Apple and The Gospel of Cardboard

In 1993 I found myself in front of an Apple Macintosh. I no longer remember why I was obliged to use it, only that I had some work on a three-and-a-half-inch floppy disk and that the machine was the only one available. I pushed the disk into the slot. The drive took it with a soft mechanical swallow, and the business for which I had come was done in a few minutes. I then spent three quarters of an hour trying to get my disk back. Every drive I had used until then had a small button beneath the slot, which you pressed and which pushed the disk out with a click. This one had nothing of the kind. I examined every face of the case. I pressed whatever could be pressed and pulled at whatever could be pulled, short of anything a magistrate might have called criminal damage. The disk remained inside, like a client’s papers in the hands of a solicitor whose bill has not been paid.

I eventually realised that the machine had no intention of releasing my property until it was instructed to do so in software. The approved method, as I discovered, was to take the little picture of the disk on the screen and drag it into the little picture of a dustbin. I had by then been using computers for ten years, and every instinct I possessed told me that putting something in the bin was how you got rid of it. Apple had arranged matters so that recovering your property resembled throwing it away. I learned later that there was also a tiny hole beside the slot, into which a straightened paper clip could be pushed in an emergency, and I regarded this less as a concession than as an admission. Disgusted, I resolved never to touch one of these machines again. I have kept that resolution for thirty-three years, which is more than can be said for most of the resolutions I have made.

The episode was trivial, though it taught me what I have since found to be the governing principle of the company. The machine on that desk belonged to whoever had paid for it. The decision about when the disk would come out belonged to Apple. Other manufacturers assumed that a man who wished to do something with a mechanical object might do it by mechanical means. Apple assumed that he should ask permission of the software, and that the software would answer on Apple’s terms. In the years since, the same principle has been extended from the floppy disk to the memory, the storage, the battery, the screen, the charger and at last to the whole working life of the machine.

I should declare an interest before going further, or rather the absence of one. I am no friend of Microsoft. I have confessed elsewhere how little I have paid it over the years, and I do not regret a penny of what I withheld. Nor have I any affection for Intel, which has for many years placed inside its processors a second small computer, its Management Engine, that the owner of the machine can neither properly inspect nor officially switch off. These are large and self-interested corporations, and I treat their public statements as I treat a ministerial assurance. Even so, a Windows computer built from ordinary parts can still be opened with a screwdriver, and its memory and storage replaced from any supplier the owner chooses. My objection to Apple is of a different kind and carries more feeling. Microsoft and Intel take your money. Apple takes your money and then preaches you a sermon about it.

The sermon is worth reading, if only for its seriousness. In September 2017 Apple published a white paper called its Paper and Packaging Strategy, which MacRumors summarised under the headline “Apple Shares Meticulous Steps Taken to Ensure iPhone Packaging is Environmentally Friendly.” We are told that the iPhone 6s had come in a box with two stacked plastic trays, while the iPhone 7 needed only one, and that this tray was now made from a fibre-based material in place of petroleum-based plastic. The plastic case that wrapped the EarPods became a piece of paperboard, folded and cut to hold the cable. Apple calculated that these changes produced “an 84 percent decrease in plastic usage” in the packaging. For the iPhone 8, the company turned its attention to the wrapper round the power adapter. A fibre wrapper had proved difficult, we learn, because “fiber naturally expands and contracts with changes in humidity,” and Apple had therefore worked directly with the supplier to change parts of its manufacturing process. The document closes with the hope that the programme might serve as a model for other companies.

I do not mock the engineers who solved the problem of the humid wrapper. It is true that a few grams of plastic multiplied by a few hundred million telephones make a respectable heap, and I have no doubt that the trays are better made of fibre than of oil. But the proportion between this effort and the rest of Apple’s conduct is so strange that it has struck people with no particular interest in environmental politics. A comment now circulating on social media puts the matter as plainly as I could wish: “Apple brags about eliminating a few grams of paper from its product packaging but forces us to throw perfectly good computers (full of rare metals much more precious and non-renewable than cardboard) in the trash because all the components are soldered on.” Its author goes on to allow that Apple “has legitimate business reasons” for wishing its customers to buy new hardware regularly, and concludes that “the claim that Apple prioritizes the environment in their manufacturing is a lie.”

That is a heavy charge, and it should be tested as one would test any pleading. The first part concerns soldering. Over the past fifteen years or so Apple has fixed the memory of its portable machines permanently to the main board, and later the storage as well. Since the change to its own processors in 2020, the memory has been placed inside the same package as the processor itself. I must concede that there are real engineering reasons for this. Memory placed close to the processor works faster and draws less power, and I do not doubt that the measured gains are real. The defence is not frivolous. Yet its consequence is that the buyer must decide, on the day of purchase, how much memory and storage he will need for the whole life of the machine, and must pay Apple’s price for it there and then, which is a good deal higher than the market price of the same capacity bought from anyone else. When I bought computers in the 1990s, I added memory as prices fell and my needs grew, and the machine lasted for years longer than it would otherwise have done. With a modern Mac there is no such option. Worse, solid-state storage wears with use. When it fails on a machine of this design, it is the main board that fails, and the cost of replacing the board will often exceed the value of what remains. The precious metals of which the comment speaks then go in the bin with everything else.

The second part of the charge is that Apple forces this result, and here the evidence is more varied, though not more comforting. In December 2017 Apple admitted that updates to its telephone software had been slowing older iPhones whose batteries had aged. Its explanation was that a worn battery could not always supply the current a busy processor demanded, so that without the slowing the telephone might shut itself down without warning. That may well have been true. What Apple did not do was tell its customers. A man whose telephone had grown sluggish could not know that a new battery costing a modest sum would restore it, and many will have concluded that the whole device was worn out and bought another. In February 2020 the French consumer authority fined Apple twenty-five million euros for misleading commercial practice by omission. In the same year Apple agreed to settle an American class action for up to five hundred million dollars, and later paid a further one hundred and thirteen million to settle claims by a group of American states. Apple admitted no wrongdoing in the settlements, as companies never do, though the sums speak for themselves.

The battery affair was at least a matter of silence. Repair has been a matter of policy. For years Apple lobbied against the right-to-repair bills introduced in various American states, and when it finally offered its customers the means to repair their own iPhones in 2022, the tools came for rent in two large cases weighing, according to the journalist who ordered them, about seventy-nine pounds. More recently the obstacle has moved into software. Many replacement parts, even genuine Apple parts taken from another Apple device, must be “paired” with the particular telephone through Apple’s own systems before they will work without complaint. Here again is my floppy disk. The part is in your hand and the telephone is on your bench, but whether the two may be joined is a question for Apple’s software.

The most revealing evidence concerns what Apple does with its own old machines. In 2020 the company sued a Canadian recycling firm called GEEP. Between 2015 and 2017, Apple had sent GEEP more than half a million iPhones, together with tens of thousands of iPads and watches, to be destroyed. Apple alleged that about one hundred thousand of them had instead been taken out and resold, and it claimed some thirty-one million Canadian dollars. GEEP denied responsibility and blamed some of its former employees. As a lawyer, I have no quarrel with an action for breach of contract. If GEEP took Apple’s money to destroy the devices and sold them instead, Apple was entitled to sue, and it may have had good reasons to fear counterfeit or stolen parts entering the market. But consider what the action discloses. Apple’s own investigation found that eighteen per cent of the devices sent to the recycler were later active on mobile networks. They were, in other words, working telephones. The grievance of the company that hopes to provide a model in the conservation of resources was that some of its products had been put back into use when it had paid to have them shredded.

The same habit has reached the Mac. Modern Apple computers are tied by a security feature called Activation Lock to the account of their first owner. I accept that this has a real value. A stolen MacBook that cannot be unlocked is worth little to a thief, and that is a benefit to honest owners. Apple will remove the lock for someone who can show proof of original purchase. A recycler who receives a pallet of machines from a company that has upgraded, or gone into liquidation, usually cannot. In January 2023 repairers in the United States, among them John Bumstead, drew attention to barely used and fully working MacBooks, some no more than three years old, that could not be refurbished and were being broken up for parts. A device that works perfectly well but cannot be used by anyone except a man who no longer has it is the purest form of waste I can imagine.

Then there is the charger. In October 2020 Apple announced that new iPhones would no longer come with a power adapter or EarPods, and presented the change as a gift to the planet. Fewer adapters would need to be made, and smaller boxes meant more of them on every pallet. There was something in this, since most of us already have a drawer of old chargers. But the cable that remained in the box had a USB-C plug, which did not fit the older USB-A adapters most owners actually had in that drawer. The smaller box also happened to be cheaper to make and to ship, and the adapter could now be sold separately. The Brazilians, who seem to have retained a firmer sense of these things than the rest of us, were unimpressed. In March 2021 the consumer protection body of São Paulo fined Apple about ten and a half million reais, and in September 2022 the Brazilian Ministry of Justice imposed a further fine and ordered the suspension of sales of iPhones without a charger.

Software is the last and quietest instrument. Apple moved its computers from PowerPC processors to Intel’s in 2006, and from Intel’s to its own designs in 2020. It sold Intel machines until 2023, when the last Intel Mac Pro, a computer that cost several thousand pounds, was withdrawn. It has now announced that macOS Tahoe, released in 2025, is the last version of its operating system that will run on Intel Macs at all. Security updates will continue for some time, but the machines are on the shelf. I must be fair to Apple here, because Microsoft has done much the same. Windows 11 refused to install on a great many perfectly serviceable computers with older processors, and support for Windows 10 ended in October 2025. The difference, so far as I am aware, is that Microsoft has never hired an actress to play Mother Nature in order to tell us how much it cares for the earth.

Apple did that. At its product launch in September 2023, Octavia Spencer appeared as Mother Nature to examine the company’s environmental record, and Apple announced that its new watches were its first carbon-neutral products. Much of this neutrality rested on offsets, which is to say on payments to plant or preserve trees somewhere else. An environmental group in Germany, Deutsche Umwelthilfe, took the claim to court, and in August 2025 a court in Frankfurt found that advertising the Apple Watch as “CO₂-neutral” misled consumers. The offsets came largely from eucalyptus plantations in Paraguay, and the leases on three quarters of the plantation area were secured only until 2029. A tree that may be cut down in a few years does not keep carbon out of the air for very long. Apple replied that the decision had “broadly upheld our rigorous approach to carbon neutrality,” which is the sort of thing one says on leaving court without one’s case.

Is the comment I quoted fair, then? I would not quite call the environmental claims a lie, since the word implies that Apple’s staff do not believe them, and I suspect many of them do. People who are paid to believe something usually manage it. The fault lies deeper. Apple’s business depends on selling expensive hardware at high margins, and on keeping the buyer inside a set of linked services from which leaving is tedious and costly. Once a man’s photographs, messages, music and purchased programs are held in Apple’s systems, the next Apple device becomes the easy choice and every other device a nuisance. A machine that its owner can open, enlarge and repair for many years is inconvenient to that model. A machine that must be replaced whole, from the same supplier, suits it very well. The environmental programme does not change this model. It decorates it, choosing for attention the parts of the operation where virtue costs little or saves money, such as the trays in the box, and keeping silent about the parts where virtue would cost a great deal.

I do not ask Parliament or the European Commission to do anything about this. I disliked the Commission’s order that every telephone should use the same charging socket, even though it forced Apple to abandon its own, because I do not think officials should design our plugs. Nobody is obliged to buy an Apple product, and millions of intelligent people do so with their eyes open. Where a company tells its customers something false to make a sale, the remedy for misrepresentation is old and sound, and the cases I have described show that it still works. For the rest, the remedy lies with the buyer, who need only read the specifications before he reads the advertisements.

In 1993 Apple required me to put my disk into the dustbin in order to get it back. In 2026 it asks its customers to put the whole computer into the dustbin, and then congratulates itself on the cardboard in which the replacement arrives. I find the joke funnier than I find the company, and I have kept my resolution without the smallest regret.