EPEAT is about more than recycling -- it's about reducing the total environmental impact of the PC. Everything from avoiding hazardous materials to energy efficiency to packaging options to end-of-life. It gives folks who give a hoot the ability to quickly do an "apples to apples" comparison of the environmental impact of various products.
It also externalizes decisions. Should we not buy that amazing device that everyone lusts over because the bezel contains brominated materials? It's just a bezel! EPEAT makes that decision easier -- it's certified, or not.
This is just one more example of the level of contempt that Apple routinely displays for anyone whose needs go beyond buying their products for MSRP at retail, I'm done with them. I'm not sacrificing our standards so that Apple can glue components to their computers.
Honest question: Are you not able to compare the EPEAT guidelines with what Apple currently does? They provide details on all of the things you mentioned - hazardous materials, energy efficiency, etc. It seems like they should still stand up to EPEAT, despite the recycling bit, considering that they offer recycling of their products. http://www.apple.com/environment/
Other vendors with similar form-factors seem to be able to meet the EPEAT criteria. The new "Ultrabooks", which are similar form-factor wise to Apple products, seem to be capable of meeting EPEAT Silver criteria.
What is Apple's commitment? Right now they may meet EPEAT Gold standards. Will they next month?
I suppose that I could hire people to figure this out, but why should I? There are plenty of competitors with quality products.
Why couldn't Apple have proposed updates to EPEAT, if it's so hopelessly out of date? A: They hold the institutional/corporate customer in contempt.
I don't think this is a claim you can really make right now though. When you send a device back to Apple for recycling, there's no way to find out what their recycling standards are.
Subscribing to EPEAT objectifies this, and makes it easier to know what happens when an EPEAT device is recycled.
I have contracts with a half dozen recycling vendors who take my junk and dispose of them in a manner deemed acceptable by us. Some of them even pay us to take certain products.
A "shiny EPEAT certification" means that I can call any of the thousands of recycling vendors in the United States and get my gear hauled off and disposed of in a sustainable and ethical manner, and at a reasonable price. No African children are smelting wires from equipment originating from my company. Memory from my Dell devices is recovered and resold. Batteries from my Thinkpads are dissembled and recycled.
I get the impression from the tone of your reply that even if Apple were to continue achieving EPEAT that you still wouldn't buy them.
While this change does not matter that much to most people here (I readily admit that I replace my laptop every one or two years, selling the old one), the average consumer uses a laptop much longer, especially when a laptop is a huge investment for them. Apple's latest designs drastically shorten the lifespan of laptops, unless you want to pay the exorbitant fees of having the battery replaced or adding memory.
It is bad for the environment (more laptops need to be produced), the consumer's pocketbook, and only serves Apple.
Apple will replace the 95Whr battery in a Retina MacBook Pro for $200[4]. $30 more than Dell charges for a similar-capacity battery, but this does include labor and the MPB gets 7+ hours of life with it[5].
I do not believe your assertion of "exorbitant fees" is supportable.
[1] http://www.dell.com/us/soho/p/precision-m4600/fs
[2] http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/category.aspx?c=us&l=...
[3] http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=6400&re...
[4] http://www.apple.com/support/macbookpro/service/battery/
[5] http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/07/retina-macbook-pro-maxi...
* For one, choosing a "random laptop off of Dell's small business" is not the equivalent of a MBP.
* Second, your choice of power benchmark is ridiculous. FTA: "Before we mention the battery life of the Precision M4600, it's important to point out that our review unit came equipped with the Intel Core i7-2920XM Extreme Edition processor." And based on the source's graph[1] they are dead last by a significant amount. Are you sure you chose this "randomly?"
* Third, choosing a laptop slightly more comparable, hell, even if it's not as comparable, will yield significantly better battery life. The ThinkPad Edge [2] ranges from 7.4-5.7 hours; The T series can go up to 16 hours on a 9-cell battery [3] and the X series with up to 23 hours.
* As for price, Lenovo is near the same price range at around $179/9-cell battery.
The word "exorbitant" may not be completely qualified here, but the prices are neither decent nor cheap.
[1] http://i.imgur.com/Ucep7.png -- Don't want to take their bandwidth.
(Shortened lenovo links below since they were really big. No referral nonsense in there, I promise.)
This is a critical factor -- if the Apple battery is $200 (installed professionally) vs $170 (parts only), and lasts significantly longer, it becomes more interesting of a comparison. But only if it lasts longer.
Also, Apple displays cycles used in system info, while finding similar information in Windows is not as easy. I know Apple is willing to replace batteries that die before their advertised cycle count is up, but I haven't heard of that behavior being common with competition.
I'm not claiming that Apple is better, not at all. Heck, comparing laptops between brands is difficult anyway, considering that Apple owns the >$1000 market and it's competition does the majority of it's business in the <$1000 market. (Meaning that most of the >$1000 laptops we compare to Apple products aren't those brands' bread-and-butter big sellers, they're niche products).
And what if the SSD or memory is not large enough anymore for your needs? (Which often happens after a few years of use.) In most other laptops and non-Retina display MacBook Pro's one can replace them at market prices. Not so with the new retina display MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, etc.
A friend of mine recently asked a quote for upgrading memory in his (pre-aluminium) Mac Mini, it was over 200 Euro. The market value of the memory was 40 Euro.
Edit: I would like to add that I am a happy Mac user. But I think Apple is rapidly moving into the wrong direction with their changes to rapidly deprecate older models, either by making them non-upgradable or pretty randomly removing support for them in new operating system versions (both OS X and iOS).
I'd rather that Apple deprecates older models of hardware than insists on supporting them perpetually. I say this as a developer. If you make an app for 10.7 you will not have to worry about building a PowerPC version, about testing it on a 2005-vintage Mac Mini just because one of your customers might have one. It's not supported. Period.
I know several people that are perfectly happy with an older system, 10.4 or 10.5 vintage either out of necessity or out of indifference. It works for them and they see no urgent reason to upgrade.
How much garbage do you think there is in Windows to support devices that haven't even been manufactured in the last ten years? How much better would Windows be if they abandoned all that and focused on making it better? I think it would look a lot like Windows 8, actually. Faster all around.
> in older models you could easily replace the battery
numerous resources for your reading pleasure
More disconcertingly, one can see the comments here -- largely defending Apple and marginalizing the issue -- being completely different if it was, say, Microsoft.
Just take a look at this article and check out the links to see for yourself how Apple was already doing more than the EPEAT guidelines required.
http://www.loopinsight.com/2012/07/10/apple-responds-to-epea...
http://www.apple.com/environment/
And as an aside - Microsoft in comparison is not a hardware company and the comments here aren't marginalizing the issue. The articles and reporting have blown this out of proportion to begin with.
http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2970727&cid=40...
«Recycling is NOT dumping it in a landfill, burning it OR bringing it to a recycling center. It is about removing materials requiring special handling and separating a product into distinct materials so those materials can be re-used.
For metal, this is easy. You can simply take a complete car, grind it up, melt and scoop all the bits non-metal. You have fully recycled the metal... but still, burning all that plastic, battery acid, glass is a bit nasty.
You COULD use a magnet to separate the metal from the rest but not all metals are magnetic and this will STILL leave you with a mess of non-metal that would take a legion to sort by hand.
So, how do you REALLY recycle a car? You take it apart. You remove the plastic bumper and put it on the pile with other plastic parts that you know are the same type of plastic because it is stamped on the part. Same types of plastics can be for better recycled then a pile of all sorts combined. This goes so far that for instance plastic bottles can be shredded and just melted into new ones. Failed bottles at production go right back into the process.
Once you separated all the different materials, you can re-use them or dispose of them in a safe manner. But the separation must be relatively easy OR the costs just sky-rocket. Taking of a bumper is easy especially if you don't have to care about damage. Separating two bonded plates, not so much.
A prime example of this is in electricity cables. Copper is expensive enough to make recycling worth while but separating it from the plastic surrounding it, is near impossible. What is done instead in many places is that the plastic is burned off. A very polluting process and not the idea behind recycling at all.
Now Apples devices are hard to take apart. If a screen can't be screwed open, the screen can't be separated from the shell, meaning it has to be shredded instead. You can still reclaim some materials but not as easily as with a screw driver.
The above poster seems to think that recycling means re-using working parts or re-selling the entire device. This is a FORM of recycling but NOT what this article is about. In the end, after re-selling the device will either end up in a landfill, be dumped OR be taken apart. The first two are wasteful, the second becomes more costly when the separate materials are harder to separate. Apple has basically said, we don't give a fuck about the environment and try to hide it by saying they are better but in areas nobody measures. Well, I am a better sportsman then anyone at the Olympics, just not in any Olympic sport.»
I would argue that they are "much more difficult" to recycle by anyone other than Apple.
They can still be recycled.
Mainly the battery. You can't just shred it like you can a car.
Permanently affixing readily recyclable components like memory and batteries to system boards are not "superior" practices by any meaningful measure. They are practices that enhance the marketing segmentation of their products and make Apple more money -- while making recovery of valuable assets (memory, battery materials) impossible at the end of the device's lifecycle.
Offering recycling of products is meaningless -- relatively few devices get recycled by the manufacturers programs (particularly at institutional customers like schools or enterprises).
Hence the logic about less environment friendly is simply not true.
Failing to meet EPEAT guidelines is not merely symbolic; it means that performing secure and environmentally-friendly disposal is rendered much more difficult. It also means the cost of ownership is higher since either the lifespan of the device will be shorter or experts will have to be paid to perform repairs.
Does Marco have a source for his claim that Apple actually recycles the new models if you bring them back?
*http://www.loopinsight.com/2012/07/10/apple-responds-to-epea...
Okay...
"I think Apple no longer wants to follow the EPEAT recycling guidelines because they think not following them allows product designs that will be more compelling for consumers and bring more value to Apple than their continued participation in EPEAT.
And I don’t think it matters much. Apple still accepts their own computers for recycling. It’s not unreasonable to ask the people who recycle old computers properly, who I imagine are very few, to bring their Apple computers back to Apple to guarantee the “best” recycling."