Forum. On November 3, Apple will launch with great fanfare the iPhone X to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the “revolution” initiated by the release of the first iPhone, in 2007. In ten years, $ 7 billion smartphones have been produced in the world and have helped to shape our daily lives.
The impact unheard-of this object on the spirit and the uses of consumers, the environment, privacy or the health in fact is a true symbol of our time. It is also one of the symbols of its by-products : extraction of polluting metals, exploitation of workers, race to consumption, tax evasion, planned obsolescence…
The Apple iPhone perfectly illustrate this ambivalence : they are used to sign petitions for the climate then they are compounds, gold, tantalum and tungsten mined in part in areas of conflict. Their designers work in offices environmental art in California, when chinese workers who produce them work in abysmal conditions and handling of toxic products.
Behind the scenes
They always arrive earlier in the hands of our children, while we’re just beginning to assess the adverse effects of the ubiquitous presence of screens on their brain development and their social relationships. The price of the iPhone continues to increase while Apple makes a margin of nearly 40%, and has accumulated a fortune indecent of more than 200 billion euros in tax havens.
Apple boasts that, with a great deal of marketing, the high technology of its smartphones but they resist hardly to a collapse, are purposely non-repairable or modular, and are made or declared to be obsolete in a few years. Apple promises a policy of recycling is ambitious, but the majority of the components of the iPhone are not recycled often end up in illegal landfills in Africa or China.
Ten…
