Since Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007, smartphones have become an economic and cultural force. Apple has now sold over two billion iPhones worldwide.
Both professional reviewers and customers generally praise the experience of using iPhones. Apple maintains a lot of control over how iPhone parts are made, which gives iPhones a pleasing consistency.
Yet the sheer amount of iPhones in existence comes with environmental challenges. As the world’s most valuable company, environmentalists have hoped Apple would be able to fix some of the issues. Instead, the iPhone has showcased just how complex these issues can be.
An iPhone might be small - but every iPhone packs a lot of mixed traces of metals in them. The total amounts of metals from iPhone production has added up after billions of iPhone devices have been created.
Sending a broken iPhone to an e-waste recycler helps recover some of the metals needed to make new electronic devices. It is also important for avoiding the toxic leakage which normally takes over landfills. However, an iPhone is harder to properly recycle than you would hope.
According to a Vox report:
The environmental cost of such a transaction is high — but the human cost is higher. Walk the streets of e-graveyards like Agbobloshie in West Africa or similar sites in Asia or another part of the developing world, and you’ll see hundreds, if not thousands, of microentrepreneurs, essentially cooking printed circuit boards to extract the metals within. From experience, I can say that the smell in the air is dizzying, and sticks in your nostrils and throat for days. - Peter Holgate, Vox
Apple has worked on its own projects for recycling iPhone devices. A recent innovation has been buidling a robot named ‘Daisy’. Daisy can expertly dissemble an iPhone to extract its materials for reuse.
While it helps, Apple acknowledges that the increasing demand of minerals will mean that even more mines will need to open around the world in the future.
“We’re not necessarily competing with the folks who mine,” said Lisa Jackson, the company’s head of environment, policy and social. “There’s nothing for miners to fear in this development.” - Ernest Scheyder and Stephen Nellis, Sydney Morning Herald
The whole process of making an iPhone requires a lot of energy and emits a lot of carbon emissions.
Substantial carbon emissions are made when:
Every new iPhone model Apple design is more powerful than the last. According to Apple’s own environmental modeling - this directly leads to Apple’s carbon emissions growing every single year as well.
Keeping each iPhone alive as long as possible is the most effective goal you can have for helping its environmental impact. The environmental costs of iPhones would be far less significant if everyone worked together to regularly keep their phones working for longer. The carbon footprint of a phone is much better if you keep it for 5 years instead of 3.
However, this mindset contradicts Apple’s incentives to replace iPhones every second year. Studies show that around half of smartphone users would currently rather buy a new phone than make a repair.
The iFixit website keeps track of how easy it is to repair different phones. IFixit gave most recent iPhone models a Repairability Score of 6/10 - better than a lot of other mainstream smartphone brands.
The Right to Repair movement has gained traction as a global political movement. The USA President, Joe Biden, has signed an executive order to help devices like the iPhone be more fixable in the future.
In 2021, Apple announced that customers will be able to buy iPhone screens and repair guides directly from Apple. Right to Repair groups hopes that this will be the first step in the vision for an open marketplace of repairs.
Apple has a famous reputation for making the iPhone nicely designed and easy to use. This is considered the foundation of its profitability.
Overall, reviewers praise the iPhone. Recent iPhone models received scores of at least 4 out of 5 stars on PC Mag or 8 out of 10 on Wired.
Overall customer ratings of iPhone models are also frequntly positive.
The iPhone features that reviewers tend to focus on are the:
Apple maintains a high level of control and consistency in its phones. The various software and hardware parts work together harmoniously. This helps with everyday performance and gives the experience of using an iPhone a dependable sameness.
in addition to the iPhone, Apple showcases its design strengths with a range of other devices - such as the Apple Watch, iPad and Mac computers. All of these devices are designed to work seamlessly together - a key benefit of owning an iPhone. Things like photos, calendars and emails will ‘sync’ from an iPhone to other devices via its ‘iCloud’. iPhone users even get a special and exclusive messaging platform when messaging just between one iPhone and another iPhone.
However, these benefits come with a sting. If iPhone customers get comfortable having all their information working well in the cloud, they may be reluctant to move to competing smartphones. This strategy has been called ecosystem lock-in, although it can be helped by storing your data in cloud services other than Apple’s iCloud.
The key specs of the latest-generation iPhone 13 are (as per Apple’s website):
Watch tech publishers take apart all the parts in the iPhone 13 Pro in the Livestream recording. You can also read the Teardown summary. <iframe width=100% height=”315” src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/5pYRatrnnPo” title=”YouTube video player” frameborder=”0” allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture” allowfullscreen></iframe>
While Apple tightly controls the design of an iPhone, making an iPhone is very much a team effort. There are many small and large companies who make iPhone parts across the globe. Companies compete very hard to supply parts for Apple, and winning Apple contracts can be very prestigious.
However, actually supplying Apple can be a blessing and a curse. Apple is known for wanting to control the minute details of how its parts are made, as well as driving hard on low costs. Even still, Apple can drop its suppliers abruptly. Companies who make a large portion of its revenue through Apple are considered slightly riskier on the share market.
Even Apple’s biggest and most advanced suppliers experience tense times while working on Apple contracts.
Samsung makes key parts for the iPhone - at the same time as making its own, competing, smartphones. For 7 years Samsung and Apple sued and counter-sued each other over claims Samsung copied patented features from the iPhone.
Qualcomm makes chips and critical networking parts for smartphones. Qualcomm and Apple also got involved in acrimonious legal battles with each other for several years, over Qualcomm’s pricing strategies. At one stage there were more than 80 lawsuits between each other, spanning several continents. The two companies eventually settled.
The largest factory which assembles the iPhone is in Zhengzhou, China, and is nick-named iPhone City. It has around 350,000 workers - bigger than the entire workforce of many large cities.
The factory is owned by a company called Foxconn. Foxconn is an independent company to Apple, but they are strategically intertwined - Apple is Foxconn’s biggest customer, and Foxconn is Apple’s biggest assembler.
Foxconn made global news in 2010 when a cluster of workers started committing suicide. Foxconn defended itself by saying that it has over a million employees overall and, as a percentage, the amount of suicides at ‘iPhone City’ was the same as the general rate of suicides in its home country. Although, it was statistically unusual that the suicides came from a mostly young, male, employed workforce.
Stories emerged of factory workers with excessive overtime, harsh management and repetitive work. Foxconn (and Apple) management kicked into gear by offering a range of solutions such as starting counselling services to employees. Although the world was especially chilled to see large suicide nets being installed to catch jumping workers, as one of the solutions.
The stories made Western readers face stories of people who made their iPhone devices. In 2012, Foxconn made the news again when 150 workers gathered on the roof of the building of Foxconn and threatened to jump, essentially using suicide as a bargaining chip in a workplace dispute (they were promised improvements and talked down by management).
Today, iPhone workers are still widely reported to work long hours, with one day off a week - or one day off a fortnight, if there is a deadline coming up. Apple has implemented restrictions on how much overtime workers in its supply chain should work - which is actually weaker than China’s own legal restrictions on overtime. None of the overtime restrictions have been found to be effectively enforced in practice. One Non Goverment Organisation calculated that an iPhone worker in Shenzen, China must work 80-90 hours of overtime every month to make a living wage - more than double the legal cap of 36 hours overtime.
Many empoloyees live in dorms at the factory property - so they live and work in the same place. Western journalists are rarely allowed to see these rooms, but when they do the pictures of the dorm are bleak. At best, married workers see their spouses once a week.
Managers, foremen, and line leaders prohibit conversation during work hours in the workshop. New workers are often reprimanded for working “too slowly” on the line, regardless of their efforts to keep up with the “standard work pace.” “Outside the lab,” according to an ominous saying of CEO Terry Gou, “there is no high tech, only implementation of discipline.” - Jenny Chan, American Affairs Journal
Like most factories which supply electronics products, Foxconn doesn’t negotiate with its employees on working conditions in meaningful ways, according to stories available in Western media. Independent trade unions are forbidden in China. That’s why human rights groups frequently try to publicly encourage Apple and Foxconn to improve formal industrial relations at Foxconn factories on an issue-to-issue basis.
Apple is one of the largest companies in the world and makes the most profitable smartphone. Apple does try to enforce policies to keep its suppliers ethical. But ultimately, part of Apple’s profitability comes from putting enormous pressure on low-paying factory workers in Asia.
Apple was one of the 83 major global brands who were found to be using forced labour in their products, including in iPhone parts. The China Communist Party has detained at least a million people from the Uighur minority in “reeducation camps” without trial since 2017. Leaked police files show the pictures of some of the detainees next to their trivial reasons for detention, such as listening to “an illegal sermon” on someone else’s mobile phone six years earlier.
Uighurs inside and outside the camps have been exploited for cheap labor. Camp detainees must sometimes “graduate” from camps to forced labour as a condition of release.
This is seen as an effort to eradicate Uighber culture in the Xinjiang province of China, essentially turning the area into a modern police state.
Despite Apple initially denying Uighur forced labour were used to make iPhone parts, later investigations found 7 iPhone suppliers with links to forced labour. This included Lens Technology, which makes screens for the iPhone and is one of its oldest suppliers.
Apple, like other American companies, has now cut ties with its Xinjiang suppliers after the USA effectively banned any parts from that province in 2022. Under the law, any goods from the Xinjiang are presumed to be used with forced labour unless proven otherwise.
Apple lobbied against these laws before they came into effect.
TMSC is the world’s largest chipmaker and makes all of Apple’s processor chips.
The process of making a procesoor chip has a large global footprint.In total, TSMC uses almost 5% of Taiwan’s electricity.
In 2021, TSMC committed to reaching net zero emissions by 2050.
Making an iPhone requires significant amounts of minerals. These minerals are mined from many different countries and areas. Mining operations can be precarious work and difficult to investigate.
According to one estimate miners around the world need to “dig, dynamite, chip and process their way through about 75 pounds of rock” to obtain the minerals needed for just one iPhone.
Even though the sale price of some raw minerals have been soaring due to the increase of technologies like electric cars, locals near mining areas are not seeing the benefit.
Several of the metals mined for electronics such as the iPhone are strongly linked to several African countries, such as the Dominican Republic of Congo. There, metal mining operations comes with a lot of violence. The high value of the metals attract warlords and other bad actors, in the same way as the “Blood Diamond” trade.
The word “Artisan” is usually used in a positive sense, such as artisan beer, coffee, or jewelry. But the term artisan miners refers to loosely organised groups of people who mine materials by themselves, outside of big mining operations.
Artisan miners tend to be the focus of human rights stories of miners. The work is precarious, and their situations are ripe for exploitation. This includes sending children to work as child labour.
The New Yorker ran a 2021 profile of artisan miners in the Dominancian Republic of the Congo. It described workers who faced real physical danger every time they started mining, and could easily be abused by police.
In it, the journalist describes meeting Ziri, who says he has been working on the mines his whole life, even from when he was 3 years old. The skyrocketing of price for Cobalt has not helped him get more money for his troubles, or help the villages where he lives.
“I asked Ziki what he thought of people who profited from cobalt mining. “I have sadness in my heart when I think of people who buy the minerals,” he said. “They make so much money, and we have to stay like this.”
When I told him that Americans paid more than a thousand dollars for the latest iPhone, he replied, “It really hurts me to hear that.” -Nicolas Niarchos, The New Yorker
Apple implements strategies for responsible sourcing of minerals. These tend to get stronger after media stories are shared about the human rights issues in its supply chains.
For example: Apple suspended buying hand-mined cobalt after a 2016 Amnesty Report, and follow up Sky news report, drew attention to child labour used in iPhone materials. However, Apple quietly lifted the ban after the media attention died down.
While responsible-sourcing policies is an important step which Apple and other brands are taking, The Conversation has reported on two current weak spots:
To help with the environmental impact of metals used in the iPhone, Apple is using its first ‘industrial sized batch’ of lab-made, carbon-free aluminium to use in making the iPhone SE. The aluminium is made by Elysis, a joint venture between two of the world’s biggest aluminum suppliers - Alcoa Corp and Rio Tinto.
To stem the tidal wave of new phones constantly been made, you can:
Doing all this will send the message to phone manufacturers that each phone should be crafted as a long-term, sustainable device - an ‘artisan device’ in the best sense.