Apple's new 'Daisy' robot is here to eat all your old iPhones
Recycling iPhones is a messy business. The handsets are notoriously difficult to take apart, which means recycling them for parts can easily turn into a time-consuming headache.
But Apple thinks its new robot can help. Today the company introduced "Daisy," its new iPhone-recycling robot, which the company says can tear apart unwanted iPhones much more efficiently than a human.
The massive robot, which Apple says can tear apart iPhones at a rate of 200 per hour, is able to separate the various internal components of an iPhone and sort them into easy-to-access piles. Using this method, Apple say it's able to recycle a greater volume of materials than it would if it used other methods, since more of the parts are maintained.
This isn't the first time Apple has turned to a robot to aid its recycling efforts. The company introduced its first such machine in 2016, a massive robot named Liam.
But while Liam was an experimental project designed only for the iPhone 6, Daisy is able to take apart nine different models of iPhone (but, notably, not the iPhone X), so it could end up having a greater impact than Liam.
The announcement comes as part of a series of new environmentally-friendly announcements the company made to coincide with Earth Day. Apple also announced a new GiveBack program for making donations to Conservation International, and a new Apple Watch feature that will reward users who exercise outdoors on Earth Day.
Karissa was Mashable's Senior Tech Reporter, and is based in San Francisco. She covers social media platforms, Silicon Valley, and the many ways technology is changing our lives. Her work has also appeared in Wired, Macworld, Popular Mechanics, and The Wirecutter. In her free time, she enjoys snowboarding and watching too many cat videos on Instagram. Follow her on Twitter @karissabe.
