Not purely cynical and that wasn’t my insinuation (or at least it wasn’t intended to be)…just mostly cynical or perhaps self serving. Tim is a liberal like a lot of the tech elite are…and he’s not shy about expressing his liberal viewpoints and every time there’s some sort of tragedy he’s quick to tweet how Apple will be making a donation…but outside of that public persona he’s also a pretty much ruthless businessman and CEO and does very little without a purpose and after consulting their legal eagles. However…their “zero carbon” claims on at least the watch were carefully indicated in the fine print as only being correct if one picked a particular band or case in the iPhone slide. I understand politics and media attention though…and just like their battery life improvements or performance gains…there’s always fine print…which again is not strictly untrue but is carefully graphed for maximum visual effect and the caveats are disclosed on the slide (just in really small and light fonts) so they’re not lying…just stretching credibility a bit…but they’re far from the only company that does these exact same things, in fact pretty much every company is equally guilty.
On the environmental push…yes, they should do their best to reduce their contribution but in reality their contribution as well as for that matter the contribution of the entire US economy is actually pretty much worthless as long as China continues their massive coal powered power plant building rate…if the US contribution of carbon and greenhouse gases went to zero that would delay what inevitable consequence the green crowd is pushing these days by a few months or years at best. Just like the whole shift to renewable resources there are tremendous problems with shifting the entire energy infrastructure that have not been solved yet…and neither the UN or anybody else can legislate scientific progress…anybody that doesn’t believe we are many decades from making a significant reduction in non renewable energy use is pretty much dreaming in my opinion. Doesn’t mean we or companies shouldn’t try but wholesale bankrupting of the economy or energy grid or anything else isn’t going to work unless every country does it…and I think it’s safe to say that China is going to continue not only doing zippo but actively building coal plants.
First, whilst it may seem ‘worthless’ to do anything, it’s clearly not - everything helps. We have people say the same thing about Australia but somebody has to lead the way and rich countries like the US and Australia should be doing it. Just because you can’t solve the problem completely doesn’t mean you don’t contribute.
Second, yes it’s alarming that China are building new coal-fire power stations but - and I’m quoting from a Reuter’s story “China is the world’s largest and fastest-growing producer of renewable energy, which is expected to account for a third of all power supplied to its grid by 2025, up from 28.8% in 2020”.
Currently they’re leading the the world in renewables - something which honestly surprised me. Are the US saying they’ll be 33% renewable within two years? From what I’ve seen, there’s not even agreement within US parties if anything needs to be done.
I’m certainly not an apologist for China, but it seems the target of your dismay could be misplaced - they’re definitely not doing ‘zippo’.
I think this is mostly a case of carbon neutrality being both really hard to achieve and difficult to document and having to start somewhere. Apple has talked a lot about recycled materials in the past, but it was always just one piece of the product puzzle. With the current Apple Watch models paired with a Sport Loop, they completed the puzzle.
It doesn’t feel like an asterisk situation to me where anything is being hidden. On the Apple Watch Series 9 page, the fact that a case and band combination is necessary is up front, and clicking the Learn How button explains in more detail.
That explanation also links to the Apple 2030 page, which explains in even more detail.
And when you get toward the bottom of that page, you can click links to see detailed information about the status of each product, including a 13-page PDF about each Apple Watch model.
My sense is more that Apple is trying to figure out how to market carbon neutrality with broad strokes while still providing sufficient detail to avoid being accused of greenwashing.
With luck, coal’s recent unprofitability will continue and start to dissuade more construction. On the flip side, in the last 7 months, China installed as much solar as the US installed in the last 6 years and as much wind as the US installed in the last 3 years.
Perhaps I should have said pointless instead of worthless, that’s more precise…because as long as China continues to build the coal plants, which they are doing faster than they’re doing renewables I read from another article…they’re not going to decommission those coal plants for 50 years or more. And since they’re the largest carbon emitter…what the rest of the world does really doesn’t change the ‘inevitable tipping point’ we’ve been hearing about since the 70s and IiRC the original inevitable tipping point was still in the 1990s…as long as China (and Brazil and India behind them IIRC) continue to build coal plants whatever will happen will still happen albeit a few months or years later. Yep…doing every little bit helps, but not nearly as much as the people trumpeting their little bits says it does. And the ‘revolutionary battery and solar cell improvements! Have been just around the corner (like fusion) for some time now…and the pie in the sky ‘the world has to be carbon free by xxx’ or whatever date/claim they’re making now is essentially based on a pipe dream of legislating scientific progress because the greenies say so.
Apple is doing some things which will help around the edges but nothing they can or will do will make a significant difference…and all the renewable power in the world won’t solve the 3 main problems with it…it doesn’t work when it’s dark, doesn’t work when the wind isn’t blowing, and the places where it can be easily produced don’t have the infrastructure to get it to where people are and those areas won’t let you build enough of them locally anyway because it spoils the view. EVs, yeah they’re great for short trips but won’t be really feasible for long trips by the number of people taking long trips for a long time because of inadequate range and charging infrastructure and trucks…yeah, EV trucks aren’t going to be economically feasible for a long time if ever. And where do the charging stations get their power from…regular coal and gas and nuclear plants…and in several cases in CA from a big diesel generator behind the building…so how do EVs do anything but move the carbon production to another source (which arguably might be slightly cleaner but certainly not clean).
We are getting way off topic though…and ace will shut down the discussion soon anyway I’m guessing as we all know he doesn’t like topic drift and he runs da joint as they say.
Yeah, all this environmental stuff is a ball of wax, and while even Apple isn’t large enough to make a huge difference on its own, every little bit helps, and Apple’s bit is way larger than what the rest of us can do.
At least they’re saying the right things, making good changes, and putting their money where their mouth is. And since their money comes from us, we’re all in it too.
But yes, let’s not get into the weeds any further.
I see that the increased iCloud+ plans will be available Sept 18th. It will be interesting to see how this works with Apple Premier One, whether there’s a variant which offers tiers of storage or whether it is available as an add on to an individual family member. We have five in our family, There’s three of us with additional 2Tb iCloud+ accounts and one with a 200Gb account, on top of the 2Tb shared and maxed out in the Family Sharing. It’s proven difficult to share the storage collectively. I’m hoping I can simply sign up for a single large iCloud storage with my Premier.
Call me the naive optimist, but I’d love to see Apple One Premier accounts bumped to 4 or 6TB. If it has to cost a few dollars more I could live with it.
I’d happily forfeit Fitness+ and Apple Arcade for the additional storage - things I have never, and will never, use.
Fitness+ has actually proven a surprise here, forming an exercise program we can find time to follow. Arcade less so, I download only occasionally, bored in an airport say.
The shared subscriptions, the joint storage, this has been the big benefit.
I’m pretty active so thought I might use it. Tried one program and didn’t like it - a bit over hyped.
I walk every day, swim a couple of klm three times a week, rock climb twice a week and play a game of touch football on the weekend. Realistically I was probably never going to fit in anything else.
I average about 70 minutes of aerobic workouts per day, usually more than 350 days per year; I hit 750 F+ cycling workouts in June. Fantastic addition to Apple One for me; so much better to do guided interval workouts on the trainer than just a boring ride of the bike. Cheaper than a Peloton subscription, too.
So it’s not just for people who don’t normally workout.
However this of us who don’t need 2TB but do need maybe half or one are being treated badly, Apple should have more steps between the levels and appropriate pricing, I have paid for 2TB for years but never got past 5GB.
And I wish they’d increase that 5 GB tier. When that was introduced, what was the baseline internal storage on Macs — 128 GB? It would be awesome if over the years Apple raised that free tier in the same way they raise the base storage on Macs.
China now outproducing the US with solar panels, large storage batteries, and EVs. With the EVs, US and European car manufacturers are protesting about the Chinese subsidies for its EV industry but they seem to forget the underwriting that US and Europe does for their car manufacturers, and now combined with Biden’s initiatives to increase investment in US renewable power generation. Chinese EVs may do the same thing that Japanese and Korean car manufacturers did in out competing the US auto industry but with EVs.
It does make one wonder about Project Titan and if it will ever materialise. Apple could use another ‘killer’ project to follow the iPhone and if it was US manufactured I’m sure that would be popular in the US. I’m not sure if it would be built there of course, I think they were in talks with Hyundai?
In reference to Apple’s, in my opinion, hypocritical claim to be environmenty sensitive and focused, I take strong issue with that. They design products to be obsolete in ~5 years coercing users to dispose of them and purchase new ones for the likely reason of increasing profits. They do this by withholding bug fixes and security updates for older products. What happens to those products? If returned to Apple for either no or minimal compensation they are either ‘recycled’, often either partly or wholly into landfills or refurbished and resold to 3rd world countries, obviously with either no or minimal warranty and no support. I do not regard that paradigm as environmentally or user friendly. They also restrict new software features to the latest products when older models can often support them in order to sell more and higher priced products despite the fact that the older models are working fine.
Based on some reports I have read, I have been given the impression the iPhone 15 is nothing more than an iPhone 14 with a different connector and a slightly faster process which is programmed to allow some new software features to work on it, but ~$100 more expensive.
Another example: If anyone has ever seen the packaging of the MacPro 2019 7.1 computer you will totally understand what I am writing about.
In my opinion Apple is one of the least environmentally friendly companies on the planet.
