A pple has a workforce of more than 166,000 – but have you heard of its robot team member, Daisy? Daisy lives in a warehouse in Austin, Texas and, with the precision of a surgeon, takes a battered old iPhone, freezes its battery with a blast of-80 ° C air and punches out the screws. Within just 11 seconds, what was once a piece of electronic waste is now a tidy collection of high-quality components, ready for a new lease of life.
But Daisy is not the only robot member of Apple’ s workforce with waste reduction as its number one focus. She is the matriarch of a growing robotic workforce that includes Dave and Taz – machines designed by Apple to solve one of the tech industry’ s most expensive and environmentally damaging problems: the graveyard of old devices.
Tackling the e-waste problem For decades, the narrative of consumer electronics has had a straightforward
212 January 2026