How green is your Apple? Well, not very, according to many in the industry we call technology, after pulling out of an environmental registry recently. it would seem that with passing of Steve Jobs, some of the ethics and ethos that made Apple such a ‘mega’ brand have also passed. Disappearing bit by bit are the ecological and environmental concerns which Job’s held dear. The latest in a string of incidents to beset the once wholesome image of Apple is the news thatSan Francisco city officials are banning local government agencies from buying Apple products, over the company pulling out of the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT).
Just last week EPEAT organizers announced that Apple was withdrawing all its products from the registry and would no longer submit new devices for them to be tested and receive ratings. "We regret that Apple will no longer be registering its products in EPEAT," they said. "We hope that they will decide to do so again at some point in future."
The news of Apple’s exit was greeted with a fair amount of speculation that government bodies, agencies and schools would stop buying Apple computers as a result, mainly because US government rules dictate that 95% of all electronics bought by official agencies must fall under EPEAT's scheme. Currently iPads and iPhones do not fall under the system's remit, however a change in the future has not been ruled out.
Officials for San Francisco city say the decision was in line with the long running policy to opt for equipment listed on the EPEAT registry. However they held out an arm of friendship to the electronics giant "San Francisco has reached out to Apple and is hopeful that a solution to this challenge can be found in the future," said their chief information officer Jon Walton.
Apple though are not likely to come back to the negotiating table, San Francisco is small fry to them, in 2010 city officials purchased $45,579 (£29,365) worth of Apple equipment, a very very tiny proportion of the $65bn Apple totaled in sales the same year. The only response so far from Apple has been a blanket and bland statement - "Apple takes a comprehensive approach to measuring our environmental impact and all of our products meet the strictest energy efficiency standards backed by the US government.
We also lead the industry by reporting each product's greenhouse gas emissions on our website, and Apple products are superior in other important environmental areas not measured by EPEAT, such as removal of toxic materials."Of course their decision to pull out of EPEAT would have had nothing to do with the fact the latest MacBook would have scored an appallingly bad rating on the registry. In recent tests, the latest MacBook Pro with its fancy, sharp Retina Display is Apple’s“least repairable laptop yet” because of the difficulty, ok alright, the pretty much impossibility of safely getting inside the device to upgrade or repair. It comes with RAM soldered to the logic board, a non-upgradeable SSD, a completely fused display, plus the lithium-polymer battery which is glued most strongly to the case, rather than affixed by screws or a less aggressively adhesive substance.
This makes the MacBook Air and Apple’s last two iPhone updates virtually impossible to repair or easily recycle and thus environmentally questionable to say the least.Cynics and critics would perhaps also suggest Apple are trying to bully the people behind EPEAT into changing their evaluation procedures by pulling some 29 already listed products off the register. But really, would a global giant like Apple throw its weight around like that? At the end of the day though, Apple may not worry much about loosing green / environmental credentials now, as they move down the road of closed box electronics where brand loyal consumers cant repair, upgrade or tinker with the innards of their machines, forcing them to buy new ones!
Not a green way of working at all, but if those customers stay as brand loyal as they have shown to be in the past, great for business and increased sales.
There has been a string of dents to that shiny veneer of loyalty in recent times, not least the connection problems with the iPhone, false and misleading advertising in Europe, allegedly covering up abuses and slave labor at production lines, numerous court cases and secretly collecting users personal data. Whilst there is little sign at the moment of Apple loosing the confidence of its customers, there is a limit to how far brand loyalty can be pushed before it reaches breaking point and consumers realize it isn’t worth paying way over the odds for a supposedly ‘cool’ gadget, especially when that gadget is no longer the coolest thing on the block!
(photo: gizmodo)
No comments:
Post a Comment