Apple iOS 26 set to dump 75M iPhones on the e-waste pile The pending release of Apple's iOS 26 could see around 75 million iPhones rendered obsolete, generating more than 1.2 million kilograms of e-waste globally, according to new research. The next major version of Cupertino's mobile operating system is scheduled to be released this month following its announcement at WWDC in June …
You might be better off getting it into the recycling system (we put consumer tech in a bag and leave it out for council kerbside collection). Whilst old AA batteries will leak and get manky, ruining your old kit, forgotten lithium cells can have a bit more of a sting in the tail.
Unless of course your local recycling specifically disallows lithium batteries and gives you no other recourse. I don't even bother with recycling. That bin has been in the back of the shed for nearly a year. I have maybe a couple cardboard Amazon boxes but everything else is listed as "don't put in the recycle bin" so I don't bother.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/regulations-waste-electrical-and-electronic-equipment
Been the law in UK and EU for years.
If you have tech recycling just offload it on Curry’s in UK.
https://www.currys.co.uk/services/delivery-installation/recycling.html
They may even give you £5 credit if you buy something on their trade in any old shite promo.
Sold two old iPhones on eBay in the last year or so, including an XS. Auctioned with no problems and got the going price. Not a lot, but better than nothing, and someone else is making use of it. Thing is to write an honest description backed by screenshots. That’s what I call recycling.
Been using eBay for about 20 years now, sold well over 2,000 items. During COVID me and the missus had a bloody good clear out and no lie we got about £2k just selling old shite we found in the spare room and various drawer, only had 1 or 2 issues where people never paid. Just wait 14 days, report the buyer and relist, simples.
Be careful of what you do. HMRC is looking at Ebay and many of the other online marketplaces. If you're not careful, they'll either deem you a business, or remind you that there is a limit on how much you can earn when selling things before you have to start declaring it on a tax form.
See here.
2K in a single tax year would definitely cross the point at which they become interested (the trading limit is just £1000 in a tax year across all market places), even if you are selling things that you've owned for years. And if they think you're disguising a business, it can get very ugly, all the way to a full tax audit!
And don't think they're looking the other way. Ebay and the others have to declare to HMRC when an individual account passes a certain threshold of sold items. Again, see here.
The first sign that they're looking is when a buff envelope drops through your letterbox reminding you of the limits. If you get one of these, start thinking very carefully about whether you can prove that you've owned what you're selling for an extended period of time.
"The first sign that they're looking is when a buff envelope drops through your letterbox reminding you of the limits".
Nope and actually that would imply that HMRC are capable of being efficient. Not in this or a close parallel universe.
The first sign is a prompt in eBay once you go above your £1,000 threshold, to register your NI number within your eBay account. Happened to me as part of a house clearance prepping for downsizing. I made a capital gain on one item and that would have been outside of normal income tax anyway, so nothing to do with eBay. Luckily it was on an antique machine with moving parts and these are explicitly excluded from CGT. There is a god.
> ...but the new phones just aren't wallet friendly.
Have you considered buying a refurbished phone?
https://www.giffgaff.com/mobile-phones/refurbished/apple?sort=price-asc
I've been buying refurb Samsungs for years, haven't bought a new phone since 2012. Get one made in the last 3-4 years from a verified source like Amazon. Last one I bought 2 years ago was absolute immaculate, not a single scratch or dent, boxed with all original accessories like cables and docs, even had that little pointy thingy for springing the sim card holder. Never paid more than £100 for mobile, so long as it plays music, texts, runs WhatsApp, maps and the alerting apps we use for callouts, sorted.
Oh, that sounds great. What phone would that be? Does it lack the major hardware problems the only two open phones generally obtainable* both have? Because I've been hoping for the mobile non-Android Linux phone for a while. Surely, if you say it's out there, it actually is.
* By which I mean the PinePhone and ... actually pretty much just that. The Pro model of that has been canceled and the Librem 5 is still on nearly infinite back order.
>What phone would that be?
Take your pick; https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuboot/docs/hardware/#laptops-intel-x86
https://www.linphone.org/en/download/
http://twinkle.dolezel.info/
>Does it lack the major hardware problems the only two open phones generally obtainable* both have?
Neither the PinePhone nor Librem5 even have fully source-available software.
Yes, those ThinkPads lacks major hardware problems.
>I've been hoping for the mobile non-Android Linux phone for a while.
Of course it's mobile; https://rms.sexy/img/img_3663.jpg
Linux? It's all GNU.
To work outside you'd need to add a mobile chipset, but why allow yourself to bothered when you're outside?
"For example, in Sweden, where I live, you basically need to install BankID to your phone if you want to do basically anything requiring identification or signing purchases or whatever."
If you give up cash, there you are. I don't have anything financially related on my phone. Maybe They will indemnify your losses and send you new credentials, but for a couple of weeks you have nothing and it might be longer to sort out fraudulent charges. It's a trade of security for convenience.
The iPhone I have now is a refurbished model already and I've had it about 3 years now I think.
I'm not against them, but I've an eye on the Fairphone 6 really. At least that's supposed to be supported for 6 years and I'm able to change the battery when it becomes time for it, on my own, for £36.
Especially true with banking apps
As it should be. There are plenty of useful roles for a phone that is no longer getting any patches, but anything involving your money should not be one of them! But the XR is still going to be getting all the security fixes for some time yet, and even longer beyond that it'll get fixes for issues deemed "critical".
So the banking apps won't stop working on it for a while yet, but once Apple stops providing ALL fixes to it, they might and even if that's not the case for your bank you shouldn't want to use it. I mean, you wouldn't want to use a Windows 10 PC after it goes off support for doing your banking, would you? (I hope not!)
If you don't recompile your apps with the new SDK, they'll be removed from the Apple App Store.
This seems sensible, although I'm not sure how quickly it happens.
I have a watch app, I updated it for the latest version of watchOS about 2 years ago then due to personal circumstances never got round to finishing the upgrade or releasing it.
Earlier this year I finished off the upgrade, including another bump of OS versions and released it. That means the previous version (which was still available) had been built on an SDK that was at least 2 and probably 3 generations out of date. It was still available for sale.
I also didn't have to make the changes for the latest version of the SDK if I didn't want to, the old code would compile fine under the latest version.
And when you you do recompile, they stop working on older iOS.
They may stop working on unsupported versions of iOS. The minimum target OS version is a property of the project. Generally you set it to the lowest version that has all the features you need.
As a software developer, it would be possible that a new software version doesn’t work on your phone, but it would be highly unusual that an existing version running on your phone would require a newer iOS version to continue running. Why would a software maker do that? The old version _does_ work.
It depends what that software does. If it's a local program that does a task, it will probably keep working. If it interacts with other services, they eventually stop allowing old versions to do that because they've changed the client and most users can update to the new one for free. This is especially true if they changed the client to fix a security problem, because then allowing the insecure one to continue operating would mean they could be blamed for people who didn't update getting attacked. Not all apps will do that, but it mostly depends on what kind of apps people spend most of their time using.
Hence the "most". From the developers' perspective, whether people choose to buy another phone is the user's problem. The developer has to ask whether it's worth it to jump through the hoops to have an older version supported when Apple makes it tricky with SDK age requirements when a lot of their users could update without replacing their hardware. A lot of them decide that it is not. If they decide that, there's little the owner of an old device can do to change that.
> Why would a software maker do that?
I have been resident in the US for years but am from the UK originally. I therefore have bank accounts in both countries, and am offered banking apps in both countries.
... except I'm not, because half the software makers tick the little box that limits their banking app to a single country, and Apple allows neither accounts that nominate multiple countries of residency nor multiple accounts to be active on a device at once. So — because banking apps like to impose their own staleness checks — I routinely have to log out of one account, sit through a lengthy process of ditching local copies of that set of iCloud content (photos and music, mainly), log into the other, update apps, then do the same in the other direction.
And, of course, it's not just banking apps. The application that is the only way to get alerts on my local public transit other than signing up to X, is also not permitted to be downloaded by anybody with any other country of residency nominated in their Apple account. That's just across the river from New York, where obviously nobody who isn't originally American lives.
So I'm off on a tangent here, but if we're asking "why would a software maker do that?" then I'd very much like to tag that on to the list. Were they worried that the people of Birmingham might be too interested in the daily train delays of New Jersey? Was there a massive influx of people downloading applications for foreign banks and wondering why they couldn't log in?
Quite a bit of phone software just seems to be wrapper around the website that does the same thing.
Even if the in-phone software doesn't change it would be quite possible for the back-end to ask the phone what operating system is running and decide not to talk to it if it's too out of date.
When Apple "obsoletes" phones they still deliver security fixes. Especially to fix "critical" stuff they often reach pretty far back - they did a patch for iOS 15 this spring, which supports as far back as iPhone 6S which is 10 years old in a few weeks.
Plus even once it gets its last security update it may be "vulnerable" but it isn't useless. You wouldn't want to trust anything PC/device that isn't FULLY patched with important stuff like banking or financial transactions, but for casual browsing, playing music, giving driving directions, that sort of thing it is just fine.
The author's claim that it is "e-waste" because once it stops getting major OS updates is utterly ludicrous clickbait.
I would disagree, it is hyperbole.
A perfectly working old iPhone doesn't *need* to be e-waste. But a weak battery or cracked screen would likely make it such.
Apple obsoletes devices far too quickly, the worst case I have encountered (probably the last new Apple I'll ever buy) was a new current device, unusable within 2 and a half years. (And no viable replacement from Apple, so a move to Android was required.)*
An old iPhone could make a very nice feature phone. Factory reset, add a calls only sim, and it has a nice camera, music player and basic apps. Organic maps will work nicely offline still on some models.
*An iPod touch 7 used with company portal, paired with an iPhone SE because 2 companies means 2 devices with company portal. What was really annoying to me is there is nothing comparable in either price or pocket space for replacement. (These were BYOD, so went to family, but I'm pretty sure lots of phones obsoleted at the same time were just e-waste).
(And I'm aware of at least one staff member with a personal obsoleted iPhone who simply dials into the Teams meetings now.)
Probably the worst case of all time was the original iPad; the iPad 2 doubled the RAM and added a second processor core, so not only did official iOS support end only about two years after the original had launched, you'd ideally probably have stopped updating at least a version before that as iOS 5 on it is a chore.
That said, Apple generally does excellently. My iPhone 6s remained perfectly usable for a solid eight years and its replacement iPhone 13 Mini is still going strong four years after the fact. Fifteen years on from that iPad experience, the general maturity of these devices is really obvious.
I updated my original iPad (2010) as soon as the iPad 2 (2011) shipped because the newer model had a camera. The original was delivered on the first day of sale in Oz - I bought it as an experiment (toy?), and used it a lot - A number of my older (60+) retiree acquaintances saw it and bought iPads to avoid having to learn Windows. The Original did only have two years support, the iPad 2 had up to 8 years. It seems that ~7+ years of support is now what to expect.
I purchase my mobile phones, and pass my "old" one on to Mrs Tim99, who normally trades-in her "old" one with Apple. I'm not sure what happens with the next one, because she really likes the size of "her" iPhone 13 mini...
I find that I use my iPad more than my other kit (iPhone, 3 Raspberry Pi 5s, 2 Pi 2Ws, and an iMac-M3), so I upgrade about every 3 years (usually with an Apple trade-in). I suspect that If I was not still writing pro bono software in retirement, and volunteering - where I need to look at very large spreadsheets, my 13" Pro iPad would be all the "computing" I need. Mobile phones are just to small for elderly eyes and hands that have lost dexterity.
"This is such nonsense. My iPhone XR will continue working for years running iOS 18.6."
Until there's a mobile operator update to 6G or something, the phones can work fine for a long time. The issue with Apple can be that since they control the App distribution, it might be harder as time goes by to find apps that will run on older hardware. Gone are the days when each new upgrade offered leaps in functionality. I've got an old Nokia XR20 that's more than adequate for my needs. There's nothing advantageous to my workflow that makes getting the latest phone worthwhile. I might pick up an Apple iPhone 12 pro/max/whatever to use for scanning spaces as it has built in LiDar if I find one cheap. I have an old Cat 60 with an IR camera that's great for electronics troubleshooting and even checking that food coming out of the freeze dryer is fully dry (no cold spots). Some phones are useful whether they are connected or not. I love my iPods, but Apple no longer makes them. An "obsolete" iPhone with a decent amount of memory can be a cheap substitute.
75 million tons of iphones -> 1,238,944kg of palladium; that's 16.5g per iphone, on average.
Currently, at $36/gram, that's around $576 per iphone just in palladium... I suspect someone has slipped a decimal place somewhere[1].
[1] Quite possibly me...
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"75 million tons of iphones -> 1,238,944kg of palladium; that's 16.5g per iphone, on average."
The process to get those metals out can be more expensive than what the metals will bring. I'd guess it's 0.165g or less of Palladium since even $5.76 worth of the metal is a lot as that's the value raw rather than processed.
I've been stocking up on Silver as a store of money as it's another metal that gets used in small quantities in lots of electronics and becomes smeared out to the point where it's uneconomical to recover. Gold has been replaced in many electronics applications due to it's cost and all of the research into finding different ways to achieve the same results.
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I have an aged iPhone currently in use as an softphone=only device, no SIM, connected to local wireless only. It will continue to be of use as a softphone for the foreseeable future, as the old VOIP apps on it still work and will NOT be updated. I don't use it for anything other than phone-type stuff, so I don't care if other apps don't work. And it makes an excellent phone for handing out phone numbers to idiots who might abuse the system; if I start getting telemarketing calls on one of the VOIP app numbers (I have multiple VOIP apps installed) I change the number in the app. There are some people who insist on getting a phone number; they get one of the VOIP numbers. Some of those people recognise VOIP numbers and get bolshie; I walk away.
There are lots of VOIP phone apps out there, the Apple Store is your friend.
"XR, XS, and XS Max owners left with $268M worth of scrap"
If people have these models and want to still use them, they will carry on functioning as they always did - they won't suddenly explode into bits because a new OS comes out. The issues with old smartphones are what they always were; security, app versions and battery. A new battery for these models costs less than 50 quid in any high street mobile phone shop, and honestly if you're still rocking an XR then you probably couldn't give two shits about the "latest" version of anything anyway.
PSA: a new OS doesn't mean old phones stop working.
Apple is the richest company on Earth.
They practically print their own money.
Why can't they show the right example and create a program to exchange old phones for an acceptable amount (don't know what that is) and sell a replacement for the usual your-first-born-child-and-a-leg and demonstrate some true ecological prowess in recycling their own stuff ?
Oh, I forgot.
Shareholders.
Apple have a decent trade-in program. I would get £465 for my 4-year old phone, in cash or vouchers to use against any Apple product I wish.
I won't do it, because my 4-year old phone is just fine. Had a new battery fitted last month, and it's good for at least another 2 years. I paid £1200 for it back in the day, which if I keep it for 6 years works out at £15 a month; even assuming it's worth £0 after that (which it won't be, it will still be worth £200 unless I drop it).
All told I call that a very decent deal.
Sp why are Apple (et al) doing this? "This" in this context means locking down the firmware and the boot process, preventing 99.9% of users installing their own OS? Any type of rending useless and/or bricking.
Money. Controlling the useful life of the device. And also, limiting the costly support window for the OS and Apps on the device.
Just make it mandatory for (1) a user controlled "Freedom" switch with the last IOS update and (2) release any appropriate private keys, protocols, device drivers, schematics and documentation to enable ALL hardware to be used by alternate Operating Systems, using a permissive Free and Open Source license, also FRAND for any patents.
End of Life (for Apple), beginning of life for the user.
That will prevent a portion of devices going to landfill. It will fuel a second hand hardware market and alternate Operating System market. It will boost efforts to break the Apple and Google hegemony on phone Operating Systems.
It's not like Apple (et al) would be forced to do this. If they keep supporting the device, then the provision never kicks in.
And back it up with Law and fines that make major shareholders go "whoa", or it doesn't mean crap.
Why should freedom be optional?
If governments served their citizens, they would mandate that any computing device could only be sold if by default it respected the users freedom and any business that tries to sell hardware that doesn't work without proprietary malware would be prosecuted for any wilful violation - up to execution of the business if required to put a stop to stop such unacceptable and ecocidal behavior.
Alas, governments do not serve their citizens and they do not serve the environment either.
Bull. One of the major benefits of this specific ecosystem is exactly that it IS closed. I'm very happy that the users I support don't have the "freedom" to sideload crap that shreds their privacy, contains more virusses than a Floridian (now they're cabcelling child vaccinations) and generally offers multiple paths to have their innocence and lack of deep tech expertise abused.
If you want that "freedom", buy an Android. There you can choose to walk on the wild side, and you can install another OS if you want to. Don't ask Apple to break an ecosystem that took years to make safe. Yes, it comes with limitations and it's not perfect, but it's easy to make it safe, that's harder with Android.
It's a bit like MacOS vs Windows. Yes, you can secure Windows, but it takes a LOT more effort and costs more.
I replaced my old Huawei P20 pro with a second hand Pixel 7 Pro.
Did I throw the Huawei, which is long, long past it's support date away?
Nope I use it to stream music control my Fire Stick as the remote for that is broken and I'm using it for concerts where I need an e-ticket but don't want to risk the "new" phone in a hot and sweaty gig.
Just because it's "obsolete" doesn't mean it's without use.
Ditto. I have used an iPhone 6 until last year for voice recording (special Røde mic) and it still got security updates.
Eventually I sold it, still working, because I decided to standardise everything on USB-C (which is not quite a standard insofar that there are data and power throughput variations so I'm now marking the cables after I test them).
Heck, I even have a PSION Organiser 2 that still works :).
I have two iPhone 5Ss that serve as extremely decent remote controls for my smart home stuff. I could even use them as phones if I really wanted to; the batteries still work. But they're better as remotes, and compared to the "universal remotes" that are invariably shite, it's a very good experience.
Where did that come from? I couldn't find that statement, but the closest information I could find was a report that 8% of purchases last year were replacing a phone less than a year old. Other information also suggests that 36% of them were replacing a device 2 years or less after purchase. So if Apple actually said that, people don't seem to think they're right.
I do have reasons to question both sources of numbers. The only way to have the accurate numbers is to track iCloud registrations of every device. I don't think Apple is likely to be doing that for a PR exercise. The other ways to estimate it that I can think of are looking at trade-ins, which would likely underestimate the number because people will probably get better value by selling on their year-old devices rather than trading them in or just surveying people which leads to all the typical sampling risks.
What this report (and, disappointingly, the article) is carefully avoiding to mention is that Apple is at least capable of recycling these phones properly, and has been for almost a decade.
They started with a system called Liam, and kept developing further. The latest version is called Daisy and went operational something like three years ago. Apple did this for the most sustainable reasons of all: it saves them a lot of money as the percentage of recycled material is a LOT higher because the system knows the design and thus knows how to isolate the relevant materials. Normal wholesale shredding tends to result in only a fraction of recoverable materials as some are hard to separate without further processes. What's more, Apple has far more recycling capacity than there are phones returned, and it's easy to add capacity when needed. If you return an iPhone to Apple, it will be sent to this system for disassembly.
Now for the interesting part: Apple has made the designs available, I think for free, so there is actually very little stopping other companies doing the same. But I have yet to see anyone else taking this up and start proper recycling too - there's no excuse anymore.
But hey, why let decent efforts get in the way of a good scare story, right?
The step before recycling is re-use and apple does almost everything possible to prevent perfectly fine hardware from being reused for a reasonable amount of time.
Recycling is usually best avoided until something is completely broken, as a commonly used technique to extract metals from e-waste seems to be to burn off the plastic to get at the metal.
I think they could do better, because not all of their arguments to prevent 3rd party repair hold water (the chain fo trust does, but few people understand enough how that works for it to be an accessible topic). OTOH, Apple supports old phones and their OS for a long time so the scope of use is good if you can get the battery replaced (big if).
That said, sorry, but short of an accident you have to be pretty careless to crash a screen. I've had iPhones since the first one, and in all those years I have cracked two screen PROTECTORS and no, I don't use a booklet sty;e case that covers the screen. If you're buying a device that is that expensive and you cannot be bothered to add a little protection, sorry, that's on you. That the industry likes you to behave as if it's all disposable doesn't mean you have to comply.
"iOS 26 could see around 75 million iPhones rendered obsolete, generating more than 1.2 million kilograms of e-waste globally"
Is it a bit melodramatic to imply that unsupported phones are going directly into e-waste? Do they all stop working as soon as the new OS release is out?
I'd also like to know: When an EV only lasts 10 years due to its software and firmware being hopelessly out of date and is this vehicle is scrapped, how many phones is that worth? My wife's and my car have 35 years of age added together.
I agree with the others who think this is rather clickbaity, though I can see it will fuel the usual anti Apple hate in the comments. But the facts stand for themselves in this specific case.
Apple are the industry leaders in software support. That is not hyperbole. They have routinely rolled out *security* updates to 10+ year old phones as needed. Which Android OEM gets anywhere close?
Even the mighty Google promises 7 years and that is only after a similar period of ratcheting up, so that doesn't apply to older models. The Pixel 5a with 5G, barely four years old, no longer receives any kind of update.
So maybe you won't get iOS 26 but would you want it anyway? It's pretty ugly.
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