Was just thinking about this the other day: wouldn’t it be nice if phones could be recycled back to their individual components. Huge steps are being made. Apple's Robot That Recycles Your iPhone - Meet Daisy - YouTube
Thinking further: if schematics of a phone are open sourced, and further elaborating on that phones are put together by robots, you could imagine that a phone could also be deconstructed using robots. Maybe even desoldering chips, resistors and capacitors for reuse in other electrical appliances.
In that way disposables like phones won’t end up on the garbage heap and we can look towards modularity.
So much to change in the system, so little time…
It’s great they automated this! But iPhones still have a long way to go. Also in terms of the right to repair. There are kits to do it, but there are people complaining that their new modules are not recognized. Stuff that can be solved in the long run of course. But Fairphone does this a lot better.
Yup, I repaired phones myself. And Apple is on the route of modules not being interchangeable. It started with the sapphire home button with touch id being connected with the motherboard and it spread to other components not being interchangeable… Batteries, screens, etc. If you have two modern, factory iPhones and interchange their parts, it won’t work.
As for the schematics: there are tools out there having all the schematics (zxw for example) of the motherboard. But I think all companies should be forced to a) open source their schematics and b) modularize their appliances so third parties can repair them.
They keyword is forced. Our economy doesn’t reward or motivate this behavior. We shouldn’t have to force this more ethical and sustainable behavior. But I get what you’re saying of course.
Totally agree. From the bottom up it totally makes sense to voluntarily open source everything. But unfortunately there are companies making everything proprietary for profit motives that need to be… motivated (lets put it this way)… to move to more sustainable decisions.