Apple’s Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering Bob Mansfield just published a letter on the company’s website announcing that Apple has reversed its decision to remove EPEAT environmental certification from its products.
“We’ve recently heard from many loyal Apple customers who were disappointed to learn that we had removed our products from the EPEAT rating system,” Mansfield writes. “I recognize that this was a mistake. Starting today, all eligible Apple products are back on EPEAT.”
Apple reportedly asked the EPEAT standards group to pull its 39 eligible products (including desktop computers, laptops, and monitors) from the EPEAT green products list earlier this month. A few days after the news broke, a company spokesperson defended the decision, saying, “Apple takes a comprehensive approach to measuring our environmental impact and all of our products meet the strictest energy efficiency standards backed by the US government, Energy Star 5.2.”
The company may have been counting on consumers like me, who own lots of Apple products but have very little idea what EPEAT is. (Products receive EPEAT ratings based on factors like energy conservation, use of environmentally sensitive materials, and recyclability.) However, as with pretty much everything else Apple does, the decision got a lot of coverage. It may also have threatened the company’s ability to sell to schools and governmental agencies — San Francisco officials, for example, said they would be blocking purchases of Apple products.
Despite backing off its earlier decision, and also claiming that the company’s relationship with EPEAT “has become stronger as a result of this experience,” most of Mansfield’s letter restates the argument that Apple had been making earlier, that its environmental success shouldn’t be measured by older standards:
“It’s important to know that our commitment to protecting the environment has never changed, and today it is as strong as ever. Apple makes the most environmentally responsible products in our industry. In fact, our engineering teams have worked incredibly hard over the years to make our products even more environmentally friendly, and much of our progress has come in areas not yet measured by EPEAT.”
EPEAT CEO Robert Frisbee has published on open letter of his on the EPEAT website, hinting (albeit in fairly convoluted language) that Apple’s move may be spurring the group to update its standards (or to work more quickly on already-planned updates):
“An interesting question for EPEAT is how to reward innovations that are not yet envisioned with standards that are fixed at a point in time. Diverse goals, optional points awarded for innovations not yet described, and flexibility within specified parameters to make this happen are all on the table in EPEAT stakeholder discussions. …
“Answers to these questions support all our subscribers, and lead to mutual benefit for all our purchasers. And they led us to the path to our strengthened relationship with Apple.”
Remember that melted Samsung Galaxy S III that surfaced in an Irish forum a few weeks ago? Samsung said they were looking into it and, along with a third party investigation, have decided it occurred as a result of “external energy” being applied to the device, not anything from within the phone itself. The damage is apparently consistent with the phone going in the microwave. The original poster has reappeared on Boards.ie, indicating it was a mistake by someone else in an attempt to recover the phone after it got wet.
Developing…
Samsung finds exploding Galaxy S III was due to ‘external source’, owner says it was a ‘mistake’ originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 06 Jul 2012 23:36:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink | 
Samsung Tomorrow, Boards.ie | Email this | Comments
Microsoft’s first Zune hardware launched in late 2006, around five years after the initial Apple iPod hit the market and less than a year before the iPhone changed the smartphone industry. Former Microsoft executive Robbie Bach, in charge of Zune at the time, says he would skip portable media players if he could launch Zune again. “The portable music market is gone and it was already leaving when we started,” admitted Bach at an entrepreneurs’ event in Seattle last week. “We just weren’t brave enough,” he says, accepting that Microsoft ended up chasing Apple without a compelling reason for consumers to purchase Zune hardware.
Continue reading…
Perhaps it should be no surprise, considering the heartbreaking delays (and $ 1,000 price bump) the Scarlet has already endured, but it looks like the project is undergoing a major shift in focus — namely, it will apparently be no longer be targeted towards prosumers. EOS HD quotes RED founder Jim Jannard thusly:
The concept of RED was to build a camera with as much capability as possible… for the professional market. Then we thought we could extend it down a bit to the prosumer level. Apparently, that was a mistake.He also says that “plenty of companies [are] dedicated to selling prosumer (short for ‘almost right’) cameras. We aren’t going to be one of them.” And later, “we had no idea what we were doing… Nothing works like it is supposed to.” Ouch. Although we respect the man’s candor (if not his eyewear), it’s hard to say exactly what this all means: is the Scarlet camera going to be scuttled completely, or merely priced out of consideration for the (well-heeled) consumer? Either way, you can officially consider us bummed out.
RED founder Jim Jannard calls prosumer Scarlet ‘a mistake’ originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 05 Oct 2010 12:09:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink 
Wet Pixel | EOS HD | Email this | Comments
Engadget
The most famous business journalist in the world – Maria Bartiromo – started her career as a production assistant at CNN. She was pulling the overnight shift for years before moving on to become a producer.
Maria did every line production job in the place and then got “promoted” behind the scenes. And hated it. So she put an audition tape together, applied for an on-camera reporting job at the then-fledgling network CNBC, and got it.
Lou Dobbs, her boss at CNN who had given her a promotion to a senior producer position, was not happy with her departure. In fact, he told her that she was making the biggest mistake of her life.
This interview is part of our Leadership series. It is presented by Marriott with limited commercial interruption.
See Maria Bartiromo’s Full Interview HERE >
Production by Bright Red Pixels.
See Maria Bartiromo’s Full Interview HERE >
Join the conversation about this story »
Props to Silicon Alley Insider
Related Posts:Microsoft has removed the Bing iPhone application from all international App Stores except the US, saying that releasing it in other countries was a mistake.
Read More: Neowin
Read the comments on this post
Props to One Microsoft Way
Related Posts: