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Comment by amichail | Hacker News Reader

Anyone find it irritating when a company advertises the environmental benefits of a product (e.g., LED displays)?

It's sort of like putting words into your mouth, making assumptions about your worldview.

Well, e-waste IS a massive worldwide problem, so you should be considering how you're purchases will be disposed and what effect that will have on the environment. Is that a worldview? If you haven't seen Frontline's Digital Dumping Ground episode, it's worth watching: http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/ghana804/video/vid...

This is what I mean. These lectures are really irritating and would make me LESS likely to buy a product.

I find it funny that you fixate on one part of the overall sales pitch as offensive. Can you imagine a consumer that is thinking to themselves, "I need a laptop that has a 15" screen and is environmentally friendly. I don't really care about the color gamut but I would like to be assured that I am not going to kill the environment."

I think it's no secret that one of the reasons Apple products appeal to many people is that Apple promotes a left-wing political worldview.

When I am looking for a product to buy, I don't wish to have a political debate or have someone make any assumptions about where I stand on various political issues.

They're providing information about their own products on their own website. How is that "a political debate"?

How exactly is stating that a product has less impact on the environment in any way political? Is there a brand of politics I'm not aware of that says that building piles of toxic waste is a good thing?

The people in Ghana who work on the e-waste must think it's a good thing (good meaning better than their alternatives) else they wouldn't be doing it.

We might not like the thought of them working with e-waste but until we provide them with a better alternative it's not right to remove their best opportunity to earn a living.

That's certainly an interesting take. Would you say the same thing about poor people that are earning their living as a result of war or other things that negatively impact the planet as a whole?

People should be allowed to engage in dirty, risky behaviour if it's their own choice. That covers the act of working in e-waste individually, as for any pollution it causes it's up to the authorities in Ghana to deal with that, but it could be that they feel the decrease in poverty of those engaged in e-waste outweighs the problem of pollution. That's for Ghana to decide though not us.

That's kind of like saying we should keep crime high so demand for policemen stays high...

No it's saying don't be so concerned with local pollution in a place that's so poor that they may starve if you make them live as cleanly as we do.

It's sad that something as fundamental as cleaning up after ourselves is made into a partisan issue.

you know, i tried conservatism once but had to stop because of all the crappy products my political worldview was causing me to buy

Hrm. Real conservatives don't buy crappy (new) products, they prefer to wear out old good ones.

Your prescription may have been switched ;-)

I am very much not a left winger, but I have no real problem with any company that advertises how easily recyclable their products are. I simply look at it as a selling point, because (eventually) I will need to dispose of the item and being easily recyclable will make it cheaper on me.

I think a reasonable philosophy is "clean up after yourself". I see no problem with advertising a product being able to easily meet that goal.

From the site: "They basically are here to earn a living. But you can imagine the health implications."

It's not obvious to me that these poor people would be better off not recycling the e-waste. I certainly wouldn't fancy doing it, but if the alternative was starvation for my family I might consider it.

I'm not at all sure that it would benefit the people of Ghana if there was no e-waste.

As for dumping toxic waste that's a problem enabled by government/courts that don't function properly.

Further it's not clear in the video how the e-waste gets there. There's the implication that the West simply dumps it there, but clearly the governments of the West don't do that, nor do companies like Apple. Probably what happens is that Ghanian companies import it from e-waste collection companies in the West.

Apple started wearing their environmental impact on their sleeve after Greenpeace screwed them over: [ http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Home/E83D58B3-10E0-4A9C-884... ]

LED also provides a much more consistent brightness across the backplane. Combine that with no 10 minute warm-up time and better lifetime performance, it's hard to whine about them advertising it.

Unless you really hate Earth, I guess.

The benefit of an LED display goes beyond just the environmental benefit. LED backlights don't have a warmup time like CFL backlights, and they provide a more uniform brightness level across the panel. The panel will also be cheaper to run over the lifetime of the device because of its energy savings (lower TCO, to borrow a term from the server community).

The fact that they are mercury free is just one of many reasons why LED backlights are considered a marketing point.

Anyone find it irritating when a company advertises the [insert niche technical spec here] of a product?

It's sort of like putting words into your mouth, making assumptions about your workflow.

Displays with an LED backlight are also capable of displaying a wider color gamut than those with a CCFL.

The sales pitch should only mention the performance benefits of a technology, leaving any environmental benefit to perhaps a subtle sticker on the product that one can easily remove.

Ack, a sticker would be worse.

Why?

The fact the Apple is _not_ the only company that prominently highlights the effect of its product on environment only proves that they are significant number of people out there who actually cares about the environmental impact of the product they are purchasing.

I have a hard time understanding why anyone would be "irritated" by this.

I am interested to know which "position of your worldview" was violated by apple's promotion of environmentally friendly product.

A sales pitch should mention the things the company believes will interest their customers. Apple obviously believes that a lot of their customers care about the environment as well as performance. There are a lot of people out there who won't buy a product unless they believe it to be 'green'. A lot of Apples customers fall into this category. Selling a product on its 'green' credentials is common in all industries, and had Apple left it out of their sales pitch it would have been an obvious mistake.

I have at times been accused of being a raving right wing, gun loving, lunatic libertarian. Even I appreciate companies that work to reduce environmental impact of their products. I mean where will I take my assault rifle to shoot Bambi if the forests are covered in e-waste? I don't make purchasing decisions purely based on performance benefits, I base them on a range of things that I value. Whether you believe in AGW or not, conservation of natural resources is a good thing.

Also, I find stickers on products aesthetically offensive.

Where is this documented? What are the CIE color points of apple's new display?

Here is an empirical point about the brightness for you: http://www.engadget.com/2007/06/06/macbook-pro-backlight-com...

A Color gamut argument is something that I cannot attest to but the colors on my MBP are vibrant if that matters. I also have it plugged into a 24" Dell Ultrasharp and the colors look more believable(aka White looks white and does not have a tinge of yellow. FWIW, I did not setup my screens with a calibrator as I do not have one.)

Brightness is not color gamut.

Wider (nonstandard) gamut is not always a good thing if applications are not aware of it. With no color correction, normal srgb images will look oversaturated and cartoonish. Even with proper application support, overly wide gamut isn't that useful because there just isn't a lot of wide gamut material to display on your fancy screen. And therefore you are just wasting precious bits to represent colors that will be rarely used in most desktop usage.

Image editing is one area where there is an actual use for wide gamut, but for all other uses, it creates more trouble than what it is worth.

This is true in general, though for the newer MacBooks they're just getting up to a good approximation of sRGB.

Yeah, something that caught my attention was the bragging about how much less power it uses. If I didn't already like Macs, I would certainly assume they were trying to make me feel better about buying a more expensive machine which will run perceptibly more slowly. Shutting down a processor core between keystrokes seems like one of those things that sounds great in theory, but in practice will produce the old familiar beachball more often, since sometimes my 24" iMac has trouble keeping up with my typing already.

But probably you can turn that off, just as I've had to do with the low energy settings on my iMacs and old Powerbook.

Haha, you're not likely to find anyone sympathetic to that perspective in this forum. Anyway, Apple has a fairly explicit leftist worldview itself, and it's never been a policy of SJ to be all things to all people.

BTW, I think the whole idea of liberal vs conservative is also offensive as it assumes that people fall into two groups each of which thinks alike on a whole host of issues -- as if their worldviews were a result of brainwashing.

Then it's strange that you're the one categorizing Apple Inc. and its target audience as "left-wing" here.

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