Apple going to great lengths to prevent recycling of Mac parts by shredding them

[andtfoot]

Not sure if it's the same in this case but I've seen perfectly good, brand new AV gear get smashed up as a tax write-off. The distributor had to prove that the equipment couldn't be resold in order to get it written off (presumably to prevent someone just taking it back out of the bin and selling it off the books).

[Jeroen3]

Yes, that is normal.
A local bakery has to dump all remaining product into the bin. Gifting them to a food bank, charity or just have workers take them home causes tax problems.
More raw materials coming in then product coming out, and you're under investigation for laundering.

This rule is especially strict on small breweries. When a batch or experiment fails someone from the regulatory body has to come down and oversee how they flush a few liters of bad beer down the drain. If the books don't line up they'll lose the license.

[tooki]

With all these talk about helping "third world" countries improve that Apple and other big corporations engaged in, this would be a viable path:  Donate it to an NGO, they could redeploy these to students in poor countries (a) to be used, and (b) as learning platform for people to learn to how to fix/deploy such equipment.

Turn the talks into real action instead of photo-ops and feel-good empty talks.

I seem to recall reading some years ago that people in poor countries didn't actually want our old computers (at least, not to use as computers), because they need reasonably recent systems as much as we do, if their learning is to be of any use.

If that is their attitude, they don't need the help.  But, probably many others with different attitude may find it very useful.

I wrote equally well / equally bad with my 10 year old PC or 12 year old laptop.  So I suspect the students can learn how to do their spreadsheets just the same without the latest and greatest.

I cannot speak for others, but I suspect plenty of us in the USA are browsing the web or doing their spreadsheets with 10 year old computers like P90 in a few more months (quoted below, currently with his 9 year old computer).

Granted, years ago when I read that, we hadn't reached the sort of performance plateau that we are at today, where older machines do quite well for ordinary tasks.

But it does make sense to me: if you couldn't run modern software, how were you supposed to learn how to use it? How could you learn, say, Windows Server administration if you can't run the current version? (That type of skill goes stale extremely quickly; you have to stay up to date.)

How do you learn to program in, say,. NET if your computer can't even run Windows XP?

These are valid objections.