Apple Thoughts - News & Reviews on all things Apple

A little editorial on Apple and their attempt, but ultimate failure on being "green" with all their shipping boxes. Not to be taken too seriously...

"Tekserve has teamed up again with the Lower East Side Ecology Center to offer free electronics recycling on Saturday, January 16th from 10a-4p. Recyclable items include computers, monitors, fax machines, copiers, DVD or VCR players, radios, telephones, cell phones, televisions, cameras, and stereo equipment."

Pretty good deal if you live anywhere near New York City, dispose of any e-waste you might have and all for free! It's happening in front of Tekserve, 119 West 23rd Street near 6th Avenue, and the Lower East Side Ecology Center is lending a hand. Tekserve also has a nifty giveaway associated with this event. Per the website, "to celebrate the event, anyone bringing electronics to be recycled can register at Tekserve for a raffle to win a MacBook Air. All participants in the event will also receive a coupon for a $25 discount on any new current model iPod (except Shuffle) or computer purchased within 30 days after the event. Coupons cannot be combined with other offers." They are also giving participants a $25.00 USD coupon good towards any Mac or iPod (excluding iPod shuffle) from Tekserve, good until February 15th 2010.

"Following an investigation of a complaint by Dell, NAD, the National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus, said Apple was “unique” in having chosen only to produce laptops that meet the highest EPEAT environmental standards. “While other manufacturers may have subcategories of lines with similar ratings, none has comparable high ratings for all of the notebooks it produces,” NAD said. However Apple was asked to remove the the reference to “world’s greenest” given the potential for overstatement. NAD noted that some individual Toshiba Portage notebooks have a higher EPEAT rating than MacBooks."

Interesting distinction. There are individual laptops that are as green or greener, but not an entire line that's as green as the MacBooks. Fair enough. Frankly, I think this whole rush to get green thing is a bit annoying already, but there are obviously people who make their buying decisions based on the color of their environmental impact (not to mention idiots like GreenPeace who won't shut up).

Frankly, I don't buy computers based on their environmental footprint, but that's me.

"HP, Lenovo, and Dell haven't fared too badly in some of Greenpeace's previous e-waste reports, but it looks like three companies have fallen well short of the organization's expectations this time around, with each getting called out for failing to live up to their promises."

Not that anyone cares (or should) about what Greenpeace has to say about anything, but Apple's a frequent target of their ire (they went so far as to disrupt Macworld San Francisco last year with their stupid stunts) and it seems like they have much bigger fish to fry now. While Apple isn't exactly in the green, Dell, Lenovo, HP, and Acer are all worse and are all selling more units than Apple will ever sell in any market, so maybe Apple goes off their radar for a bit and they start focusing on the bigger guys who will, justifiably, ignore them.

I don't know about you, but I like this ad. It's pretty cool how they've managed to keep their distinct feel and completely change the message from "Get a Mac" to "We're green." I don't know if this is going to sway anyone who wasn't already predisposed toward getting a Mac in the first place, but it can't hurt, particularly with all the negative attention Apple got from the folks over at GreenPeace.