Apple’s annual environmental report gives us a tidy insight on how much raw material it gets when recycling our old phones and tablets. As it turns out, we’re almost worth our weight in gold (and steel… and glass).

If you’re curious, Apple pulled about 2,204 pounds of gold from recycled iStuff (and Macs!) last year. That’s a solid ton of gold, worth about $40 million.

Apple also yanked about 61 million pounds of steel, glass, aluminum and other miscellaneous materials from recycled devices.

Now we know why Liam is such a big deal.

If you’re wondering what Apple did with any proceeds from all that recycling, so are we. For now, we’ll just assume the company put it towards its $1.5 billion green bond initiative and call it (almost, but not even close) even.

via Business Insider

Turn (almost) anything into a table with this… leg

When I first read the motto of Tabl , I laughed. It’s hard not to when it declares itself “the world’s most adaptable table leg” – a category I assume it stands alone in. But, the more I found out about it, the more weird sense it made.

The idea is this: You get any flat surface under 60kgs, attach legs to it and, boom, there’s your table. The only tool you need is an allen key, which is included.

This GIF visualizes the concept well:

“I live in New York and I have moved around a lot in the last few years,” says the designer, Nick Flutter. Originally from Australia, he now works as an architect in the American city. He told me that Tabl is “about making the furniture you have work harder,” creating something that can function in any living situation.

This makes sense to me. I’ve just moved to Amsterdam, but before I spent five years in London, living across eight different unfurnished houses of varying sizes. While I had furniture, it had to serve a direct purpose and a decent table was just too unwieldy to shift around. Tabl is a solution to that. But, at $369 for four legs, getting something cheap from IKEA and then throwing it away is, for many people – myself included – much more accessible.

“I have been down [that] road,” Nick said, “[and] it feels like a waste.” Instead, Nick thinks that you should invest in the adaptable and high-quality Tabl, especially “if you talk about living in an environmentally sustainable way.”

He’s not wrong, but there is a big catch: Access to materials suitable for a good tabletop. As an architect, Nick is likely to be in contact with surfaces that work for this purpose. Someone in a different sector or industry, maybe less so.

There’s something to be said for a system like Tabl, where you can create your own furniture and then bring it with you no matter how often you move. Some people will scoff at buying “adaptable table legs” while others will crawl over themselves to craft their own furnishings. Me? I think it’s the best silly idea I’ve heard in some time.

Tabl is currently raising funds on Kickstarter, if you’d like to support the project, you can do so here . Speaking with Nick, if it reaches its target, backers can expect to have their products shipped to them by mid-August 2018.

The Next Web’s 2018 conference is just a few weeks away, and it’ll be awesome. Find out all about our tracks here .

Apple should rename its confusing iPad lineup to mimic the iPhone’s

The iPad is a confusing device. Sales figures suggest there’s no energy for the platform, yet Apple is pushing forward with tablets. Part of the confusion is brand identity, and it’s about time Apple tighten its naming scheme.

There are three sizes of iPad for sale right now: a 7.9-inch mini , the 9.7-inch Air (and Pro ) and a 12.9-inch Pro.

There are also three names: mini, Air and Pro. It gets a bit confusing through the lineup, though. A ‘Pro’ could be one of two tablets, and there’s a mini 4 and mini 2 listed on Apple’s site, but you can buy a mini 3 elsewhere.

Don’t feel bad if you’re confused; it’s a lot to take in, and that’s really the problem Apple has created.

An easy, recognizable fix is right in front of us: the iPhone.

The iPad mini could be the iPad SE . It could have all the same specs as the 9.7-inch iPad, but a smaller screen at a reduced price point.

That ‘Air’ moniker can be dropped altogether. Apple should just return it to ‘iPad.’ The ‘Pro’ is a sticky one, and while it’s a new product name, I’d prefer Apple just call it the ‘Plus.’

Further, Apple should call the 9.7-inch iPad Pro the ‘iPad Plus,’ and saddle the larger iPad Pro with an ‘XL’ tag, making it an ‘iPad Pro XL.’ All iPads should keep a numbering scheme like the iPhone, too, even though that means pulling a Microsoft and skipping ahead.

Keeping with the iPhone naming scheme, it’s still not quite as clean as the iPhone lineup, but the iPad has a fourth device so it really never will be.

Still, I think mimicking the iPhone naming scheme for the iPad lineup streamlines things quite a bit. You’d have an SE, iPad and Pro — with a very slight margin of Pro XL users.

It’s clear Apple isn’t giving up on any of its hardware any time soon, but I don’t see a reason to have so many different names floating around the ecosystem.

If it wanted to get really nuts, Apple could also make the Mac Mini the SE, drop the Air and continue the iPhone-y naming scheme throughout the Mac lineup (MacBook and MacBook Pro) — save for that pesky iMac, which could even be the XL.