R.I.P. iPhone
In a few short hours, I have an appointment with one of Apple’s so-called Geniuses in which I am told they will replace my iPhone. Apart from the fact that it’s pretty heavily scratched, there’s nothing much the matter with it. The volume button on the side fell off over the weekend, and as I happened to be walking past the Regent St. Apple store last night, I figured I’d go in and see what they could do.
I’m not exactly sure what will happen to it from that point—will my phone be crushed up into little bits and be sent to landfill in that town in China where technology goes to die? Or will it be torn up and re-sold as component parts? Will the metals from its various chips be melted down and sold as scrap, the plastic casing recycled to make new park benches commissioned by ‘green’ municipal councils?
It seems like a big waste to replace the whole phone just because of a broken volume button (which still, kind of, actually works if I press it in with my fingernails.) Aside from any of this, I’m reasonably attached to my iPhone: I queued up on release day in July last year, outside the Optus store on Collins Street in Melbourne with a band of other true believers for five hours in the cold! (That said, I could have been there a lot longer. I showed up at around 3am, still a bit drunk after my last DJ set at the now recently deceased St. Jerome’s, but the girl in front me had been there since 8pm.)
So, while I’m a bit torn, the lure of a new phone is too much:
I’m going to trade in my old, worn, scratched iPhone that I bought on the day it came out for a brand new one, fresh out a factory in some horrible coastal part of China and I really hate that I’m going to do that.
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