Back to Latest Solar News

LATEST SOLAR NEWS

The New MacBook’s Green Credentials

By Joe Hutsko

In his 2008 Environmental Update, Steve Jobs, the C.E.O. of Apple, highlighted the company’s new product environmental performance reports — part of Apple’s efforts to design more efficient and eco-friendly products.

“We are constantly working to reduce the emissions associated with Apple’s products,” Mr. Jobs wrote. “This means making them more efficient in size and energy consumption.”

That was the thinking behind the new MacBook, released last month and described on the company’s Web site as “the greenest MacBook ever” — and there are quite a few design upgrades, green and otherwise.

Gateway’s $1,000 MC7803u notebook, by comparison, boasts a 16-inch widescreen display that’s similar to the MacBook’s in fit and finish, twice the video memory (512MB v. 256MB) for better game-time performance, a 320 GB hard disk, and more ports and expansion slots than any one person could ever use.

Well, as green gadgets go, the machine performs well. It achieves both Energy Star 4.0 compliance, as well as a gold rating from the Green Electronics Council.

The new MacBook has received mostly positive reviews from green-gadget watchers elsewhere — albeit with caveats. “Its new laptops are definitely better,” Casey Harrell, Greenpeace International’s toxic campaigner, told the technology news service Newsfactor, adding: “But not all toxic pieces have been eliminated yet.”

The Apple Web site touts that the body of the laptop is made of “a single piece of solid, recyclable aluminum that replaces dozens of extraneous pieces once destined for landfill.” That may be true, but writing at EcoGeek last month, Mr. Green highlighted unnecessary energy expenditures.