other conflicting meanings (the imperial short ton and the imperial long ton) when you already have a word that is more canonical and completely unambiguous in "Megagram"? Plus it just sounds cool.
Because no one has any concept of that unit of measure. They use relatable units of measure, that's where the whole banana for scale thing came from because almost everyone has a grasp on the dimensions of a banana. People know cars weight tons and so a ton is a vastly more relatable unit of measure.
Why not? It shows the relationship between itself and other metric units better than "tonne" does. It would start sounding natural if people started using it.
It's only a problem in the US. The Commonwealth ton is only 1.6% larger than the tonne, so the distinction is usually insignificant. Most of the world has no knowledge of either the short or long ton.
Likewise, confusion between "mills" (millimetres) and "mils" (thousandths of an inch) are an exclusively American problem.
The American adherence to customary units is a constant annoyance for electronics engineers - an 0603 resistor could measure 0.6mm x 0.3mm or ~1.5mm x ~0.76mm
A resistor measuring ~0.6mm x 0.3mm is an 0201. (2 1/100ths of an inch by 1 1/100th of an inch.) The standard doesn't make sense in SI units, but it's the standard.
SMD passives are listed in both metric and imperial units. Most sizes are unambiguous, but 0402 and 0603 resistors exist in both series. There's also possibility for confusion between the imperial 01005 and the metric 1005. These parts are specified in metric, making the imperial sizes purely nominal.
The metric/imperial split is a constant nuisance. Most board houses and PTH packages use mils, but the vast majority of SMT IC packages are specified in millimetres. Board layouts almost always necessitate switching between imperial and metric units; Layout software includes features to manage this. Wire gauges are a total mess - AWG, SWG and mm are all in common use. Standard pin headers and derivative connectors are 0.1" pitch (2.54mm), but JST connectors are 2.5mm pitch. Conversion errors have caused countless production problems.
Sadly also a Canadian problem. We're nominally a metric country, but we're very much a hybrid. When we went to metric, many things still stayed in customary units, but with metric names. I'll likely never ask someone to go get me 454g of sugar from the grocery store, it'll be a pound. Your 2x4 is going to be 8 feet long. You're going to use 1/2" bolts. My generation does consistently use litres and celsius though!
Mils really confused me when I was learning PCB design. In the UK a thousandth of an inch is not a common unit anymore, but it isn't unknown. The problem is that we call it a "thou".
Also, the gold was not just from iPhones. Macs and iPads are included in that number. What a weird non-story. It would be interesting to know the cost of the recycling program to know if the materials recovered paid for the program.
Step 2: determine it costs too much to repair "broken" iPhones (see step 1).
Step 3: Burn the whole lot down for precious metals.
What an enormous win for the environment and recycling! There are plenty of companies that will already do step 3, but pretty much nobody other than Apple has the opportunity to do something about the vastly more important step 2.
yeah right... a snazzy looking robot my arse.. more like children in China and India sitting in squaller pulling them apart by hand, burning the plastic by hand and sniffing it to determine the plastic type..
"Because the U.S has not ratified the Basel Convention or its Ban Amendment, and has no domestic laws forbidding the export of toxic waste, the Basel Action Network estimates that about 80% of the electronic waste directed to recycling in the U.S. does not get recycled there at all, but is put on container ships and sent to countries such as China.[6][7][8][9] Guiyu in the Shantou region of China, and Delhi and Bangalore in India, have electronic waste processing areas.[6][10][11]"
iPhones are VERY repairable. Source: I run a repair shop and iPhones are most of our business.
You want to talk about phones that are not repairable? Let's talk about ANY HTC phone. They're total crap to repair.
The worst, though, are the cheap MetroPCS and Cricket Android phones--the ones you've probably never heard of but that we get calls about every day, like HTC Desires, Samsung Galaxy Core Primes, and a whole line of tiny LG phones with odd model numbers. THOSE phones are completely unrepairable--not because we can't get the parts, but because the repair, which runs $80 or so to fix a broken screen, is almost twice what it costs to just buy a new phone.
These phones are unabashedly sold to poor and even to homeless people, who then get the choice of desperately trying to continue using them when they inevitably break, or ponying up another $50 to buy a new one. It's a way, way worse model than iPhones, and one the HN community probably isn't familiar with (I didn't know anything about this until I started running a repair store.) It's a pretty disgusting market.
I agree, even as a major iOS detractor, that recent iPhones are amazingly repairable, while there's an opposite trend for many (most?) high-end Android phones these days.
But is it really "disgusting" that a phone is cheaper to replace than repair because it is extremely cheap to begin with? Following that argument, they would solve the problem by raising the price of the new phone.
You have to put yourself in the shoes of the poor or homeless person who walks through the door of our repair shop. They don't have enough money to buy a computer. So their entire life is on that phone: photos, contacts, documents, email. They've applied to jobs through that phone. Everything is centered around that item.
Then it breaks. And since the software is usually so crappy on it, there's no consistent way for them to have backed it up. Sometimes the contacts are on the SIM card--sometimes not. Sometimes they've backed up to the Google cloud; sometimes they didn't understand what that was, so they just hit "skip" when it asked them to set up that account.
So when that phone breaks, they've lost EVERYTHING. Now I know there are some folks on HN, because I've been around here long enough, who would say "They should just learn how to back it up!" And to that I would say, who is teaching them? Can you? These people are sometimes barely literate, often only with a high school education (or less.) We can't expect them to understand what a "Google cloud" is. And heck, even as technical people, many of us don't back up stuff properly, especially personal items.
So when that phone breaks, they've lost a lot. Personal photos of their kids. Important contacts. The calendar that reminded them where that job interview next week was.
Many of these same folks would be far better served buying a used iPhone 4S, which is $55 to fix when a screen breaks. But the difference between $50 for a Cricket HTC Desire and a $100 iPhone 4 could be a week or two--a week or two during which they cannot survive without their phone. That's why I say it's a disgusting market.
Insightful comment, as someone constantly surrounded by computers (I have four inside 20ft right now) it had never occurred how incredibly dependent someone could be on a cheap phone.
I worked at a now deceased photo-sharing startup, and the stats were so bad. Most photos never left the device, meaning people had all of these important life moments in only one place. Lose or break your iPhone? All of baby's first whatevers, gone forever. Pictures of your mom's last weeks? Gone to the ether.
The part where I will disagree with you slightly is this wasn't just a problem of the barely literate, or even technical people overlooking backups. When we did user studies it was essentially everyone that came in - none of them had off-device backups, or knew how to share. The number of people for which "sharing photos" meant holding up the phone with a picture on the screen while the other person took a picture of the phone was depressing. The sharing UI was totally opaque to them. I see this on Instagram today, where people take pictures of the display on a DSLR in order to share the photos.
I apologize for the rant. I acknowledge this is a religious hobby-horse for me. At the aforementioned startup one of the stats that killed me was the average views of a picture once taken was essentially 0 - pictures go to SD cards to die. No better for phones. At the time Facebook was getting three or four Flickrs a week, and the stats were still pretty grim. We have to better serve customers, but I don't know what that looks like. Verizon offers a cloud-like service for contacts and photos (I have this on my Samsung U365 flip phone), but it's a pain to set up and unclear when it will cost you extra.
Bonus story: smart guy I worked with bought a really nice new camera, they default picture size was too big (too many pixels, too large files) to attach to emails, so he did the obvious thing: set the default resolution of the camera to something low enough to fit. WHY OH WHY BUY A 5 MEGAPIXEL CAMERA THEN SET THE DEFAULT RESOLUTION TO VGA? Because resizing everything was a PITA. Another unhappy customer experience. We (the industry) need to enable our customers, not frustrate them.
You're responding to someone who runs a repair shop...
Seriously though it reads as if that shop has fair repair charges, and it's simply easier (thus cheaper) to repair an iPhone than some no-name android. This conforms to my experience with other sorts of equipment. You'll always pay more when the case has panels attached by screws, rather than two plastic shells that can only be mated once.
I've only ever broken one screen on a phone, and that is not so broken that it is unusable. I appreciate other people break screens more often, but never breaking the screens is a fairly common situation. Given that old iPhones continue to trade at a multiple of a cheap android, you could probably pay for at least 2 screen repairs with the difference, and you would be paying for those well down the line. The economics for somebody who is not exceptionally clumsy probably still supports buying the cheap android.
That probably doesn't help the repair shop guy too much, but making the poor support his dying business model doesn't sound fantastic on the ethical scale either
Sounds like, "Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness"
> The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
> Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
> But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
> This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
That's a problem of labour costs rather than design. It sucks for your homeless customers, but I can't understand your outrage.
By your definition, these phones would only be "repairable" if they were vastly more expensive to buy. Does it really help low-income customers if the cheapest phones available are several hundred dollars?
These phones are primarily intended for the developing and middle-income world, where lower labour costs make them perfectly economical to repair.
Gold, silver or copper are used in electronic devices as a conductor. Your device should have one as well, whether in gold or silver, depends on the makers. But the quantity of the metal used might not be as much as you are thinking.
I wish they made those tiny little round white stickers they have inside Apple products out of gold [1]. They keep getting wet and voiding my warranty.
I'm not sure if sarcasm or not, but that's the point. If they got wet enough to 'trip', then enlighten damage could have been done to internal components to void your warranty anyway.
For those who haven't had a physics class, that's garbage because silver is somewhat more conductive than copper, which is slightly more conductive than gold.
The main benefit of gold is that it's more stable than copper, so it's a good material for connector contact surfaces, but the bulk of the contact should be something else like copper or steel, depending on the relative importance of electrical or mechanical properties.
I remember back when i did film photography, some people used to recover the silver from the solutions used to print onto paper (you know, from a negative).
Something that we just started seeing in robotics at the beginning of 2015, dedicated disassembly robots. They should be able to replace much of the disassembly done in places like China or Ghana where containers of old electronics have been dumped. In terms of a project that helps the world I would totally invest in such robots.
Notably, to me, they have recovered 4x as much steel as aluminum, suggesting to me that a significant part of their recycling operation is on non-Apple PCs and or quite old Apple equipment since the bulk of their current products (for in some cases 10 years) are composed of aluminum.
I knew of an assembly worker at HP Labs whose job including trimming off gold flash. It was a small amount but she threw it in her desk drawer. After a few years she sold the collection for a lot of money. She was caught and had to pay it back.
92 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 73.4 ms ] threadOther communities talk about radiation risk in terms of radiotion you get from a banana.
It's about as useful as double-decker buses or football fields.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2z-OLG0KyR4
Short ton: 2000 lb.
Imperial (UK) long ton: 2,240 lb.
Longweight ton: 2400 lb.
I'm in the boat business where a register ton is 100 cubic feet.
There are more, especially once you get to other types of pounds.
Likewise, confusion between "mills" (millimetres) and "mils" (thousandths of an inch) are an exclusively American problem.
The American adherence to customary units is a constant annoyance for electronics engineers - an 0603 resistor could measure 0.6mm x 0.3mm or ~1.5mm x ~0.76mm
A resistor measuring ~0.6mm x 0.3mm is an 0201. (2 1/100ths of an inch by 1 1/100th of an inch.) The standard doesn't make sense in SI units, but it's the standard.
http://www.newark.com/chip-smd-resistors/resistor-case-style...
The metric/imperial split is a constant nuisance. Most board houses and PTH packages use mils, but the vast majority of SMT IC packages are specified in millimetres. Board layouts almost always necessitate switching between imperial and metric units; Layout software includes features to manage this. Wire gauges are a total mess - AWG, SWG and mm are all in common use. Standard pin headers and derivative connectors are 0.1" pitch (2.54mm), but JST connectors are 2.5mm pitch. Conversion errors have caused countless production problems.
EDIT: Correction, all except for the number for recovered steel.
[1] http://images.apple.com/environment/pdf/Apple_Environmental_...
Also, the gold was not just from iPhones. Macs and iPads are included in that number. What a weird non-story. It would be interesting to know the cost of the recycling program to know if the materials recovered paid for the program.
Step 2: determine it costs too much to repair "broken" iPhones (see step 1).
Step 3: Burn the whole lot down for precious metals.
What an enormous win for the environment and recycling! There are plenty of companies that will already do step 3, but pretty much nobody other than Apple has the opportunity to do something about the vastly more important step 2.
It seems they have a deft touch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYshVbcEmUc
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone_recycling
"Because the U.S has not ratified the Basel Convention or its Ban Amendment, and has no domestic laws forbidding the export of toxic waste, the Basel Action Network estimates that about 80% of the electronic waste directed to recycling in the U.S. does not get recycled there at all, but is put on container ships and sent to countries such as China.[6][7][8][9] Guiyu in the Shantou region of China, and Delhi and Bangalore in India, have electronic waste processing areas.[6][10][11]"
http://edition.cnn.com/2013/05/30/world/asia/china-electroni...
http://www.cnet.com/news/the-environmental-pitfalls-at-the-e...
Would be interesting to see a real follow-up, rather than just some PR-numbers from Apple.
I'm pretty confident that recovering gold economically involves smelting and other rather destructive processes.
You want to talk about phones that are not repairable? Let's talk about ANY HTC phone. They're total crap to repair.
The worst, though, are the cheap MetroPCS and Cricket Android phones--the ones you've probably never heard of but that we get calls about every day, like HTC Desires, Samsung Galaxy Core Primes, and a whole line of tiny LG phones with odd model numbers. THOSE phones are completely unrepairable--not because we can't get the parts, but because the repair, which runs $80 or so to fix a broken screen, is almost twice what it costs to just buy a new phone.
These phones are unabashedly sold to poor and even to homeless people, who then get the choice of desperately trying to continue using them when they inevitably break, or ponying up another $50 to buy a new one. It's a way, way worse model than iPhones, and one the HN community probably isn't familiar with (I didn't know anything about this until I started running a repair store.) It's a pretty disgusting market.
But is it really "disgusting" that a phone is cheaper to replace than repair because it is extremely cheap to begin with? Following that argument, they would solve the problem by raising the price of the new phone.
Then it breaks. And since the software is usually so crappy on it, there's no consistent way for them to have backed it up. Sometimes the contacts are on the SIM card--sometimes not. Sometimes they've backed up to the Google cloud; sometimes they didn't understand what that was, so they just hit "skip" when it asked them to set up that account.
So when that phone breaks, they've lost EVERYTHING. Now I know there are some folks on HN, because I've been around here long enough, who would say "They should just learn how to back it up!" And to that I would say, who is teaching them? Can you? These people are sometimes barely literate, often only with a high school education (or less.) We can't expect them to understand what a "Google cloud" is. And heck, even as technical people, many of us don't back up stuff properly, especially personal items.
So when that phone breaks, they've lost a lot. Personal photos of their kids. Important contacts. The calendar that reminded them where that job interview next week was.
Many of these same folks would be far better served buying a used iPhone 4S, which is $55 to fix when a screen breaks. But the difference between $50 for a Cricket HTC Desire and a $100 iPhone 4 could be a week or two--a week or two during which they cannot survive without their phone. That's why I say it's a disgusting market.
The part where I will disagree with you slightly is this wasn't just a problem of the barely literate, or even technical people overlooking backups. When we did user studies it was essentially everyone that came in - none of them had off-device backups, or knew how to share. The number of people for which "sharing photos" meant holding up the phone with a picture on the screen while the other person took a picture of the phone was depressing. The sharing UI was totally opaque to them. I see this on Instagram today, where people take pictures of the display on a DSLR in order to share the photos.
I apologize for the rant. I acknowledge this is a religious hobby-horse for me. At the aforementioned startup one of the stats that killed me was the average views of a picture once taken was essentially 0 - pictures go to SD cards to die. No better for phones. At the time Facebook was getting three or four Flickrs a week, and the stats were still pretty grim. We have to better serve customers, but I don't know what that looks like. Verizon offers a cloud-like service for contacts and photos (I have this on my Samsung U365 flip phone), but it's a pain to set up and unclear when it will cost you extra.
Bonus story: smart guy I worked with bought a really nice new camera, they default picture size was too big (too many pixels, too large files) to attach to emails, so he did the obvious thing: set the default resolution of the camera to something low enough to fit. WHY OH WHY BUY A 5 MEGAPIXEL CAMERA THEN SET THE DEFAULT RESOLUTION TO VGA? Because resizing everything was a PITA. Another unhappy customer experience. We (the industry) need to enable our customers, not frustrate them.
Seriously though it reads as if that shop has fair repair charges, and it's simply easier (thus cheaper) to repair an iPhone than some no-name android. This conforms to my experience with other sorts of equipment. You'll always pay more when the case has panels attached by screws, rather than two plastic shells that can only be mated once.
That probably doesn't help the repair shop guy too much, but making the poor support his dying business model doesn't sound fantastic on the ethical scale either
> The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
> Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
> But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
> This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
https://thebillfold.com/to-terry-pratchett-who-gave-us-sam-v...
By your definition, these phones would only be "repairable" if they were vastly more expensive to buy. Does it really help low-income customers if the cheapest phones available are several hundred dollars?
These phones are primarily intended for the developing and middle-income world, where lower labour costs make them perfectly economical to repair.
He's outraged because it sucks for his homeless customers.
[1] http://www.ebay.com/itm/10x-Water-Damage-Warranty-Sensor-Ind...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhuwO8AjM7k
A "business" is a money-making hobby.
Just garbage reporting.
The main benefit of gold is that it's more stable than copper, so it's a good material for connector contact surfaces, but the bulk of the contact should be something else like copper or steel, depending on the relative importance of electrical or mechanical properties.
Something that we just started seeing in robotics at the beginning of 2015, dedicated disassembly robots. They should be able to replace much of the disassembly done in places like China or Ghana where containers of old electronics have been dumped. In terms of a project that helps the world I would totally invest in such robots.
[1] (Warning its Mashable) http://mashable.com/2016/03/21/apple-liam-recycling-robot/#f...
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+tonne+of+gold+in+cub...
A gallon of gold is 75lbs, almost 10x as dense as water, and worth about $3million