Meet Apple's Liam: A robot that will rip apart old iPhones for recycling

At the Apple event where it announced the new 4-inch iPhone SE and the new 9.7-inch iPad Pro, we saw the announcement of an interesting research and development project from the Cupertino giant - Project Liam.

Project Liam is an Apple in-house robot that basically takes apart an old iPhone that is out of use. The interesting thing is the way Liam works is that it takes apart the different components of the iPhones gradually, in a way that they can be separated according to the material being used. The whole idea behind Project Liam is to remove parts in a way that they can be refurbished - either at the consumer level or the enterprise level. This is part of Apple’s larger green initiative which it spoke at length about in the initial few minutes of the presentation - a time-slot usually reserved for talking about past sales numbers.