In the not too distant past, Apple was getting a lot of flak about their resistance to implementing a recycling program for their products. While I am not surprised that Apple is bad about recycling, there is one very important thing that is not talked about much in the world of electronics: building devices to be repairable and upgradable. Apple builds their computers to be solid and upgradeable. They have one of the best repair records in the industry for laptops, and more importantly, Apple owners use their computers much longer than any other computer maker.

Also, Apple generally makes it easy to upgrade and fix them yourselves, and there is a real market for it. (http://ifixit.com) Compare that to any other maker. I just sold my 5 year old, 800Mhz PowerBook with a broken screen for $200. Compare that to a refurbished, 2-3 year old 1.4 GHz Dell laptop with a 90 day warranty for $300. It’s hard to even find Dell laptops for sale older than 3 years.

To be clear, in no way do I support Apple’s resistance to implementing computer recycling, that’s a important effort to keep all that toxic material out of the ground. But I think that the debate over recycling is coming at the expense of the more important issue of building devices to last. The making of electronic devices generates a lot of pollution and requires a lot of energy and resources during the manufacture. Yet people treat them as disposable. Apple is fully complicit in this when you look at iPods and other devices. If there was a small effort put into making electronics repairable and upgradeable, we’d save a lot of money, energy, and pollution.

Call me sentimental, but I got quite attached to my old powerbook, and had it been possible to fix, I would have. Instead it is going to be an organ donor and I bought another one which I hope to have for longer than 5 years.