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Documents obtained by Motherboard: "No reuse. No parts harvesting. No resale."
Apple released its Environmental Responsibility Report Wednesday, an annual grandstanding effort that the company uses to position itself as a progressive, environmentally friendly company. Behind the scenes, though, the company undermines attempts to prolong the lifespan of its products.
Apple's new moonshot plan is to make iPhones and computers entirely out of recycled materials by putting pressure on the recycling industry to innovate. But documents obtained by Motherboard using Freedom of Information requests show that Apple's current practices prevent recyclers from doing the most environmentally friendly thing they could do: Salvage phones and computers from the scrap heap.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Monday April 24 2017, @01:57PM (6 children)
Back in the day, you could only RENT equipment from IBM. You could not purchase it. Order the equipment you need, it is delivered and set up. You pay monthly rent on it. The price is high.
But why not purchase? To prevent the emergence of a market for used equipment or parts.
This helps keep prices high on new equipment and parts. You can't exactly charge outrageous prices if Joe's Electronics has plenty of used parts or used phones.
Apple is a wannabe monopolist. The very thing that Apple hated IBM and Microsoft for back in the 1980's. Apple was bitterly and loudly against the very idea of software patents when the idea first emerged (there was an Apple Tech Note about this). Now Apple is a serial patent litigator. (aka, patent troll) You didn't think rounded corners and slide to unlock were because these were such inventive non-obvious ideas, did you? Give any software developer this problem:
Any decent developer would come up with some kind of on screen gesture, which would involve sliding your finger somehow, within about, say, 30 seconds.
In one of Apple's foreign lawsuits, some years ago, against Samsung tablets, and I think it was in a German court, Apple actually made an argument like this: Samsung could have chosen to make its tablets not so light weight, or thicker. They didn't have to copy Apple's thin light weight.
Yes, really. Light weight and thin are Apple exclusive property.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday April 26 2017, @04:50PM (5 children)
I would argue that this was never true. See the case where they sued Franklin for copying their firmware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Electronic_Publishers [wikipedia.org]
PS My first computer was a Franklin Ace 1200.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday April 26 2017, @05:29PM (4 children)
I am aware of Franklin and Orange. That is a copyright issue. Not a patent issue. No software was patentable at that time.
That litigation was years before the idea of software patents.
The Tech Note against software patents was real. I read it and held it in my hands. It was in the huge physical package of information mailed to Apple developers monthly. It was well written and argued, and passionate about the subject. The one idea that I remember in it was this. I can't quote it exactly, but the jist of it was: If software can be patented, I won't be able to write software without a lawyer. And that's just about where we are now today. You would write something new like Linux, and then have Microsoft emerge with some mysterious, undisclosed patents, threatening that you infringe upon these patents. But you won't find out what they are unless Microsoft sues you because you won't buy a patent license.
As for Franklin.
If Franklin had developed their own firmware rather than copying Apple's, I would be on their side instead of Apple's. Much like all the PC clones building their own firmware to be carefully compatible with IBMs PC firmware.
Those early days of micro computers were exciting and fun times.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Thursday April 27 2017, @11:44AM (3 children)
Good point. I didn't realize it was a byte-for-byte copy.
I was young then but started out on the Ace 1200. Here at work I actually found a complete Ace 1200 in the original box with software. That promptly came home with me after they cleaned out the attic along with a Mits Altair 8800b, and an IBM System/23 all mint in boxes. Best find ever.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday April 27 2017, @01:16PM (1 child)
That would be a real find. Very cool. If I found it, I would put it on YouTube. Then I would ponder whether to just box it all back up, possibly with newly written instructions to help some future person be able to set up and operate it, and save it for posterity. Or whether to sell it. Or donate it to a museum.
Late last year I began re-reading BYTE magazine issues from 1975 up to about 1982 ish. It was like a trip back in time. Especially interesting is to watch the rapid standardization and progress of early microcomputers. In 1977 the holy trinity arrives. Off the shelf standard computers: TRS-80, Apple II and Commodore Pet. Low quality BYTE scans here [americanradiohistory.com]. Higher quality here [archive.org].
I remember my love then eventually hate relationship with Apple.
When I got out of college, I started working on an Apple ///. (Apple 3) I enjoyed it much more than the Apple 2. It was amazingly well though out. But it should have had a fan. It's a shame it didn't take off. It was a way more capable machine. But then the IBM PC kept rising and rising. But I got into the Apple Lisa and Macintosh development. I was a card carrying Apple fanboy from about 1982 to 1997. During this time, as BYTE magazine put it, the entire history of the microcomputer industry was an attempt to keep up with Apple. At that time Apple was a great company. By the mid 90's Apple was stumbling both in management and technically. That one time they had a $1 Billion dollar writeoff was a wake up call. They were selling everyone on the future of the Power PC. Especially selling software developers on it. And I was sold. The technical story was fantastic. And the public was sold. But Apple's management kept on building 680x0 Macs, and suddenly realized that the demand was for Power PC macs -- as they had been evangelizing. Nobody wanted a billion dollars of inventory of 680x0 Macs. Their managers didn't believe it would succeed. Or something.
Also Apple couldn't seem to get their new Power PC operating system off the ground.
When Apple bought NeXT and Steve Jobs came back, I had mixed feelings. There were very good reasons why Jobs had been stripped of decision making power at Apple. Jobs left Apple on his own. He wasn't forced out. He was just holding things back. Like the Mac II in 1987. Jobs insisted: no color, ever. No slots. No cpu box separate from the monitor. No optical drives. And other great ideas were suppressed by Jobs because of his vision of an "appliance" computer. Like the iMac in 1997. Amusingly, when Jobs left Apple, his company NeXT built a computer with everything he had not let Apple do. Separate CPU box. Card slots. Color. Optical drives. Etc.
Once Steve got his NeXT OS remade into the next Mac OS, it made obsolete all of the existing PowerPC Mac hardware. Including all of mine. So I suddenly had no use for Apple. If I was going to eventually abandon many thousands (probably $10,000) worth of Mac hardware eventually, then what did I want to replace it with over time? There was this new interesting toy called Linux. And the rest is history.
Once the iPhone vs the world lawsuits started, I became very anti-Apple. Apple simply wasn't the great innovative company I remembered in my youth. Within the first few years of the iPhone, it was copying features from Android. Steve Jobs would come out on stage and say "nobody needs multitasking on a phone" to cheering crowds. Next year, he would introduce an iPhone with multitasking, done poorly, again to cheering crowds. The next year he would introduce multitasking done right, using Android's pull down notification system, again to cheering crowds. Then a taller iPhone in response to Android phones. Then bigger screens in response to Android. Then Apple seemed to realize that it was profitable to make sure not to use industry standard connectors and cables. Even more profitable to change them every year. Not a company I could like.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Thursday April 27 2017, @05:43PM
This is my ATT unic pc booting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aj1n2_qEq5k&t=29s [youtube.com]. Haven't started it since. I also have all the manuals including compilers and disks. Even have the original box but it was damaged somewhat.
The Ace 1200, 8800b and System/23 are still in boxes. The two I really want to play with are the 8800b and the Ace 1200. The IBM needs 8" floppy disks and I don't know what I have for software. I hope to get them out and cleaned up this summer.
We never became an apple household even after having the Franklin. My father moved to the PC and our first was a Canon 8086 with color graphics and a 20 meg hard disk around the mid 80's. Then he took that to his business and bought an ATT PC6300 for home. I wrote a lot of my school reports in Symantec Q&A and printed them on what I am pretty sure was a Juki daisywheel printer from that 6300. It only had a 10 meg disk but it managed to hold all of our documents and software. My father even had a CAD package on that thing which I used to draw stupid characters along with my friend. From there we jumped to a white box 486 DX33 (Fastdata was the brand) with a 170Meg hard disk and VGA graphics. Big leap from the monochrome PC6300. We also got a new printer, a Citizen 200GX with the color ribbon kit and tractor feed kit. First color pictures were again stupid characters me and my friend drew in paint and one of those clip art programs, think it was from Corel. The next system was a Micron 486 DX2 66 which I still have all of the original parts to save for the hard disk which died. That ran Wolfenstein, Doom, and after the pentium overdrive, Quake. By then I knew how to build a PC from playing with upgrades so I built my first PC in high school around 1998 with a single Pentium 166 using a Tyan dual processor AT board with the HX pro chip set and 32M of EDO RAM. Stuffed that into the Micron case and put the 486 board with pentium overdrive into a junk 286 case I got from the high school dumpster. I then bought a Voodoo2 for the pentium and played quake 2 on that bad boy. Those were my golden years for sure.
I sometimes wish I didn't miss the microcomputer age of the 70's/early 80's but that was satisfied in university when we built our own 8088 board and programmed it in assembler. Best class I ever took.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday April 27 2017, @01:18PM
BYTE magazine, April 1980, page 115.
NEW HIGH-SPEED COMMUNICATIONS BUS: Xerox Corporation recently made a public announcement of a new concept of processor-to-processor communications intended for an office environment. This novel concept is called "Ethernet", and is a result of some of the work being done in their research labs. In this concept, a single coaxial cable is used as a high-speed communications bus between all processors; communication protocol is handled through software or software supplemented by special-purpose hardware. Rumor has it that an Ethernet processor is now being developed by some form of joint arrangement between Xerox and Intel.
BYTE magazine, April 1980, page 116.
IBM INDICATES NEW TECHNOLOGY COMING: New computer technologies from IBM will be used in computer systems available at the end of this decade. These systems will employ superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs) using high-speed (0.06 nanosecond) Josephson-junction logic with 0.5 nanosecond programmable memory with up to 1000 connections between chip and carrier.
IBM also plans super-density logic cards (0.6 by 1.2 inch) with more than 300 "micro-pins" per card and up to 2500 printed wiring channels per inch. This will mean up to 10 times the density and 100 times the performance of the new IBM 4300-series systems. IBM will be able to build a processor with an internal performance of 70 million instructions per second (MIPS), 32 K byte cache memory, and 16 megabyte main memory in a 6-inch cube. Josephson-junction logic requires immersion in a liquid helium bath for proper operation.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.