There is a lot more to e-waste than just repairability. There is the recycled materials in the initial phone. Quality of the components. Sturdiness of the phone. Do people trade in their phones so they can be recycled? Is there even a trade-in program for this phone? What percentage of the phone is recycled after use?

This doesn’t matter. E-waste is a crock of shit. All of the phones you will ever use over your lifetime will fit in your coffin with you, there’s nothing seriously poisonous in there else it wouldn’t be safe to carry phone around in sweaty pockets, and the recoverable raw material value is approxmiately 0% of the manufacturing cost of a phone.

Apple’s “recycling” program is half virtue signal, half sneaky way of keeping devices off the used market. Which, by the way, is the only way real value is ever recovered from old phones. Recycle is the last R for a reason.

How many years does the phone get updates?

This, on the other hand, is very important. The real reason disposable and unreliable phones are bad is that getting a new phone sucks. Search costs suck, transaction costs suck, the “features” that the new phone comes with inevitably suck, and migrating data to a new device sucks. Which is at least partly intentional. Observe one scumbag Android developer cheering about the prospect of users no longer being in control of their own data.