Toxic Apple

I'm not a big fan of Apple Computers, and today's expose in the Independent (see here) will do nothing to improve my opinion of it. I own an iMac and Mac Mini - the latter because the former failed after barely any use when I needed access to a Mac for an article I was writing. Thankfully my good friend Martin has now fixed it, so I will soon have two Macs in the study - this is a good thing, because the space currently vacated by the iMac is full of rubbish thanks to my untidiness.

Anyway, I digress. I'm not sure where Apple gets its green image from, because it's always been a poor steward of the environment in my opinion, regularly updating its range and trying to rail-road consumers into upgrading more often than they need to. They've never really pioneered any decent environmental steps for computers as far as I can see - I'm pretty sure they only started phasing out harmful metals after being slammed by Greenpeace. The irony is that Al Gore is a prominent board member - perhaps it's time for him to start demanding the company tighten its practices.

So much for revealing some good news for environmentalists - that the next generation of home-based wind turbines will be far more effective than the first generation. Once again early adopters find themselves left short-changed, just as I was with the first-generation iMac G5.