I was a single time in an apple shop about 20 years ago, and couldn't help but shaking the head. Motley and streamlined desktop computers. What for? Do they have to account for drag?
Yeah, the Macs of
20 years ago looked like frickin' airplanes. Nothing like the
sedate, utilitarian design favored by even contemporary Windows users.
The ipod. Several hundred $ when walkmans and portable cd players were down to ten bucks or so...
...fit with a battery that went dead after one year,
Five, for me, and I only use it plugged into the car now so it doesn't matter, but who's counting?
I'm eager to learn more about the Apple electronics recycling program. Do they take your old Apple PC back when you can't resist but buy a new one? And then put them into containers, and ship them to landfills in Africa?
Bad faith is bad.
The practical upshot is, if an old Mac has any outstanding useful parts or materials, you get a gift card for them. An old iPod is worth a 10% discount on a new one. Useless crap is carted off to their contractor for disposal.
If you have a problem with companies claiming to recycle and then not (which, I'm sure by total coincidence, is actually a real thing) you'll want to harass fans of
WeRecycle!, the contractor Apple uses for electronics waste.
As for Apple's own environmental policy,
it's surprisingly well-articulated. It's amazing what being the only company in the field harassed by Greenpeace for stuff that happens industry-wide will do.
I agree with the sentiment that the context it was used in this thread is inappropriate. But Jobs' reaction to his cancer diagnosis is essentially a high profile exercise in what happens when you replace medical expertise with pseudoscience and I think it's important to recognize that to help prevent other people from making the same mistakes in the future. And if Jobs had chosen differently he very well could still be alive today.
I feel similarly, but the nature of the internet means the sentiment is rarely used in an appropriate context. The fact is, Steve Jobs was a big boy who could make his own decisions about his health, even stupid ones he'd regret later. Most of the people who've made any kind of comment have made it about Jobs' arrogance and either tried to turn it into some kind of greek tragedy where the gods of the pancreas finally punished him for his hubris, or gotten all entitled and spoken of how his ego deprived us all of him too soon and he should've been more aware of his responsibilities to gadget-fans. Either way, it's an excuse to condemn the man for what was a private (albeit foolish) decision.
It's not as if he was an advocate against surgery, and went around telling people not to go to "the Man's hospitals" and that he ate watermelon for a year and is now cancer-free and you should, too. Maybe he makes a useful anecdote in favor of science-based medicine, but it's uncalled for to condemn him or say he deserved it, and disingenuous to suggest he would've lived to a hundred and one if only he'd done the right thing a few months earlier (not that you're doing either).
Personally, after having been interested in the Apple II+, the Apple IIe, and the Apple IIc, I found it curious that the computer manufacturer best known for systems with color graphics and a design that encouraged users to open the case and fiddle with the innards put out products like the original Macs ... black and white graphics in a case that required a special tool to open. That change is what drove me off Apple originally, and the same mentality persists through the current product line with some of the nonsense Kai outlines.
Thing is, a case could be made for all of those compromises. The black and white screen was made to allow white backgrounds for WYSIWYG previews of print-outs, for instance. Temporarily sacrificing color for a couple of years is what gave the Mac its foothold in design and publishing and kept the company on life-support through the 90s long enough for the Department of Justice to begin antitrust investigations into Microsoft, which made it very attractive to them to continue to have a "competitor" in the desktop OS market and assure Apple's survival long enough to move on to the next big thing.
More than twice the price of a comparable Windows PC.
A build-it-yourself PC, perhaps. If you buy a preassembled one, the truly "comparable" models may be slightly cheaper, but hardly half. If you have a specific example we can take a look of course.
The problem with that, though, is it's easy to overlook something that doesn't show up on the spec sheet. Okay, sure, you find a 15 inch Dell laptop with an i7, the same amount of RAM, and the same disc space for $800 less than a MacBook Pro. So Apple's obviously gouging you, right?
Well, maybe, but what's the case made of? If the Apple is metal and the Dell is plastic, that'll cover some of the difference. Does the Dell have an SD or HD webcam? How about the backlit keyboard, or Firewire ports? Does that integrated/discrete graphics switcher thing the MBP has come standard in the Windows world? I honestly don't know. Maybe the optical drive? What if the Dell has a blu-ray drive, then Apple's manufacturing costs are going down, and maybe it's a screw-job from the fruit, after all. How about component quality? Sure, they both have 15 inch displays, but all displays were not created equal. Apple could be using higher-quality (or, at least, more expensive) parts.
It's certainly possible to build an equivalent Windows laptop that's
more expensive than the Apple version if you go to a more "boutique" manufacturer like Sony, especially if you don't drill down and compare every little thing and just compare processor, disk, and memory.
