A few months ago, I saw the future of Apple's repair policy. My grandson dropped by wife's new $900 iPad and cracked the screen. I figured that the screen needed replacing. Not so with Apple. The entire iPad was replaced with a new one since there were no refurbs two days after launch. This appears to be the tact with new MacBooks. If your memory is bad, we replace the entire logic board, send the old one back to Apple and repair it. It makes some sense if you think about it. The Applecare pricing with both iPad and MacBook are very reasonable and fit into this approach. The way to recycle the Retinas is to send them to Apple who will disassemble and recycle, with the appropriate technology. It is one thing less for consumers to worry about, at a reasonable cost. So, why did Apple reject EPEAT? The standards set by EPEAT are no longer reasonable, and there are easier, more efficient ways to recycle.
I thought the post was funny, and you're proving his point. You're a moderator- you don't need to get in the mud and argue with him. Shouldn't you be above it?
All crap, all the time. Lol. It's catchy.
In my opinion, it reflects very badly on AI to have an immoderate mederator who spews insults and nastiness in practically every post.
Scratch my original speculation about Apple planning its own recycling centers capable of handling the R-MBP. The cynic in me suggests the following motivation instead:
Apple may be pulling previously EPEAT-certified models because (as reported elsewhere) some large customers have policies to buy EPEAT-certified equipment preferentially. If the R-MBP isn't certified but other MBP models are, customers may have difficulty circumventing corporate policy in order to buy the R-MBP.
(Apologies to anyone who may already have written it.)
YOu may be on to something there.
But whether or not this specific theory is correct, it is certain that Apple pulled out in a move to increase profits. Any time one wonders why Apple took any action, the explanation is the same at its base. Everything Apple does is designed to take more money out of consumer's pockets and to give it to Wall Street.
[" url="/t/151144/apple-pulls-products-from-government-backed-green-electronics-list#post_2142003"]Good. I've always felt that Apple spends too much time talking up the whole green angle during their keynotes,
This really has nothing to do with them being green or talking about it.
It's about abiding by a particular standard for 'being green'. That's all. EPEAT is about being able to open the computer with standard screwdrivers etc to pull out the battery and toss the rest in a shredder. But is that really the best way to recycle. Might it actually be better to strip the components apart and do it that way. Is shredding everything together better than perhaps the machine going back to Apple to be disassembled and the enclosure somehow melted down to be pressed into a new enclosure, the rare earth metals melted down etc. And if this way a step towards Apple offering an incentive like they do for iPods, that wouldn't be a bad thing.
And the govt thing is a bit moot cause Congress and Obama can change those rules if they want to.
. I also don't see why Apple can't set up recycling centers to disassemble MacBooks and iPads to separate out their aluminum shells.
They already have a place. Their repair depots. They would have to have the tools to replace batteries in repairs.
The issue with EPEAT is that Apple doesn't use common screws etc that you or I can remove with something we picked up at Joes Hardware. That's it. That's what got them off the list. It doesn't count if you can go to an Apple store and pay a tech $10 to remove the battery for you. Doesn't count if they ship it to a repair center to have it done. If I can't do it right now myself, it's not EPEAT standard
Well there goes Apple's opportunity and momentum of selling computers to the government down the drain. Bush signed an executive order requiring all federal agencies to use EPEAT when purchasing computers back in 2007. Also there are a lot of schools and corporations that require EPEAT certification.
So it is a big deal and a setback..
So Obama writes a new order, as do the schools. Issue over
Like I said, if we cannot even by whatever manual or automatic technique unglue a battery, recycle the battery and recycle the case, we are truly screwed.
To me this seems much ado about nothing. And the only people we've heard from are an EPEAT and iFixit spokesperson - certainly not objective, neutral parties. iFixit is just po'd because they can't sell a service. I don't trust their motives.
And just because something isn't EPEAT certified doesn't mean it's not recyclable. Again much ado about nothing. How many people purchased a Mac because of the EPEAT certification? My guess is not many.
To me this seems much ado about nothing. And the only people we've heard from are an EPEAT and iFixit spokesperson - certainly not objective, neutral parties. iFixit is just po'd because they can't sell a service. I don't trust their motives.
And just because something isn't EPEAT certified doesn't mean it's not recyclable. Again much ado about nothing. How many people purchased a Mac because of the EPEAT certification? My guess is not many.
How many people can even have a broad understand of what EPEAT is or what the acronym EPEAT stands for? I could have given the former and their rating nomenclature (not what the levels mean) but I couldn't have told you what EPEAT stood for.
Except I meant "in the minority on this Board", not in the overall marketplace. I don't think the full impact of Apple's 'no-upgrade', 'can't fix" design philosophy has hit the market yet. Come back to me a year from now and we'll see.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Quadra 610
It already has. Long ago. In the form of iPods, iPhones, and iPads.
You're comparing a $200 phone to a $2500 laptop? I (and I think most people) can live with replacing a $200 phone every 2-3 years. The Pad only runs one app at a time, so the need to add memory is someone lesser and while most people wouldn't be thrilled at replacing a $500 to $700 machine every year or two, it's still not completely unreasonable. But a $2500 laptop has got to last a long time (except perhaps, for people who are rich enough so that it doesn't matter how much they spend) and therefore, needs to be upgradable and fixable. I think we'll see a lot of backlash down the road once these machines either break down or when applications have ever-increasing memory requirements that render the machines useless for newer apps. And as I posted earlier, even if I'm wrong, Apple's competitors will use this against them in any case.
And I still don't understand why many are defending Apple is this regard. To do so, you have to believe that a non-upgradable, non-repairable laptop is better than one that can be repaired. I refuse to believe that Apple's engineering team couldn't deliver the latter. The only debate is whether it was worth saving the 1/4" of depth to make them unrepairable. Some will say yes because of the elegance of that thinner design and people like me will say no.
At the very least, Apple has got to accept machines back for recycling (do they do this now?) and institute some sort of reasonable "trade-up" plan.
Environmentalists in general, and Greenpeace in particular, pattern their activism on modern political parties' reality distortion fields. They spin, cherry-pick, lie, distort, and capitalize on it all to feed the insatiable desire of their growth hormone's agenda. The 'environment debate' stands as a variation on the theme of 'making a proprietary case' out of 'molded', 'plastic'... differentiations. Pun intended.
One lesson ought to be learnt from Apple's system-wide creativity. They will, through organic consistency, expand and 'fine-grain' their original thought process onto life-after-death ...of their 'end' products. Who can better recycle past innovations into more salient ones than a through-the-core, recidivist innovator himself?
Apple's genius stands on its own, very lonesome indeed, as a self-replicating 'art-and-science' tautology. Very salmon-like; spawning grounds re-cycled into killing fields ...into spawning grounds ...into killing fields...Very Apple-like, 'bear market' notwithstanding...
You should really take a half day out of your important life and visit, say, the local dump. Many of the hills one sees are mountains of garbage. Stay and watch while truckloads come and dump their loads. You will first enter a large secured site, and drive miles of dirty roads as you climb the "mountain". The dirty underneath your car wasn't there a decade ago, but excavated from deepening holes and dumped on top of garbage, then spread out by heavy equipment which "buries" the garbage, then flattened to make a pathway for your car and loaded trucks as they climb higher up the garbage mountain. There at the top of you will drive over partially buried bricks, clothes, coat hangers, children's dolls, decaying refuse in black plastic bags with wire ties, All day, the heavy machinery is plowing and moving the newly deposited garbage around, while more garbage comes along with truckloads of excavated dirt. It's loud; maybe 100 decibels or more as the machines do their work moving the new dirt on top of new garbage then packing them down to make a plateau of garbage, your garbage. Next week, go back again, and the garbage you dumped the week before will have been buried, the garbage mountain just a little higher than the week before; the road you traveled just a little bit steeper, until they decide to make a new road up to the new plateau.
Think of what you are seeing, and image how this area was and how much life it contained before we acquired it for a dump. You will see nothing living there, and life will not return. Apple's genius will be long forgotten; the dumps will remain our lasting legacy.
EPEAT (Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool) is a comprehensive environmental rating that helps identify greener computers and other electronic equipment (1) which is managed by the Green Electronics Council, a program of the International Sustainable Development Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation. (2)
EPEAT is not a government program although EPEAT was conceived and developed through the collaboration of stakeholders from the business, advocacy, government and academic arenas during the presidency of George W. Bush with funding and support via an executive order requiring that all federal agencies satisfy 95% of their purchase requirements with EPEAT-registered products. (3)
More importantly, the preceding illustrates that EPEAT is not a government program.
Apple states, "Our goal in 2010 was to achieve a [B][I]worldwide recycling rate of 70 percent[/I][/B]. (To calculate this rate, we use a measurement proposed by Dell that assumes a seven-year product lifetime. The weight of the materials we recycle each year is compared to the total weight of the products Apple sold seven years earlier.) We met and exceeded that goal in 2010. This far surpasses the last reported numbers from [I][B]Dell and HP[/B][/I], which were each [I][B]lower than 20 percent[/B][/I]. In 2011, Apple global recycling once again exceeded our 70 percent goal, and we are confident that we will maintain this level through 2015." (4)
The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) assumes that 40 percent of commercial computers reach their end-of-life after three years, another 40 percent after five years, and the remaining 20 percent after seven years "... based on information from the International Association of Electronics Recyclers (IAER 2006), surveys of computer reuse (Lynch 2001), personal communications with industry experts (DuBravac 2006, Powers 2006), and assumptions about the length of time that commercial products are held in storage ..." (5)
The EPA estimates "that in 2009:438 million new electronic products were sold; 5 million short tons of electronic products were in storage; 2.37 million short tons of electronic products were ready for end-of-life management; and 25 percent of these tons were collected for recycling." (5)
[I][B]The approach implemented by Apple appears to be far more successful in reducing waste and reusing components.[/B][/I]
I have been an Apple fan for a while, and i have been directly or indirectly been responsible for quite a few Apple purchases, through friends, family or work. I am however starting to have a problem with what Apple is becoming. Put simply, I think the bean counters are gaining control of the company. They are getting too greedy and complacent. The glued in batteries, non upgradeable memory, and proprietary ssd hard drives are really just the last straw. I also find that my iPad feels like a controlled prison. I have al ready purchased an Android phone and I will likely find other alternatives for my next laptop purchase. I am angry at Apple.
I have been an Apple fan for a while, and i have been directly or indirectly been responsible for quite a few Apple purchases, through friends, family or work. I am however starting to have a problem with what Apple is becoming. Put simply, I think the bean counters are gaining control of the company. They are getting too greedy and complacent. The glued in batteries, non upgradeable memory, and proprietary ssd hard drives are really just the last straw. I also find that my iPad feels like a controlled prison. I have al ready purchased an Android phone and I will likely find other alternatives for my next laptop purchase. I am angry at Apple.
The thing that concerns me is that the Govt and many large corporations require their purchases to be EPEAT certified. It really sucks to be blocked out of a whole market like that.
The thing that concerns me is that the Govt and many large corporations require their purchases to be EPEAT certified. It really sucks to be blocked out of a whole market like that.
I have been an Apple fan for a while, and i have been directly or indirectly been responsible for quite a few Apple purchases, through friends, family or work. I am however starting to have a problem with what Apple is becoming. Put simply, I think the bean counters are gaining control of the company. They are getting too greedy and complacent. The glued in batteries, non upgradeable memory, and proprietary ssd hard drives are really just the last straw. I also find that my iPad feels like a controlled prison. I have al ready purchased an Android phone and I will likely find other alternatives for my next laptop purchase. I am angry at Apple.
Lol. Will you please come back a few months from now and tell us how the alternatives worked out for you on all these attributes.
Comments
Quote:
Originally Posted by [email protected]
A few months ago, I saw the future of Apple's repair policy. My grandson dropped by wife's new $900 iPad and cracked the screen. I figured that the screen needed replacing. Not so with Apple. The entire iPad was replaced with a new one since there were no refurbs two days after launch. This appears to be the tact with new MacBooks. If your memory is bad, we replace the entire logic board, send the old one back to Apple and repair it. It makes some sense if you think about it. The Applecare pricing with both iPad and MacBook are very reasonable and fit into this approach. The way to recycle the Retinas is to send them to Apple who will disassemble and recycle, with the appropriate technology. It is one thing less for consumers to worry about, at a reasonable cost. So, why did Apple reject EPEAT? The standards set by EPEAT are no longer reasonable, and there are easier, more efficient ways to recycle.
Totally worth quoting.
All crap, all the time. Lol. It's catchy.
In my opinion, it reflects very badly on AI to have an immoderate mederator who spews insults and nastiness in practically every post.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cpsro
Scratch my original speculation about Apple planning its own recycling centers capable of handling the R-MBP. The cynic in me suggests the following motivation instead:
Apple may be pulling previously EPEAT-certified models because (as reported elsewhere) some large customers have policies to buy EPEAT-certified equipment preferentially. If the R-MBP isn't certified but other MBP models are, customers may have difficulty circumventing corporate policy in order to buy the R-MBP.
(Apologies to anyone who may already have written it.)
YOu may be on to something there.
But whether or not this specific theory is correct, it is certain that Apple pulled out in a move to increase profits. Any time one wonders why Apple took any action, the explanation is the same at its base. Everything Apple does is designed to take more money out of consumer's pockets and to give it to Wall Street.
Oh, look. More government. This is exactly why we can't build anything in this country anymore.
This really has nothing to do with them being green or talking about it.
It's about abiding by a particular standard for 'being green'. That's all. EPEAT is about being able to open the computer with standard screwdrivers etc to pull out the battery and toss the rest in a shredder. But is that really the best way to recycle. Might it actually be better to strip the components apart and do it that way. Is shredding everything together better than perhaps the machine going back to Apple to be disassembled and the enclosure somehow melted down to be pressed into a new enclosure, the rare earth metals melted down etc. And if this way a step towards Apple offering an incentive like they do for iPods, that wouldn't be a bad thing.
And the govt thing is a bit moot cause Congress and Obama can change those rules if they want to.
They already have a place. Their repair depots. They would have to have the tools to replace batteries in repairs.
The issue with EPEAT is that Apple doesn't use common screws etc that you or I can remove with something we picked up at Joes Hardware. That's it. That's what got them off the list. It doesn't count if you can go to an Apple store and pay a tech $10 to remove the battery for you. Doesn't count if they ship it to a repair center to have it done. If I can't do it right now myself, it's not EPEAT standard
So Obama writes a new order, as do the schools. Issue over
YOU can't, doesn't equal that Apple can't
You drop Apple over this lack of EPEAT, to go to a computer that lacks EPEAT
That's logical
And just because something isn't EPEAT certified doesn't mean it's not recyclable. Again much ado about nothing. How many people purchased a Mac because of the EPEAT certification? My guess is not many.
How many people can even have a broad understand of what EPEAT is or what the acronym EPEAT stands for? I could have given the former and their rating nomenclature (not what the levels mean) but I couldn't have told you what EPEAT stood for.
Quote:
Originally Posted by zoetmb
Except I meant "in the minority on this Board", not in the overall marketplace. I don't think the full impact of Apple's 'no-upgrade', 'can't fix" design philosophy has hit the market yet. Come back to me a year from now and we'll see.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Quadra 610
It already has. Long ago. In the form of iPods, iPhones, and iPads.
You're comparing a $200 phone to a $2500 laptop? I (and I think most people) can live with replacing a $200 phone every 2-3 years. The Pad only runs one app at a time, so the need to add memory is someone lesser and while most people wouldn't be thrilled at replacing a $500 to $700 machine every year or two, it's still not completely unreasonable. But a $2500 laptop has got to last a long time (except perhaps, for people who are rich enough so that it doesn't matter how much they spend) and therefore, needs to be upgradable and fixable. I think we'll see a lot of backlash down the road once these machines either break down or when applications have ever-increasing memory requirements that render the machines useless for newer apps. And as I posted earlier, even if I'm wrong, Apple's competitors will use this against them in any case.
And I still don't understand why many are defending Apple is this regard. To do so, you have to believe that a non-upgradable, non-repairable laptop is better than one that can be repaired. I refuse to believe that Apple's engineering team couldn't deliver the latter. The only debate is whether it was worth saving the 1/4" of depth to make them unrepairable. Some will say yes because of the elegance of that thinner design and people like me will say no.
At the very least, Apple has got to accept machines back for recycling (do they do this now?) and institute some sort of reasonable "trade-up" plan.
That's only for you, Zazzles.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Berp
Environmentalists in general, and Greenpeace in particular, pattern their activism on modern political parties' reality distortion fields. They spin, cherry-pick, lie, distort, and capitalize on it all to feed the insatiable desire of their growth hormone's agenda. The 'environment debate' stands as a variation on the theme of 'making a proprietary case' out of 'molded', 'plastic'... differentiations. Pun intended.
One lesson ought to be learnt from Apple's system-wide creativity. They will, through organic consistency, expand and 'fine-grain' their original thought process onto life-after-death ...of their 'end' products. Who can better recycle past innovations into more salient ones than a through-the-core, recidivist innovator himself?
Apple's genius stands on its own, very lonesome indeed, as a self-replicating 'art-and-science' tautology. Very salmon-like; spawning grounds re-cycled into killing fields ...into spawning grounds ...into killing fields...Very Apple-like, 'bear market' notwithstanding...
You should really take a half day out of your important life and visit, say, the local dump. Many of the hills one sees are mountains of garbage. Stay and watch while truckloads come and dump their loads. You will first enter a large secured site, and drive miles of dirty roads as you climb the "mountain". The dirty underneath your car wasn't there a decade ago, but excavated from deepening holes and dumped on top of garbage, then spread out by heavy equipment which "buries" the garbage, then flattened to make a pathway for your car and loaded trucks as they climb higher up the garbage mountain. There at the top of you will drive over partially buried bricks, clothes, coat hangers, children's dolls, decaying refuse in black plastic bags with wire ties, All day, the heavy machinery is plowing and moving the newly deposited garbage around, while more garbage comes along with truckloads of excavated dirt. It's loud; maybe 100 decibels or more as the machines do their work moving the new dirt on top of new garbage then packing them down to make a plateau of garbage, your garbage. Next week, go back again, and the garbage you dumped the week before will have been buried, the garbage mountain just a little higher than the week before; the road you traveled just a little bit steeper, until they decide to make a new road up to the new plateau.
Think of what you are seeing, and image how this area was and how much life it contained before we acquired it for a dump. You will see nothing living there, and life will not return. Apple's genius will be long forgotten; the dumps will remain our lasting legacy.
EPEAT is not a government program although EPEAT was conceived and developed through the collaboration of stakeholders from the business, advocacy, government and academic arenas during the presidency of George W. Bush with funding and support via an executive order requiring that all federal agencies satisfy 95% of their purchase requirements with EPEAT-registered products. (3)
More importantly, the preceding illustrates that EPEAT is not a government program.
Apple states, "Our goal in 2010 was to achieve a [B][I]worldwide recycling rate of 70 percent[/I][/B]. (To calculate this rate, we use a measurement proposed by Dell that assumes a seven-year product lifetime. The weight of the materials we recycle each year is compared to the total weight of the products Apple sold seven years earlier.) We met and exceeded that goal in 2010. This far surpasses the last reported numbers from [I][B]Dell and HP[/B][/I], which were each [I][B]lower than 20 percent[/B][/I]. In 2011, Apple global recycling once again exceeded our 70 percent goal, and we are confident that we will maintain this level through 2015." (4)
[URL=http://forums.appleinsider.com/image/id/171114/width/600/height/250][IMG]http://forums.appleinsider.com/image/id/171114/width/600/height/250[/IMG][/URL]
The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) assumes that 40 percent of commercial computers reach their end-of-life after three years, another 40 percent after five years, and the remaining 20 percent after seven years "... based on information from the International Association of Electronics Recyclers (IAER 2006), surveys of computer reuse (Lynch 2001), personal communications with industry experts (DuBravac 2006, Powers 2006), and assumptions about the length of time that commercial products are held in storage ..." (5)
The EPA estimates "that in 2009:438 million new electronic products were sold; 5 million short tons of electronic products were in storage; 2.37 million short tons of electronic products were ready for end-of-life management; and 25 percent of these tons were collected for recycling." (5)
[I][B]The approach implemented by Apple appears to be far more successful in reducing waste and reusing components.[/B][/I]
1. Unattributed. No Published Date provided. [URL=http://www.epeat.net]EPEAT Home[/URL]. [I]EPEAT[/I]. Retrieved 8 July 2012.
2. Unattributed. No Published Date provided. [URL=http://www.greenelectronicscouncil.org/pages/about]About the Green Electronics Council[/URL]. [I]Green Electronics Council[/I]. Retrieved 8 July 2012.
3. Unattributed. No Published Date provided. [URL=http://www.epeat.net/who-is-epeat/history-2/]EPEAT Timeline[/URL]. [I]EPEAT[/I]. Retrieved 8 July 2012.
4. Unattributed. No Published Date provided. [URL=http://www.apple.com/environment/#recycling]Apple Recycling Program[/URL]. [I]Apple[/I]. Retrieved 8 July 2012.
5. Unattributed. May 2011. [URL=http://www.epa.gov/epawaste/conserve/materials/ecycling/docs/fullbaselinereport2011.pdf]U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Office of Resource Conservation and Recovery Electronics Waste Management in the United States Through 2009[/URL]. [I]EPA[/I]. Retrieved 8 July 2012.
Okay, bye.
The thing that concerns me is that the Govt and many large corporations require their purchases to be EPEAT certified. It really sucks to be blocked out of a whole market like that.
Sucks for whom?
Apple's doing fine.
Lol. Will you please come back a few months from now and tell us how the alternatives worked out for you on all these attributes.