The True Cost of Your iPhone

iPhone 16

Every September, millions of people watch Apple unveil its latest iPhone with the kind of excitement usually reserved for movie premieres or championship games. Sleek ads roll out, influencers gush, and preorders crash websites. The new phone looks amazing. It always does. But behind the polished aluminum and glass, behind the promises of speed and innovation, there’s a cost you won’t see on the price tag. And it’s a cost we, the public, have been quietly paying for years. Since the beginning.

Apple makes billions in profits, but it’s not just from selling you a device. 

The bigger profit comes from a business model that shifts the true costs of production, waste, and environmental destruction onto society. 

The minerals in your phone; cobalt, lithium, rare earth elements, are mined under conditions that often devastate local environments and communities. Manufacturing creates mountains of electronic waste and carbon emissions. And when the device becomes “old” after just a few years, most of it will end up as toxic trash, leaching chemicals into water and soil.

Here’s the part that makes it worse: Apple knows. Of course they know. They have some of the smartest engineers, supply chain managers, and sustainability experts on the planet. They track every gram of material, every watt of electricity, every ton of waste. They know exactly what it costs; in forests cut down, rivers poisoned, air polluted, and communities harmed, to produce and dispose of an iPhone. And yet, they let those costs stay off their books, because if they had to pay the true price of that damage, their profits would shrink dramatically.

So who pays instead? We do. We pay in higher health costs from pollution. We pay in taxpayer-funded cleanup efforts. We pay when our natural resources are depleted and when the climate crisis worsens. 

Apple’s shareholders get the returns. Apple’s executives get the bonuses. We get the bill.

The brilliance of Apple’s marketing is that it convinces us we’re just buying a phone. The tragedy is that we’re also buying into a system where the richest corporations in the world can externalize destruction and call it innovation.

The iPhone is a marvel of design and technology, no one doubts that. But the question is, Why are we, the public, footing the hidden bill for Apple’s success?

Until that cost is truly accounted for, and paid by the people who profit from it, every “upgrade” will come at a price far higher than $999.

Thanks for reading. Abrazos.

Diego Rojas