21 Jun 2007 1810H

Apple recycles your old hardware

My dad has a hand-me-down Pentium III which had been my PC from senior year and grad school, which I had replaced literally every part of except for the case. I actually still have all that obsolete but perfectly good hardware somewhere, plus a few CRTs, which all contain mercury, even the fried AGP graphics card and a burnt out power supply. But what to do with old silicon? Most schools and nonprofits won’t even touch the old stuff. Who wants to work on a crappy 286 running DOS with 8MB of RAM? Why do these darn beige boxes with their 500W power supplies suck up so much power anyway, just sitting idle? And, you can’t throw that stuff away. You don’t want that stuff buried in some landfill, where the heavy metals and manufacturing-related toxins that went into making those chips and boards leach into your groundwater and soil, poisoning you and your kids. You want to make sure it’s reclaimed and all that good stuff. The solution is to factor the cost into the purchase, but how to do this?

So for Dad’s Day I bought my old man a Mac Mini to replace that old clunky machine on which I cut my first GIFs and JPGs. When I was ordering online, Apple’s e-commerce site gave me the option to recycle my old machines. Once checked they said they would send me the codes later on. Today I got them via email. Looks like this:

Apple Recycling

First of all, I love the design of this form. Tells you what it is in big type up front. Concise, to-the-point copy. Numbered instructions, written with short, easy-to-follow copy. Two codes. Links for more info. That’s it. Second of all, the ease of the whole process seems very Apple: do not make the user think about it. Stay out of the way of the user’s objective.

There’s no thirdly yet. I need to box up the old clunker and recycle a bunch of old stuff this summer as part of my housecleaning process. I’ll keep you posted as that moves forward. Still have books from last summer that never got handed off to Little City. That’ll happen soon, maybe tomorrow.

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Filed under Design, Environment, Technology, User Experience

2 responses to "Apple recycles your old hardware"

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23 Jun 2007 0622H

K writes:

I guess the form is nice? But the recycling thing is great. :)

23 Jun 2007 0740H

Gino writes:

The form is only a touchpoint in a long list of processes that made everything possible to be condensed into a few short, pithy steps, yes, but, as the “user interface,” is arguably the most important piece.

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