It's all marketing.

I don't doubt there's a robot that can disassemble a phone as show in this video, but the economics of recovering silver, platinum, cobalt, and lithium from old phones?

Nonsense.

If it weren't for hard-won legislation, you'd still have copious amounts of tin-lead solder in every electronic device you own, simply because it's cheap and it works. Now, most companies use Tin/Silver/Copper eutectic solders for cheap surface mount parts, and even then, micronization and skyrocketing silver prices have pushed most OEMs to go silver-free.

So when Apple claims to recover silver, gold, and copper from surface mount parts like camera modules, which cost less than a dollar per unit when bought in trays, it's nothing but a pretty lie to make consumers feel better about their purchases.

The reality is that, over the past 10 years, service providers like Sprint, Verizon, and AT&T have made it too painful to switch carriers by requiring device manufacturers to adhere to their demands, such as hard-soldered SIM cards and tamper-evident stickers. They leverage their oligopoly over the telecommunications infrastructure in order to force device makers to meet their demands. Sure, you can buy an unlocked, carrier-free phone for $600. On the other hand, by signing this contract, you could amortize the cost over a period of 24 months, with the option to switch to a new phone after 12-18 months, and also get a trade in credit...

It's very easy to justify the cost of a device when it's spread out over several years.

In reality, however, anyone who trades in or "recycles" a phone to a service provider is basically handing back the equity they built during the course of their contract. Once Sprint, Verizon, or whoever gets the phone back, they ship it off to Foxconn Mexico where it's "refurbished" and re-marketed to consumers in the third world at a premium.

So Apple has been watching the carriers make money, and have finally decided that they want a piece of that action.