Apple Pulls Products from Environmental EPEAT Registry
Apple has notified the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT) that it is withdrawing its products from the EPEAT registry and will no longer be submitting its products to EPEAT for environmental rating. CIO Journal spoke with Robert Frisbee, CEO of EPEAT, who offered slightly more color to the decision:
“They said their design direction was no longer consistent with the EPEAT requirements,” Frisbee said. The company did not elaborate, Frisbee said. “They were important supporters and we are disappointed that they don’t want their products measured by this standard anymore.”
EPEAT certification requires certain standards that make the machines easy to disassemble and recycle using common tools. Apple's recent Mac products, such as the Retina MacBook Pro, are difficult to fully disassemble making them ineligible for certification. iFixIt explains:
According to my EPEAT contacts, Apple’s mobile design direction is in conflict with the intended direction of the standard. Specifically, the standard lays out particular requirements for product “disassemble-ability,” a very important consideration for recycling: “External enclosures, chassis, and electronic subassemblies shall be removable with commonly available tools or by hand.”
The move could have a financial impact on Apple's sales. CIO Reports that many corporations require EPEAT certified computers. Meanwhile, the U.S. government requires 95% of electronics purchases also be EPEAT certified.
The move does not seem to affect Apple's popular iPhone and iPad devices, as they are presently a class of product not certified by EPEAT.
Popular Stories
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple is set to unveil iOS 18 during its WWDC keynote on June 10, so the software update is a little over six weeks away from being announced. Below, we recap rumored features and changes planned for the iPhone with iOS 18. iOS 18 will reportedly be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history, with new ChatGPT-inspired generative AI features, a more customizable Home Screen, and much more....
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
Best Buy is discounting a collection of M3 MacBook Pro computers today, this time focusing on the 14-inch version of the laptop. Every deal in this sale requires you to have a My Best Buy Plus or Total membership, although non-members can still get solid second-best prices on these MacBook Pro models. Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Best Buy. When you click a link and make a...
Top Rated Comments
*Stops wondering why Apple pulled products*
Exactly. So many Apple fans will demonize EPEAT over this in an attempt to brush over what a lame move by Apple this is. The stereotype that Mac users are nothing but liberals who pretend to care about social and environmental issues but deep down really don't care at all is validated by this move on Apple's part. Bypassing EPEAT just to have a new barely thinner laptop to release each year to please the crowds is not really the kind of company I like to do business with.
If this is the way technology is going to become, getting smaller and lighter but less conscious about the world we live in then I'm not for it.:(