John Turner

A lot of people see being “green” as a political statement, and take it one step further by generalizing that anyone “green” or environmentally friendly is liberal or left-wing. A “treehugger”, if you will. This is incorrect, as should be obvious. You can be green without being political, and even if you are political, you can be green and support political platforms at any point in the spectrum.

I see being green from an engineering perspective. It just makes sense. Being green means doing more with less (recycling and reuse) and preserving future resources. That’s why I was pleased to read a recent release from Apple: A Greener Apple.

I switched to a Mac at home over a year ago. Even before that, I was using a G4 Powerbook as my primary laptop. Having a history with Windows-based PCs spanning more than a decade, I took a lot of grief from friends and colleagues when I started using a Mac. The common criticism was always “Macs cost more for the same features as a Wintel PC.”

My replies were always two-fold: a) I’m not stupid, and b) sometimes there’s more to a purchase decision than price and benchmarks. I can compare prices as well as the next person, and believe me, I’ve compared the prices between Apples and any other PC hardware. Apples are more than competitive on price. When I purchased my G4 Powerbook, for example, the nearest comparable Dell laptop was $400 more based on features alone, and that wasn’t even counting things like getting a real UNIX-based OS on the Mac (which, for an old UNIX greybeard like me, is a serious plus). When I bought my Mac mini, there wasn’t a comparable PC desktop available for the same price, assuming you counted things like having a footprint slightly bigger than a CD jewel case and running completely silent the same as CPU speed, amount of RAM, and hard disk size. And I do.

And, as I said above, sometimes there’s more to a purchase decision than price and benchmarks when it comes to technology. For example, supporting elegant, efficient design and engineering. In effect, voting with your wallet to show support for products that take the long view, that constantly evolve, iteration after iteration, getting better and better each step of the way. Take a conventional PC desktop…has it evolved? No, it hasn’t. Sure, the colors have changed, but basically big companies like Dell and HP blast out rectangle boxes with chips in them. All that changes is the chips get faster or smaller or have higher capacity. But the end result hasn’t changed. It is still a box with some stuff in it, made with the same processes they’ve always used.

By “better and better”, I include being more green. Getting rid of toxic materials that can’t be recycled, using less energy both in production and use, implementing take-back programs and basically just going about your business in a very smart, elegant, effective, efficient manner with more than a passing quarterly-earnings glance at the long view. Thanks, Apple, for putting into black and white and confirming what I already suspected.