Apple Has Taken Its Love of Recycling Just a Little Too Far

The Studio Display illustrates how the company's tendency to recycle its tech may not always be the best option.

- By Jason Snell

Recycling is good. Just ask Apple. After Greenpeace repeatedly called out the company for poor performance on environmental issues (fave.co/3JdfnPq), it began a process to detail all the ways it was being green, including that now-familiar slide that appears at the introduction of every Apple product detailing how it's made from recycled materials, doesn't contain toxic byproducts, and more. You know the one.

But in recent years Apple has also become an expert at a different kind of recycling. The company has found strategic advantages in designing an increasing amount of its hardware in-house and then, to make the most of it, it uses that hardware again and again in different products.

The most obvious example, at least this month, is the Apple Studio Display. It has the same Center Stage camera system that is in every current iPad model, the same A13 processor as in numerous iPhones and iPads, and even runs a version of iOS behind the scenes. It's not just the display's aluminum that's 100 percent recycled most of its technology is, too!

RECIPE FOR A PRODUCT

If you were Apple and you were building a 5K standalone display from scratch, would you make a product like the Studio Display? Almost certainly not! Embedding a complete smartphone system on a chip (with 64GB of onboard storage, no less) is overkill, as is running an entire mobile operating system.

But modern Apple does not build its products from scratch. Instead, it uses the technology it has on hand to build what's needed. While Apple's ingredients are often invented to build iPhones and iPads, they are also used in other contexts.