This is not the issue at hand. People are looking at this and trying to tie it to all kinds of things, like environmental policy, or the right to repair. All of those are valid issues that have specific policy goals behind them but his is much more straightforward. Apple contracted a recycler to destroy the devices, and those devices made it out to the market, breaking contractual obligations. That's it. For some reason, you want to nitpick specific reasons I listed why a company may want to destroy devices, but that's not the point. You and I don't know the reasons, don't know the space, don't know the business, don't know what we don't know, we're just two guys speculating on things we don't have experience in.

I am confident in arguing, however, that in whatever regulatory regime we are in, there will be times and good reasons for destroying or landfilling devices.

I'm happy you have a secondhand Thinkpad. And I'm happy you got an endorphin rush for telling people on the internet that you have a secondhand Thinkpad - but you are going to landfill that device. Also, I hate Apple devices. I think OSX is overrated, and both OSX and iOS have terrible ergonomics. And yes, Mac computers and laptops are overpriced and their quality varies from year to year.

> This is not the issue at hand.

> Apple contracted a recycler to destroy the devices, and those devices made it out to the market, breaking contractual obligations.

There are definitely broken obligations, but who invented those obligations in the first place and why? Apple did it for profit and user control, against environment and ethics. This is the actual problem here.

>but who invented those obligations in the first place and why?

Contract law. If you want to change the entire legal regime underpinning these kinds of contracts, that's a big (and separate) discussion.

>Apple did it for profit and user control, against environment and ethics

You don't know that. You're speculating. It's not clear that this policy against environmental initiatives or it is unethical. Besides, environmental concerns need to be balanced with other factors. Our company contracts IronMountain to destroy old disk drives - our interpretation of this is that IronMountain will in fact securely destroy those drives and not resell them on the market, EVEN IF that would be more friendly to the environment.