City of San Francisco Will No Longer Buy Apple Products

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Why couldn't Apple have proposed updates to EPEAT, if it's so hopelessly out of date?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.

* 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.)

[2] http://lnv.gy/N0mufz

[3] http://lnv.gy/cVtbKt

[4] http://lnv.gy/dBYhVr

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).

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.»

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).

Apple may be right in claiming EPEAT wasn't evolving - but large organizations with environmental targets & commitments to meet depend on standards rather than the non-scalable need to scrutinize & validate every individual vendor's approach.

Like, you know, how we managed to figure out, way back when, that we can't just dig a hole anywhere and call it a toilet, despite all the naysayers at the time who must have been saying "I don't understand all this expensive and inefficient indoor plumbing stuff, when just burying our waste in a pit that just so happens to be near the big creek where we get our drinking water from is a perfectly viable option. Most of it won't seep out of the pit, and the creek runs so deep and flows so fast, after all."

So forgive me for (hoping) that you couldn't possibly have been serious with your original riposte.

Of course, it's hard to say for certain, because the actual criteria aren't public -- some digging around turned up the fact that you have to buy the documents from IEEE.