• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • Home
  • About
    • Stephen Foskett
      • My Publications
        • Urban Forms in Suburbia: The Rise of the Edge City
      • Storage Magazine Columns
      • Whitepapers
      • Multimedia
      • Speaking Engagements
    • Services
    • Disclosures
  • Categories
    • Apple
    • Ask a Pack Rat
    • Computer History
    • Deals
    • Enterprise storage
    • Events
    • Personal
    • Photography
    • Terabyte home
    • Virtual Storage
  • Guides
    • The iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Guide
      • The iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Troubleshooting Guide
    • The iPad Exchange ActiveSync Guide
      • iPad Exchange ActiveSync Troubleshooting Guide
    • Toolbox
      • Power Over Ethernet Calculator
      • EMC Symmetrix WWN Calculator
      • EMC Symmetrix TimeFinder DOS Batch File
    • Linux Logical Volume Manager Walkthrough
  • Calendar

Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat

Understanding the accumulation of data

You are here: Home / Everything / Apple / Buy Apple For Chic, Not Green

Buy Apple For Chic, Not Green

October 14, 2008 By Stephen Leave a Comment

Apfelteiler by Frank C. Müller
Apfelteiler by Frank C. Müller

Apple just introduced their new MacBook and MacBook Pro, so far amping up the chic-meter that only Jony “Dramatic Stutter and Pause” Ive could do the product justice in their promo video. Yet, despite the company’s environmentally-friendly pronouncements, I’m unconvinced. They continue to pull a time-honored sleight-of-hand, touting their products as recyclable while ignoring the massive waste of energy and materials that goes into their production.

Let’s cut right to the heart of the matter: Apple talks about environmentalism and has made some real strides (as noted by TUAW and CNET) in reducing packaging, eliminating toxic chemicals, and improving the energy efficiency of their products. This much is true. I don’t doubt that they would like to be an environmentally-friendly company, and one might assume that the manufacturing process meets this description. But although producing computer products will always be extremely environmentally-unfriendly, Apple’s new “brick” unibody process is probably much less green than previous processes (as noted by TreeHugger).

Think about it:

  • Apple takes a 2.5 lb aluminum slab and cuts out 80% of the metal! These tailings are very difficult to recycle, and Apple proudly says they’re leaving 2 lbs on the floor for every machine they make.
  • The amount of time and energy required to create that unibody must be incredible! Just watch the video. Milling machines? High-powered industrial lasers? Wow!

Compare this to a conventional process, which stamps out individual pieces from sheet metal. Very little is wasted, the scrap remains uncontaminated and can more easily be recycled, and the entire process takes a little energy and less than a second.

The fact that Apple doesn’t go into detail about the environmental impact of this new manufacturing process probably says a lot. They change the subject – talking about how recyclable the aluminum chassis is and how it saves on transportation. This is a classic trick – focus on the positives and hope no one notices that you’re ignoring the negatives. In fact, even though Apple never says the manufacturing process is environmentally friendly, a reasonable person might make this assumption, as did TidBITS.

It’s hard to figure out just how energy-intensive this process is from Apple’s data, however.  They just introduced a new environmental status report format with these new machines. Although it’s light on details, it does include some amazing metrics if you look hard enough. The company only lists production on their “greenhouse gas emissions” chart, but this can help us deduce the energy required to produce the products, at least, since this is likely directly proportional.

 

 

 

  Production Consumer Use Transport Recycling
MacBook Pro 285.6 212.8 56.0 5.6
MacBook 230.0 179.4 46.0 4.6
MacBook Air 149.6 156.4 30.6 3.4

This table, filled with information from Apple’s status reports, shows that production of the new MacBook and MacBook Pro creates far more greenhouse gases (and thus, take much more energy) than the MacBook Air. In fact, production takes even more energy than consumer use of the machines over a four year period! Wow!

Don’t get me wrong. I love my MacBook Pro, and I would love one of the new ones. And Apple is probably more environmentally-friendly than most companies. But this new manufacturing process is not a highlight of efficiency.

(And, seriously, could Jony Ive sound any more like Jeremy Clarkson?!?)

You might also want to read these other posts...

  • Electric Car Over the Internet: My Experience Buying From…
  • How To Connect Everything From Everywhere with ZeroTier
  • Liberate Wi-Fi Smart Bulbs and Switches with Tasmota!
  • Introducing Rabbit: I Bought a Cloud!
  • How To Install ZeroTier on TrueNAS 12

Filed Under: Apple Tagged With: Apple, energy, greenhouse gas, MacBook, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, manufacturing

Primary Sidebar

We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done

Alan Turing

Subscribe via Email

Subscribe via email and you will receive my latest blog posts in your inbox. No ads or spam, just the same great content you find on my site!
 New posts (daily)
 Where's Stephen? (weekly)

Download My Book


Download my free e-book:
Essential Enterprise Storage Concepts!

Recent Posts

How To Install ZeroTier on TrueNAS 12

February 3, 2022

Scam Alert: Fake DMCA Takedown for Link Insertion

January 24, 2022

How To Connect Everything From Everywhere with ZeroTier

January 14, 2022

Electric Car Over the Internet: My Experience Buying From Vroom

November 28, 2020

Powering Rabbits: The Mean Well LRS-350-12 Power Supply

October 18, 2020

Tortoise or Hare? Nvidia Jetson TK1

September 22, 2020

Running Rabbits: More About My Cloud NUCs

September 21, 2020

Introducing Rabbit: I Bought a Cloud!

September 10, 2020

Remove ROM To Use LSI SAS Cards in HPE Servers

August 23, 2020

Test Your Wi-Fi with iPerf for iOS

July 9, 2020

Symbolic Links

    Featured Posts

    New England Takes On Seattle To Determine Who’s Number 2 … In Tech!

    January 19, 2015

    FCoE vs. iSCSI – Making the Choice

    May 20, 2011

    Microsoft’s Overlooked Innovation

    February 15, 2010

    Infographic: Real-World Port Throughput Relative To Thunderbolt (Formerly Light Peak)

    February 21, 2011

    Sony QX100 Lens Camera: Ruined by a Flaky iOS App

    October 7, 2013

    Not All 802.11n Networks Are Alike

    July 2, 2011

    Aerobie AeroPress Review: The Hacker Coffee Maker

    February 7, 2011

    Are You a Hypervisor Hugger or a Storage Stalwart?

    November 14, 2011

    The Rack Endgame: Converged Infrastructure and Disaggregation

    September 19, 2014

    ZFS Is the Best Filesystem (For Now…)

    July 10, 2017

    Footer

    Legalese

    Copyright © 2022 · Log in