As I recall, Apple's opinion is that the recycling standards aren't keeping up. Which may be true -- these kinds of electronics aren't, so far as I know, particularly well-suited to begin with for the type of mass assembly-line recycling techniques that would have problems with ungluing a glass panel, and there are lots of recycling programs that almost certainly can handle that step, including Apple's own, but the standards won't allow you to mention that.
From what I understand, many government agencies and administrations require that a certain percentage of their computers comply with EPEAT standards. According to the article, SF requires it for all of there computers, so this is really just an administrative decision to keep within previously established guidelines, and has nothing to do with self-importance.
there are numerous laws in place at local and state levels that prohibit purchasing electronics that do not meet this certification. the state of california is also governed by such rules (and will also have to stop purchasing apple equipment), as are parts of the federal govt
so apple basically just took itself out of govt procurement
See my other comment in the thread; based on the information out there, it really feels like the standards have not kept up with what's going on in the real world, and may be too strict in their definition of whether something's recyclable.
Of course, it's hard to say for certain, because the actual criteria aren't public -- some digging around turned up the fact that you have to buy the documents from IEEE.
i think more realistically, they are abandoning govt procurement as a business decision. for apple, i think this is smart, it allows them to avoid all of the bureaucracy of selling to govt agencies and better focus on consumers.
i don't buy any of the "IT lifecycle" arguments wrt apple equipment here either. for a massive govt contract like the state of california, the vendor is almost certainly required to replace any faulty equipment upon request...from the govt's perspective, reliability is simply a cost issue for the vendor themselves, not the buyer/govt
"According to stats from the Journal, this won't be much of a blow to Apple. Only about 500 to 700, or 1 percent to 2 percent total, of San Francisco computers are Macs."
So yeah, you'll have to pardon me if this strikes me as non-news.
> "According to stats from the Journal, this won't be much of a blow to Apple. Only about 500 to 700, or 1 percent to 2 percent total, of San Francisco computers are Macs."
To expand on this, in 2010, the City of San Francisco spent $45k on Apple computing products in 2010[1]. Or, in other words: not much.
I don't disagree, but for some reason nobody seems to be writing that article, they're just writing about the city of San Francisco and hoping it feels important.
Apple may be right in claiming EPEAT wasn't evolving - but large organizations with environmental targets & commitments to meet depend on standards rather than the non-scalable need to scrutinize & validate every individual vendor's approach.
The real damage will come from environmentally aware people. And this news has already taken center stage. Its a bad publicity for Apple specially now that the message is clear - "Go to hell with environment and recycling, we care only about our margin and our product."
"I think Apple no longer wants to follow the EPEAT recycling guidelines because they think not following them allows product designs that will be more compelling for consumers and bring more value to Apple than their continued participation in EPEAT.
And I don’t think it matters much. Apple still accepts their own computers for recycling. It’s not unreasonable to ask the people who recycle old computers properly, who I imagine are very few, to bring their Apple computers back to Apple to guarantee the “best” recycling."
I understand it -- and do think that the decision is rational -- from a business perspective, but at the end of the day it's Apple making a conscious choice to make their products less environmentally friendly. That's completely fine for Apple to do, but its still disappointing that they're disregarding environmental standards.
More disconcertingly, one can see the comments here -- largely defending Apple and marginalizing the issue -- being completely different if it was, say, Microsoft.
That's just not true. They are saying that they will no longer comply with an out-dated standard. Their current practices in manufacturing, materials and offering recycling of their own products are superior to the EPEAT guidelines. They actual already go above and beyond the EPEAT guidelines and now they won't be beholden in their designs to those guidelines.
Just take a look at this article and check out the links to see for yourself how Apple was already doing more than the EPEAT guidelines required.
And as an aside - Microsoft in comparison is not a hardware company and the comments here aren't marginalizing the issue. The articles and reporting have blown this out of proportion to begin with.
That sounds like a smokescreen. Sure, Apple does a lot of good environmental stuff that's not covered by EPEAT. But that doesn't change that it's started gluing screens and batteries to cases, making them basically impossible to recycle, which is the real story here.
If you get the battery replaced by Apple (the only option) they recycle the battery. If you want to get rid of your old laptop, Apple will recycle it.
I have never actually had a completely dead/garbage Apple laptop since I usually sell them after about 5 years, they have a much longer lifespan then your average PC laptop.
I don't know. Why are computers needed to be recycled by HAND? C'mon, cars are recycled by machinery and modern cars use glue like hell. So whats the issue here?
«Recycling is NOT dumping it in a landfill, burning it OR bringing it to a recycling center. It is about removing materials requiring special handling and separating a product into distinct materials so those materials can be re-used.
For metal, this is easy. You can simply take a complete car, grind it up, melt and scoop all the bits non-metal. You have fully recycled the metal... but still, burning all that plastic, battery acid, glass is a bit nasty.
You COULD use a magnet to separate the metal from the rest but not all metals are magnetic and this will STILL leave you with a mess of non-metal that would take a legion to sort by hand.
So, how do you REALLY recycle a car? You take it apart. You remove the plastic bumper and put it on the pile with other plastic parts that you know are the same type of plastic because it is stamped on the part. Same types of plastics can be for better recycled then a pile of all sorts combined. This goes so far that for instance plastic bottles can be shredded and just melted into new ones. Failed bottles at production go right back into the process.
Once you separated all the different materials, you can re-use them or dispose of them in a safe manner. But the separation must be relatively easy OR the costs just sky-rocket. Taking of a bumper is easy especially if you don't have to care about damage. Separating two bonded plates, not so much.
A prime example of this is in electricity cables. Copper is expensive enough to make recycling worth while but separating it from the plastic surrounding it, is near impossible. What is done instead in many places is that the plastic is burned off. A very polluting process and not the idea behind recycling at all.
Now Apples devices are hard to take apart. If a screen can't be screwed open, the screen can't be separated from the shell, meaning it has to be shredded instead. You can still reclaim some materials but not as easily as with a screw driver.
The above poster seems to think that recycling means re-using working parts or re-selling the entire device. This is a FORM of recycling but NOT what this article is about. In the end, after re-selling the device will either end up in a landfill, be dumped OR be taken apart. The first two are wasteful, the second becomes more costly when the separate materials are harder to separate. Apple has basically said, we don't give a fuck about the environment and try to hide it by saying they are better but in areas nobody measures. Well, I am a better sportsman then anyone at the Olympics, just not in any Olympic sport.»
Permanently affixing readily recyclable components like memory and batteries to system boards are not "superior" practices by any meaningful measure. They are practices that enhance the marketing segmentation of their products and make Apple more money -- while making recovery of valuable assets (memory, battery materials) impossible at the end of the device's lifecycle.
Offering recycling of products is meaningless -- relatively few devices get recycled by the manufacturers programs (particularly at institutional customers like schools or enterprises).
Actually that's possible, for example if the battery in a Retina Macbook lives for 800 - 1k cycles because they use better technology and the battery in a average PC laptop only lives 400 - 500 then yes it's possible that the Mac could be better for the environment. Someone would have to do a thorough check on each component to objectively verify if it's better or worse then EPEAT certified laptop. All things are not equal standards like EPEAT are too generic to rely on in all cases.
That's really too much Apple love. While it's true that old machines can still be recycled. But, in older models you could easily replace the battery --- you can pop them out with a lever, get a new battery at the Apple store, and put it in. Without removing any screws (or warranty).
While this change does not matter that much to most people here (I readily admit that I replace my laptop every one or two years, selling the old one), the average consumer uses a laptop much longer, especially when a laptop is a huge investment for them. Apple's latest designs drastically shorten the lifespan of laptops, unless you want to pay the exorbitant fees of having the battery replaced or adding memory.
It is bad for the environment (more laptops need to be produced), the consumer's pocketbook, and only serves Apple.
agreed. e-waste is a massive problem that most techies would rather ignore. most of our toxic electronic waste ends up in the third world, poisoning environments.
I just picked a random laptop off of Dell's small business site: The M4600[1]. Dell will sell you a replacement 97Whr battery for $170[2]. The M4600 gets 3.5 hours of life with the larger battery[3].
Apple will replace the 95Whr battery in a Retina MacBook Pro for $200[4]. $30 more than Dell charges for a similar-capacity battery, but this does include labor and the MPB gets 7+ hours of life with it[5].
I do not believe your assertion of "exorbitant fees" is supportable.
* For one, choosing a "random laptop off of Dell's small business" is not the equivalent of a MBP.
* Second, your choice of power benchmark is ridiculous. FTA: "Before we mention the battery life of the Precision M4600, it's important to point out that our review unit came equipped with the Intel Core i7-2920XM Extreme Edition processor." And based on the source's graph[1] they are dead last by a significant amount. Are you sure you chose this "randomly?"
* Third, choosing a laptop slightly more comparable, hell, even if it's not as comparable, will yield significantly better battery life. The ThinkPad Edge [2] ranges from 7.4-5.7 hours; The T series can go up to 16 hours on a 9-cell battery [3] and the X series with up to 23 hours.
* As for price, Lenovo is near the same price range at around $179/9-cell battery.
The word "exorbitant" may not be completely qualified here, but the prices are neither decent nor cheap.
While I'm unsure of the capacity of competition batteries, Apple claims 1000 or more recharge cycles on their batteries.
This is a critical factor -- if the Apple battery is $200 (installed professionally) vs $170 (parts only), and lasts significantly longer, it becomes more interesting of a comparison. But only if it lasts longer.
Also, Apple displays cycles used in system info, while finding similar information in Windows is not as easy. I know Apple is willing to replace batteries that die before their advertised cycle count is up, but I haven't heard of that behavior being common with competition.
I'm not claiming that Apple is better, not at all. Heck, comparing laptops between brands is difficult anyway, considering that Apple owns the >$1000 market and it's competition does the majority of it's business in the <$1000 market. (Meaning that most of the >$1000 laptops we compare to Apple products aren't those brands' bread-and-butter big sellers, they're niche products).
I just did a quick eBay search, and you can get a genuine battery for that particular Dell model well under $80. And as with most Dells, you can probably replace it yourself (which was my main point). Replacing the battery in the MacBook is 2.5 times the price of replacing the battery in the Dell.
And what if the SSD or memory is not large enough anymore for your needs? (Which often happens after a few years of use.) In most other laptops and non-Retina display MacBook Pro's one can replace them at market prices. Not so with the new retina display MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, etc.
A friend of mine recently asked a quote for upgrading memory in his (pre-aluminium) Mac Mini, it was over 200 Euro. The market value of the memory was 40 Euro.
Edit: I would like to add that I am a happy Mac user. But I think Apple is rapidly moving into the wrong direction with their changes to rapidly deprecate older models, either by making them non-upgradable or pretty randomly removing support for them in new operating system versions (both OS X and iOS).
It's easy to pick on Apple in isolation. When you compare Apple's practices to other big vendors they're not all that different. Dell charges a tiny fortune for memory, especially for server models, compared to a wholesaler, they need to protect their bottom line as much as Apple and upgrades are always how they make their margins.
I'd rather that Apple deprecates older models of hardware than insists on supporting them perpetually. I say this as a developer. If you make an app for 10.7 you will not have to worry about building a PowerPC version, about testing it on a 2005-vintage Mac Mini just because one of your customers might have one. It's not supported. Period.
I know several people that are perfectly happy with an older system, 10.4 or 10.5 vintage either out of necessity or out of indifference. It works for them and they see no urgent reason to upgrade.
How much garbage do you think there is in Windows to support devices that haven't even been manufactured in the last ten years? How much better would Windows be if they abandoned all that and focused on making it better? I think it would look a lot like Windows 8, actually. Faster all around.
I think the assumption is that you can extend the life of older laptops. I can get a new $25 battery on amazon for my 4 year old Dell laptop. Not sure what the comparable price would be for apple.
> in older models you could easily replace the battery
I wonder which variant of the battery is more environmentally friendly (including production): the one produced as separate unit, with casing and all, or the type used in Apple devices.
Also, retina MBP may be more difficult to disassemble. However it uses less materials, what's the net outcome?
The casing is probably going to be the part of the laptop that impacts the environment the least, except for the carbon emissions used to manufacture it.
But many agencies cannot simply send devices, often containing sensitive information, off to 3rd parties without a specific contract and vetted protocol governing the exchange. Part of the reason that a government agency has to handle disposal themselves is so that they can ensure the legally-mandated destruction of private data.
Failing to meet EPEAT guidelines is not merely symbolic; it means that performing secure and environmentally-friendly disposal is rendered much more difficult. It also means the cost of ownership is higher since either the lifespan of the device will be shorter or experts will have to be paid to perform repairs.
You honestly think bog-standard consumers are going to make up for the hundreds of millions of dollars they're likely to lose from large institutional customers who can no longer purchase Apple products?
Can I be absolutely certain that the sub-contractors Apple uses won't just chuck the nasty glued bits in landfill as well?
Other countries may not benefit from Apple's own recycling programs.
I am a member of a group that makes PC standards selections for an organization that buys 30,000-40,000 computers per year. We take stewardship of our IT asset lifecycle seriously -- over 60,000 devices were properly recycled last year. (Includes non-computer equipment and counts monitors separately) Apple was a small growing category for us since 2009.
EPEAT is about more than recycling -- it's about reducing the total environmental impact of the PC. Everything from avoiding hazardous materials to energy efficiency to packaging options to end-of-life. It gives folks who give a hoot the ability to quickly do an "apples to apples" comparison of the environmental impact of various products.
It also externalizes decisions. Should we not buy that amazing device that everyone lusts over because the bezel contains brominated materials? It's just a bezel! EPEAT makes that decision easier -- it's certified, or not.
This is just one more example of the level of contempt that Apple routinely displays for anyone whose needs go beyond buying their products for MSRP at retail, I'm done with them. I'm not sacrificing our standards so that Apple can glue components to their computers.
I don't think it's contempt. It may appear to be contempt in the eyes of large customers, but from Apple's perspective they want to make the best products they can. If that is counter to the way the EPEAT guidelines operate, but they can offer equal or superior environmental impact and produce the products they want, isn't that ok?
Honest question: Are you not able to compare the EPEAT guidelines with what Apple currently does? They provide details on all of the things you mentioned - hazardous materials, energy efficiency, etc. It seems like they should still stand up to EPEAT, despite the recycling bit, considering that they offer recycling of their products. http://www.apple.com/environment/
That webpage is part-information, part-marketing. It conveys the message that the company wants to tell. EPEAT's criteria come from published IEEE standards, last updated in 2009.
Other vendors with similar form-factors seem to be able to meet the EPEAT criteria. The new "Ultrabooks", which are similar form-factor wise to Apple products, seem to be capable of meeting EPEAT Silver criteria.
What is Apple's commitment? Right now they may meet EPEAT Gold standards. Will they next month?
I suppose that I could hire people to figure this out, but why should I? There are plenty of competitors with quality products.
Why couldn't Apple have proposed updates to EPEAT, if it's so hopelessly out of date? A: They hold the institutional/corporate customer in contempt.
It is perfectly ok if they can offer equal or superior recycling.
I don't think this is a claim you can really make right now though. When you send a device back to Apple for recycling, there's no way to find out what their recycling standards are.
Subscribing to EPEAT objectifies this, and makes it easier to know what happens when an EPEAT device is recycled.
The crucial point from the perspective of corporate procurement is that it externalizes the decision. While the parent could probably do the research and make a solid comparison to EPEAT, his employer would not believe him. Large organizations want to be able to set a policy that even dumb procurement staff can follow, and certifications like EPEAT give them that.
If you want your Apple products to be "properly recycled" then take them to Apple when you EOL them. Relying upon a shiny EPEAT logo/cert to make your decision easier is ignoring that there are other ways to be environmentally friendly.
I am unknowlegble on this topic; what do we know about how they recycle their equipment? Recycle is not a binary option, there are different amounts that something can be, which is also different from how much it is.
Why should I change my business process to make Apple more money? I'm not hauling thousands of devices to Apple -- particularly if I can save money by using any of a half dozen competitors.
I have contracts with a half dozen recycling vendors who take my junk and dispose of them in a manner deemed acceptable by us. Some of them even pay us to take certain products.
A "shiny EPEAT certification" means that I can call any of the thousands of recycling vendors in the United States and get my gear hauled off and disposed of in a sustainable and ethical manner, and at a reasonable price. No African children are smelting wires from equipment originating from my company. Memory from my Dell devices is recovered and resold. Batteries from my Thinkpads are dissembled and recycled.
Except Apple has NOT confirmed that they actually recycle these new models with glued components. In fact their official response* dodged this question, directing attention to other aspects of their green efforts. But no word on the key design change, the gluing of components that would need to be separated in order to be recycled.
Does Marco have a source for his claim that Apple actually recycles the new models if you bring them back?
I don't think this will hurt them much - Apple is a consumer-oriented company, not government, business or education.
Students will continue to buy Macs and eventually the weight of all those purchases will bleed over into other areas, whether there are guidelines or not.
Governments will get a small propaganda boost for a bit, but eventually people will start to question whey they're so behind the times.
Business doesn't want to pay a premium for it's computer equipment, so no big loss there.
no one in govt will care if they have apple computers or not...they all have something far more valuable than any toy a techie will have on their desk - A PENSION.
california is riddled with civil servants making six figures in retirement, i can assure you that they rationally understand that this is far preferrable to having last month's computer on their desk
yeah good riddance I say. For each SF city that decides to not buy Apple product, many more iFans like me will some forward in support and buy more. What do I care if the product is bad for the environment? It looks shiny and expensive and makes me look cool.
The only part that's a sticking point with EPEAT is they mandate that any shop can dismantle the device. Apple wants to push manufacturing past that. How's that any worse for the environment, so long as they recycle all of their own stuff?
So you don't really get it do you? It's not just about recycling its about reuse. I can buy a used laptop and a new battery and I have a good usable laptop. I don't need to purchase a new one. That's where the dismantling helps.
"The letter to municipal agencies will cite a 2007 policy that mandates that city funds only be used to purchase EPEAT-certified desktops, laptops and monitors..."
Later on: "...the EPEAT registry does not yet include certifications for smartphones or tablets..."
Finally it also says: "...the city spent $45,579 on Apple desktops, laptops and iPads (the last of which are not certifiable under EPEAT and would not be barred by the city’s policy.)"
So on the one side we have the Buy Your Own Device* (BYOD) trend and on the other side we have stuff bought with public funds. Guess what - people will bring their own Macs, iPads etc and thus are exempted from the EPEAT rule - and the city saves money. Win-win? Well, except for the environment, but hey ...
(*) I refuse to call it Bring your own device. This trend really is about moving investments from the company to the work force. It's effectively workers paying fro their job - and that is so wrong ...
The purchase price of the device (investment/capital expenditure) is not neccessarily the greatest expense. Sure, in many smaller companies it will be, but in companies that have (for example) information protection policies or systems/services beyond email, support and operating costs for BYOD can in fact be more expensive.
Consider the simple scenario of using GMail, calendar and contacts - on a MacBook you need to know to configure it as an Exchange service, or you only end up with mail. Many may want to enforce some sort of policy on the device - such as requiring a PIN to unlock.
Spread that across all the device types users might bring in and compare that with managing just a single device, for example BlackBerry.
Sure, there are tools these days that make it easier to manage. Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, for example, can be managed using SCCM. But in many cases BYOD does't deliver the (often naive) expectations of savings.
> Consider the simple scenario of using GMail, calendar and contacts - on a MacBook you need to know to configure it as an Exchange service, or you only end up with mail.
Actually, you can't set up Google anything with Exchange on a MacBook. For whatever reason, Google Sync only accepts connections from mobile devices. I'm not sure if the ActiveSync protocol is substantively different for mobile vs desktop, or if Google is looking at user agent strings, or what, but you can verify it for yourself pretty easily.
The only way to get calendar and contacts on OS X 10.7+ is to set it up as a GMail account, which magically does the right thing.
There's a long history of other professions providing their own equipment: barbers buy their own scissors, chefs buy their own knives and builders/plumbers/electricians are often required to buy some equipment themselves.
I'm not saying I agree with it, particularly when working for big corporations, but it's not unprecedented.
What some companies do (for example, mine) is give employees a stipend for the amount a traditional corporate Lenovo would cost. The employees then make the choice of what machine they want to buy with this money. If it's more, the employee pays it out of pocket. If its less, the extra is supposed to be returned to the company. I don't have any numbers on how many companies with BYOD do this, but I know mine is not the only one.
So on the one side we have the Buy Your Own Device* (BYOD) trend and on the other side we have stuff bought with public funds. Guess what - people will bring their own Macs, iPads etc and thus are exempted from the EPEAT rule - and the city saves money. Win-win? Well, except for the environment, but hey ...
(*) I refuse to call it Bring your own device. This trend really is about moving investments from the company to the work force. It's effectively workers paying fro their job - and that is so wrong ...
In fairness, Apple produces luxury products, and you can pretty much always get a cheaper version. (yes, the cheaper versions of an iPad were not so comparable, but you could have used a laptop) It's not unreasonable for a government organisation not to furnish it's staff with such treats.
This "green" stuff seems extremely shortsighted to me.
No point in sacrificing economic efficiency (read: better lives for actual humans) when just putting all the stuff in a gigantic landfill is a perfectly viable option.
Except that without certifications like this costs of waste, environmental degradation etc. become externalities for the companies and individuals involved. It's not viable to dump laptops in a landfill batteries and all, so who is going to pay to remove the glue from the new MBA battery? (I know, apple says they will, but they don't have to and only do so for marketing purposes).
...but until that happens (if it ever does), presumably you're in 100% agreement that we'll need to make sure that batteries, and other toxic components of personal computing industry end up somewhere besides unprotected landfills.
Which is, of course, precisely the point of SF's decision not to support products that don't appear to have such safeguards built into their lifecycle.
A landfill is not a black hole or a magic box. The stuff is still there. Decaying. Reacting. Leaching into the groundwater and into the air. And holding lots of valuable materials that now have to be dug out of the ground elsewhere.
Saying, "fuck it, put it all in landfills" isn't economic efficiency; it's short-sightedness and bad accounting. Thinks like EPEAT work to take societal costs hidden through negative externalities and put them back in the purchase price.
See, this is exactly why people call the green movement a "religion."
I have been to schools all my life that attempt to sell the "green story" to children, and I've honestly never been convinced. It's just not good economics.
Now, you have a chance to make a rational argument and set me straight, but instead you say (in effect), "Just shut up and get on the bandwagon."
It's just that your original comment seems to demonstrate an incredible lack of awareness of basic general knowledge as to such as, oh, humanity's experience with waste management over the past couple of thousand years.
Like, you know, how we managed to figure out, way back when, that we can't just dig a hole anywhere and call it a toilet, despite all the naysayers at the time who must have been saying "I don't understand all this expensive and inefficient indoor plumbing stuff, when just burying our waste in a pit that just so happens to be near the big creek where we get our drinking water from is a perfectly viable option. Most of it won't seep out of the pit, and the creek runs so deep and flows so fast, after all."
So forgive me for (hoping) that you couldn't possibly have been serious with your original riposte.
It's funny that the only thing San Francisco city has a problem with is the fact that you cannot dispose of the battery by yourself. That's clearly another way Apple removes power from the user (and forces them to go back to the Apple store for maintenance, recycling and all - as a company which LOVES centralization of power) but that's probably not the worst. The fact that devices such as iPad are locked to the death in terms of software do not seem to get any reaction, however.
Microsoft was judged on antitrust grounds for far LESS than what Apple is doing nowadays.
Something not being user serviceable doesn't mean that it warrants an antitrust process. The two things couldn't be further apart.
As to your first point, would you agree that, say, 95% of all devices are "locked to the death in terms of software"? Because if you think about it, you'll see it is quite true. Note that by this I don't disagree with openness, I'm just contradicting the assumption that Apple is not the norm here.
If you are talking about computing devices, I don't know if your number of 95% is really true.
I don't really care if my oven is hackable or not, but I do care about my computer/tablet/smartphone/other computing device. I am not really a fan of Windows, but it's certainly NOT a deeply locked system: you can develop your own programs and install whatever you like, and even modify the registry. Android is "relatively" open. You can still develop software for it on your own, without any expenses as long as you have the SDK on your computer. True, you can't tweak the system as much as you'd like, and the manufacturers do put some additional locks on the device (preventing root access, for example).
All of this is impossible on any Apple device, out of the box. You just can't produce software. It's just as disposable as your oven/washing machine.
That's definitely not the kind of computing device that I want, no matter how shiny the interface looks like.
This looks like the same scenario as the car engines - mechanics adapted - those who didn't - perished. Same will happen here, if this works, rest of the industry will follow and everyone who tweaks has to adapt(invent new tools to fix) or perish. The industry would like it to perish so more $ in their pocket.
tl;dr -- EPEAT is out of date, doesn't cover phones or tablets, and you can be EPEAT certified without even being Energy Star compliant (Dell is cited as an example).
So the knee jerk response from City of SF etc. is idiotic posturing. Are they also boycotting Dell?
http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2012/07/10/san-francisco-officials-...
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