Steve Jobs writes about Apple's efforts to become a more enironmental friendly company. "Apple has been criticized by some environmental organizations for not being a leader in removing toxic chemicals from its new products, and for not aggressively or properly recycling its old products. Upon investigating Apple's current practices and progress towards these goals, I was surprised to learn that in many cases Apple is ahead of, or will soon be ahead of, most of its competitors in these areas. Whatever other improvements we need to make, it is certainly clear that we have failed to communicate the things that we are doing well." Among other things, Apple will introduce LEDs in displays to Macs this year.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2005-11-10
I'm all for using our inventions responsibly, but take into fact:
* The oil industry actively prevents innovation in alternative power sources.
* America consumes 75% of the worlds resources for 12% of the landmass.
* Americans also pay the least amount of tax on gas. If gas cost $7.36 per gallon, like it does here in the UK (1 litre = ~£1) there would be riots in the street. The economy would collapse
* America would not work with the Kyoto agreement
* American cars are consitently less fuel efficient than cars of any other country
* American corporate greed actively prevents innovation in less environmentally damaging technologies and products. Europe has been one of the leaders, including the fridge eating machine, better designed housing / materials and construction processes.
Member since:2005-08-28
* Americans also pay the least amount of tax on gas. If gas cost $7.36 per gallon, like it does here in the UK (1 litre = ~£1) there would be riots in the street. The economy would collapse
The economy AND our government (for failing to do anything about the American Worker). When gas hit $3 per gallon people were calling out for the strategic petroleum reserve to be tapped.
* America would not work with the Kyoto agreement
This has to change. Hopefully with the next election, it will.
* American cars are consistently less fuel efficient than cars of any other country
Few things make me laugh and cry at the same time quite like the 'gas card' incentives GM and Ford were trying to roll out a while back, to entice people to buy their same gigantic gas-guzzling cars during the "OMG $3" gas crisis. I find it hard to believe the desire for more fuel-efficient cars caught them THAT off guard that they didn't have anything decently efficient to promote.
No comment on the others...
I think what you've managed to nail is the difference between "good" and "less bad" (and equivalently, the difference between "better" and "good").
For someone who's definitely going to buy a new computer anyway, greener is better, and Apple is to be commended. At least, as long as Steve Jobs didn't leave out a huge list of other nasty chemicals that Apple refuses to dump but that Dell has...
Member since:2006-06-02
We all need to clean up but if you really want to keep the pressure on you'd best tactically switch your attention to China, India and Brazil: the US, as is Europe, is inhabited to a great extent by a culturally post-industrial population - the *current* US Administration will soon seem like a lot of neutered pussycats once the Chinese dragon starts to dig its heels in over carbon emissions (and then ask yourself where a lot of PC equipment is now produced these days)
Member since:2005-07-06
Its not just America, most of the developed world is the same. True, fuel costs less in America, but that doesn't stop people in the UK or France for example, driving down to the shops in a 4x4 vehicle, or buying a petrol guzzling people carrier for one person.
I doubt society will ever change, because 99% of people don't care, because it won't effect them.
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.Glass is getting some love at Google I/O as well. New applications have been released - Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Elle, Tumblr, and CNN. Perhaps more interesting: the newly announced Google Glass Developer Kit will allow offline applications and direct hardware access - great for hacking and expanding Glass' potential. This kit will really allow hackers to put Glass through its paces."But Beck and Merrill decided that simply banning toxic players wasn't an acceptable solution for their game. Riot Games began experimenting with more constructive modes of player management through a formal player behavior initiative that actually conducts controlled experiments on its player base to see what helps reduce bad behavior. The results of that initiative have been shared at a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on panels at the Penny Arcade Expo East and the Game Developers Conference." Absolutely fascinating stuff. I'm a League of Legends player, and to be honest, the community isn't nearly as bad as some make it out to be. I'm happy Riot games has the guts to employ science to address the issue.
"Android and iOS, the number one and number two ranked smartphone operating systems worldwide, combined for 92.3% of all smartphone shipments during the first quarter of 2013 as Windows Phone crept past BlackBerry for 3rd place. According to the International Data Corporation Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, Android smartphone vendors and Apple shipped a total of 199.5 million units worldwide during 1Q13, up 59.1% from the 125.4 million units shipped during 1Q12." Windows Phone doubles from a few to twice few, iOS loser market share as its growth is slower than that of the overall market. BlackBerry continues slide into irrelevance."According to the latest research from our Wireless Smartphone Strategies service, global Android smartphone profits reached US$5 billion in total during the first quarter of 2013. Samsung dominated and captured an impressive 95 percent share of all Android smartphone profits." Wow.
Member since:
2006-08-21
So let me get this straight: you would have the whole world stop buying computers, stop driving cars, stop, in effect, using energy that comes from a power plant.
Um, no.
Look, I'm all for people driving less (I don't own a car) and getting off their fat arses to carry their own weight for a while. And I'm all for finding alternatives to energy sources that we know are doing damage to our environment. But the fact is, our society *depends* on the things you would have us give up. There exists this idea of sustainable living--and I believe these "green" products play to this idea--wherein we acknowledge that we don't want to stop our society, but rather change our behavior enough that the impact we have on our environment is mitigated, and ideally eliminated, by the methods of conservation that we adopt.
Now, given that, would you rather fight for a society that doesn't burn fuel (ain't gonna happen), or fight for a society that makes conscientious decisions about what it does with the energy the burnt fuel provides, with the goal of finding ways to affect positive change that balances out the harm we're doing? I for one applaud any company that recognizes the importance of gradual--and voluntary!--adoption of cleaner practices.