This article is over 2 years old, so not exactly new news.
Just keep your phone for as long as possible and only upgrade when you absolutely have to.
There are no environmentally friendly options, but making sure your device is recycled at EOL, replacing your battery rather than your phone, and keeping it for as long as possible is the best you can do while still having the luxury of owning a phone.
Sorry, but this article is mostly bullshit. Apple is a leader in recycling their products, and in making them out of non-plastic materials like aluminum and glass. They take back their products at their stores for recycling, and have even built machines that disassemble them into individual parts. iPhone has one of the longest lifespans in the industry — receiving updates long after competitors have abandoned models of similar age. Repairability has also been improved on the recent iPhone models.
Airpods — yes, the design isn’t serviceable, they’re made from Virgin plastic and their tiny batteries aren’t replaceable. I agree that should be improved. But at least Apple recycles them for free.
If you really want to bitch about something hard to repair — look at the current iMac design. Again though, it’s mostly aluminum and glass.
It’s hard to take iPhone longevity seriously though until they do something about the batteries.
True, the phones themselves are functional and updated for a long long time, but after a few years it’s unthinkable to go anywhere without a power bank and that’s a great motivator for throwing an otherwise perfectly good phone. If they actually cared they’d make the battery replaceable.
You can take your iPhone to any authorized service provider for a replacement battery. Apple charges around $99 for it. It’s a trade off to make the device better sealed to increase waterproofing.
And if you want to do it yourself, you can:
Apple is a leader in recycling their products
Yes. A repair website would rather you repair your phone than recycle it. You are free to do that.
And if you don’t want to go through ifixit to do that, you can go through Apple for the first five years of the product life (7 in California) and even do the repair yourself:
