When the side buttons on my three-year-old iPhone stopped working, it seemed like a small problem at first. 

But pretty quickly I realised those tiny buttons control some of the most important features like Apple Pay, Apple Wallet and even just the volume.

Suddenly my expensive iPhone felt useless, so like millions before me, I booked a trip to the Apple Store and met with one of their ‘Genius’ staff members to get it fixed.

The repair quote came to about $700 which was half the price of a new phone, and roughly what I’d paid for it three years earlier, all for a couple of broken buttons. 

I wasted more than an hour in the Apple store getting this diagnosis. 

I put up with the glitch for a couple of weeks, but eventually I’d had enough. I went back, swapped the phone and one of the Apple staff helped move my data onto the new one.

Once the data was copied, my old phone’s buttons suddenly sprang back to life and started working perfectly.

It made me wonder if my iPhone was ever truly broken, or just pretending until I bought a new one.

By then the money was gone, the trade-in deal sealed and another hour stolen by Apple.

All I wanted was freedom so I walked out, new phone in hand, with the employee just as stunned as me that the old iPhone was suddenly working again.

In that moment, it hit me – the phone in your pocket is made to be disposable.

Apple’s business model depends on a cycle, new phone, upgrade, replacement and repeat. It is a cycle where we do the pedalling and they do the peddling.

The cheapest iPhone 15s start at $1,200 which is more than a week’s wages for many Australians. 

And yet you are told you are ‘lucky’ if your phone still works after only three or four years. One Apple employee even told me exactly that.

Lucky? Shouldn’t it be the minimum expectation?

Apple loves to preach its values, boasting that it is ‘committed to protecting the planet’. 

The company highlights its use of recycled and renewable materials, clean electricity, and lower-carbon shipping.

But behind the marketing gloss the reality is far less noble. For all the talk of sustainability, Apple continues to push millions of customers into an endless cycle of upgrades, one overpriced iPhone at a time because they make repairs so expensive.

Each phone contains rare earth metals and cobalt, some of it mined in conditions so harsh human rights groups call them modern-day slavery. 

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, children as young as seven dig through toxic mud to mine cobalt for batteries, often earning just a few dollars a day. 

In China, the factories that assemble these phones have been accused of driving workers into 12-hour shifts, crowded dormitories, and even suicide. Rivers in China run black with industrial waste.

All this so that every three or four years, we can throw another $1,200 device onto the e-scrapheap.

As I paid for the new phone, I couldn’t stop thinking about the seven-year-olds in the Congo digging cobalt out of toxic mud just so I could tap for coffee with Apple Pay. 

Apple says every iPhone since the iPhone 15 now has a battery made entirely from recycled cobalt. 

But recycled doesn’t mean innocent, that cobalt may still have originated in the same child-labour mines before being fed back into the supply chain.

While Apple’s batteries now use recycled cobalt, the phones themselves still contain around 3 per cent unrecycled cobalt. The progress is real, but it’s far from guilt-free. 

And it’s not just cobalt. Every phone still depends on lithium, nickel, copper and rare earth elements, materials that can leach into soil and groundwater if a device is dumped in landfill instead of being properly recycled. 

That sleek device once sold as the future can quickly become an ecological hazard the moment it’s declared obsolete. 

My grandparents’ generation fixed things, but for us millennials, that knowledge was lost.

Instead we’ve been trained by corporations to upgrade and throw away, to see repair as pointless and even a waste of time. 

Get the new iPhone with its slightly better camera, a bit more battery life, with the latest AI features until it breaks all too soon and you’re forced to replace it again all too soon.

And then there is the Apple Store itself. 

While I was waiting for the last rites on my phone I asked the employee if he was even allowed to have a bottle of water on the shop floor. ‘No,’ he said. Not even a sip of water on the floor.

What kind of company is this where the people tasked with fixing our thousand-dollar gadgets are not trusted to drink a glass of water in public view? 

Apple’s famous 1997 slogan ‘Think Different’ helped resurrect the company under Steve Jobs. 

But today, those words ring hollow inside its sterile, waterless temples of consumerism, where short-lived iPhones pile up under a shroud of greenwashing because they’re so expensive to repair.

And let’s be honest, it’s not just Apple. Every big tech company does it, some are even worse. But people like me keep feeding the machine. 

So how do we fix it?