Apple on reusing

There was an Apple Event today for the press where they announced new iPads and iPhones.

An interesting thing about the event is that they spent around ten minutes (out of sixty) talking about the environment, how they use renewable energy, and how they work on reusing and recycling their products. They mentioned that the vast majority of iPhones that come back in, get reused in some way.

Everything was awesome and Apple looked like it did a fantastic job in the green category. For a second I almost forgot about planned obsolescence, or how their business is based on people buying new stuff all the time.

Fast forward a bit, and here’s Phil Schiller on stage talking about why they chose the size for the new iPad to target existing PC users, and he says this:

There are over 600 million PCs in use today that are over 5 years old. This is really sad.

I recently replaced a 4 year old MacBook Pro only because I needed all the performance I could get for development work, but it was perfectly functional for less intensive tasks. My previous 5 year old iMac was sold to a friend who still uses it frequently. We also just sold a 6 year old MacBook Air that also worked fine. I even keep a 12 year old iBook that would work fine if it weren’t for the broken AC adapter. My mother uses my 6 year old iPhone 4. I fail to see how any of this is sad other than it means less money for Apple.