waffle

So yes, the big deal about the “A Greener Apple” article is Apple taking Greenpeace to task for ranking companies based on their promises. Admittedly, there’s not a whole lot you can rank them with unless you’ve got a spare stack of flux capacitors lying around, but any company can make promises. If The Steve is to be believed, Apple has a history of initiating phase-outs sooner than strictly necessary, and that’s gotta count for something.

That’s not to say Apple’s response is without spin. There’s an underlying theme of formulas in the vein of “they aren’t finished yet, meanwhile we started this [but, actually, we're not finished yet either]“, and a chart in the middle that doesn’t blatantly and clearly disambiguate between actual data points and estimated data points – an ‘e’ after the year is everything you get, and the dramatic slope of the curve starts after the estimates begin.

Meanwhile, Paul Thurrott considers Apple’s response to be full of hubris: “Look, given the company’s hubris, they’ll no doubt get where they need to be very quickly. But then, Apple’s hubris is what makes open letters like this happen in the first place, right?” Yes, it’s not like they were pressured by an international environmental group and had to make a statement sooner or later. High as a kite, indeed.