Tag: e-waste
Will USB-C Charging Standard Bring Fewer Other Proprietary Parts and Less e-Waste?
A CNN opinion piece calls this “a hallelujah moment for iPhone owners everywhere.”
iPhone cords are a very big business: There are reportedly about 1.2 billion active iPhones out in the wild. And if their charging cables need to be replaced once or twice a year as many users attest, at roughly $20 a pop, well, you could just about buy a Twitter a year for that sum…. While the new edict only directly applies to devices sold in the EU, India looks set to follow in Europe’s footsteps….
[T]he move is almost certain to serve as the push that gets Apple to finally abandon its bespoke-battery-booster approach for future versions of the world’s most popular smartphone. Even Greg Joswiak, the company’s global head of marketing, admitted that the EU standardization push means the lifespan of Apple Lightning charging cables is likely finally over. And right on time, given that ten years ago Apple called it the “cable standard for the next decade….” It might even dilute some of the tribal tension between iPhone and Android users, assuming the latter don’t lord over us the fact that most of them have already been charging with C for half a decade. (We still have our blue message bubbles, greenies!)
And it might generally reduce the temptation among tech companies, chief among them Apple, to “innovate” by introducing proprietary parts that regularly force an entire domino cascade of costly upgrades. (The fact that every new iPhone seems to be a random millimeter different in size and shape in each direction already means that brand new cases, cradles and screen protectors have to be repurchased along with new handsets, all for the privilege of a few hundred pixels of fresh real estate.) While that process may offer a welcome cash stimulus to the peripherals and accessories industry, it contributes to the massive environmental burden caused by e-waste, estimated at about 60 million tons a year — an amount heavier than the world’s heaviest man-made object, the Great Wall of China.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
E-waste: Five billion phones to be thrown away in 2022
Stadia Controllers Could Become E-Waste Unless Google Issues Bluetooth Update
“Now if you’d just enable Bluetooth on the controller, we could help the environment by not letting them become electronic waste,” writes Roadrunner571 on one of many controller-related threads on the r/Stadia subreddit. “They created trash and they at least owe it to me to do their best within reason to prevent millions of otherwise perfectly good controllers from filling landfills,” another wrote. Many have called for Google, if they’re not going to push a firmware update themselves to unlock the functionality, to open up access to the devices themselves, so the community can do it for them. That’s often a tricky scenario for large companies relying on a series of sub-contracted manufacturers to produce hardware. Some have suggested that the full refunds give Google more leeway to ignore the limited function of their devices post-shutdown. It’s worth noting that you can still plug a Stadia controller into the USB port on a Smart TV, computer, or gaming console and use it as a controller through a standard HID (Human Interface Device) connection. But, currently, it’s not possible to connect the controllers wirelessly, unless you go through a lot of effort.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.