Sunday, July 8, 2012

Apple : Apple bows out of green tech certification programme

Apple : Apple bows out of green tech certification programme

Apple bows out of green tech certification programme

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Apple bows out of green tech certification programme

Apple will no longer participate in a programme that grants environmentally-friendly certifications for technology.

The US government-backed EPEAT body rewards manufacturers for creating easily recyclable and energy-efficient electronics.

However, Apple has asked the agency to pull the certification from all 39 of its applicable products, including its MacBook laptop range, citing a different design direction.

"They said their design direction was no longer consistent with the EPEAT requirements," Robert Frisbee EPEAT CEO said.

"They were important supporters and we are disappointed that they don't want their products measured by this standard anymore."

Retina Display MacBook to blame?

Apple had been one of the key tech manufacturers that helped establish the EPEAT standards, along with the US government and environmental groups.

It is suspected that the new Retina Display MacBook Pro may be behind the decision to move away from EPEAT certification.

The agency specifies that electronics must be easy for recyclers to disassemble and that particular product has proved more or less impossible to take apart.

What would Steve do?

Regardless, it's still a surprising move from Apple.

At keynote addresses of yesteryear, late CEO Steve Jobs seemed to take joy in regaling audiences with how environmentally-friendly Apple products were, right down to the minimalist packaging.

What would Steve say?

Tutorial: How to tame Mac OS X Lion annoyances

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Tutorial: How to tame Mac OS X Lion annoyances

OS X Lion tweaks

Some changes introduced in OS X Lion haven't been to everyone's tastes. Luckily, many of those changes can be tweaked, while other annoyances can be tamed with third-party software, helping you avoid a trip into Terminal.

If you've been plagued by a particular setting, read on to discover how to resolve the situation.

If you want your Finder windows to resemble Snow Leopard, the following tweaks will bring things back.

First, restore the status bar at the bottom of each Finder window by selecting View > Status Bar. Next, open the Finder menu and select Preferences, then choose your home folder from the 'New Finder windows shows:' drop-down menu. Now switch to the Sidebar tab and place ticks next to missing shortcuts.

Lion increases the size of the Finder sidebar icons, so less fit on the screen at once - revert to Snow Leopard settings by opening the General System Preferences pane and setting the 'Sidebar icon size' dropdown menu to Small.

Wondering how you remove items from the Favourites sidebar? Hold down Command as you drag them away and watch them disappear.

Disable Resume

TinkerTool

Don't like apps restoring their saved state after being reopened? Hold down the Option key as you open a program's menu to access the Quit option, you'll see the option changes to 'Quit and Discard Windows', allowing you to close a program without saving its state.

It can be fiddly remembering this, so if you never use Resume, disable it from the General System Preferences pane: untick 'Restore windows when quitting and re-opening apps'. Not all apps use Lion's Resume function to save their state, so if one continues to reopen previous windows when launching, check its Preferences for an option to disable it.

You can also choose which apps use Resume (without using Terminal or locking folders) by downloading and installing TinkerTool. Switch to the Resume tab and use the dropdown menu next to an app to selectively disable or enable Resume for that app. Once complete, log off and back on for changes to take effect.

Disable Resume on reboot

If you're always waiting while a load of applications you previously had open restore themselves, you might want to switch off the 'Reopen windows when logging back in' feature permanently.

The solution involves downloading a script to copy and paste into a Terminal window. Once pasted, hit Return, read the warning and enter your user password to make the change. Once done, reboot ignoring the 'Reopen windows…' prompt as it's now disabled, and only Finder will launch when you log in.

Should you wish to restore the original feature, open Terminal, and type: sudo defaults delete com.apple.loginwindow LoginHook

Trackpad and mouse settings

Magic Trackpad

If you can't bear the reverse mouse scrolling feature, switch it off via the Mouse System Preferences pane (untick 'Scroll direction: natural').

You may also find yourself confused by changes to various swipes (navigating pages in Safari is now done with two fingers instead of three, for example), in which case, switch to the More Gestures tab to swap them round again.

Lion also disables tap dragging by default - switch it back on, and disable inertial scrolling at the same time from the Universal Access System Preference pane (select Mouse or Mouse & Trackpad).

Cut Dashboard from Mission Control

Dashboard has been reduced to a Space in Mission Control in Lion. If you want to revert it to an overlay - as it does in Snow Leopard - open the Mission Control's System Preferences pane and untick 'Show Dashboard as a space'.

Dump the username

Lion places your username in the menu bar as a shortcut for logging off or switching user, but if you don't need it, hold Command+Option as you click and drag it off the bar.

Change the login screen

Loginox

Lion makes it more difficult to change the login screen, but with a copy of the free Loginox, it's simple to change background texture and logo. The program will resize and convert images, all you need to do is supply the original images (we suggest a logo with a transparent background).

Revert to classic Mail

The new user interface for Mail in Lion will surprise many, but, Apple makes it simple to revert to the older, classic user interface. Open Mail, then select Mail > Preferences, choose Viewing and tick User classic layout. Once done, click the Show button under the mail icon to reveal the Mailboxes sidebar.

Replace Front Row

Lion removes the Front Row media software completely, and recent updates to iTunes mean it's not practical to restore it using Front Row Enabler. If you want a suitable replacement on your Mac, we recommend trying XBMC, a complete media centre solution. If you need help with tagging your movies and TV shows, try iDentify 2.

Lion Tweaks

When Lion was first released, tweaking many settings to more closely resemble what you were used to involved opening Terminal or editing system files. Now, nine months on, you can make changes with just a few clicks thanks to various third-party tweaking tools.

One of the best is Lion Tweaks - this regularly updated freebie currently allows you to 'fix' 23 settings with little or no fuss.

The step-by-step guide covers restoring coloured icons to the Finder sidebar, but other improvements include making your personal Library folder visible again, re-enabling the 2D Dock, removing various animations and restoring the old aluminium look to both iCal and Address Book.

It also provides a number of tweaks to how Stacks behave, allows AirDrop to function on older Macs and switches on TRIM support for non-Apple SSDs in Lion. Put simply, it's an essential tool if you're unhappy with certain aspects of Lion.

How to restore the colourful Finder sidebar icons

1. Install Lion

Colour 1

Get Lion Tweaks. Once done, drag the Lion Tweaks app from Downloads into your Applications folder. Double-click to launch the program, clicking Open when prompted. Start by clicking Yes next to Enable colour in the Finder-sidebar.

2. Install extras

Colour 2

Safari will download and extract its contents – just browse to Downloads\SIMBL-0.9.9 to install the pkg file. Return to Lion Tweaks and click OK > No, Create it for me. If colour icons don't appear, click Already got it… twice.

3. Auto-restore

Colour 3

To prevent icons disappearing after reboot, go to themacmob.com/downloads and click Relaunch_Finder.zip to download a script. Open System Preferences > Users & Groups > Login Items, then drag the script into this list. Tick its entry, then restart.

In Depth: How Apple became the world's richest company

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In Depth: How Apple became the world's richest company

A tale of design

Apple's value hit $619 billion (£389 billion) in April, making it the world's most valuable company - and some experts suggest that it could be worth an incredible $1 trillion by this time next year as it expands into China.

It's an extraordinary amount of money, especially for a firm that many people dismissed as a basket case in the early 90s. So what's Apple's secret?

Design has been in Apple's DNA since 1977's Apple II, whose case was inspired by the food processors and coffee makers Steve Jobs saw in a Macy's department store. Jobs tried (and failed) to persuade Steve Wozniak that customers only needed expansion slots for a printer and modem, but he did play a key role in designing the case to make it as friendly as possible.

That friendliness and simplicity has been key to Apple products ever since, from the Lisa and Macintosh of the 80s to the iMac of the 90s and the OS X and iOS devices of today. For Apple, design isn't something you bring in to make things look pretty - it's part of the process from day one.

"In most people's vocabularies," Steve Jobs told Fortune in 2000, "design means veneer. It's interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains and the sofa." Jobs, and Apple, didn't think that way: describing the iMac, he said that "the essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible consumer computer in which each element plays together."

Apple Mac

If that means asking your engineers to make the impossible possible, so be it. "I was adamant that we get rid of the fan, because it is much more pleasant to work on a computer that doesn't drone all the time," Jobs said. "It required a huge engineering effort to figure out how to manage power better and to do a better job of thermal conduction through the machine. That is the furthest thing from veneer. This is what customers pay us for: to sweat all these details so it's really easy and pleasant for them to use our computers."

That philosophy applies to the entire Apple experience. It's why Apple offers a handful of products in each category instead of dozens of barely differentiated ones, it's why even the cheapest bit of Apple kit is packaged so beautifully, and it's why Apple often prototypes new products but decides not to ship them. Other firms want to be all things to all people. Apple wants to be insanely great.

To become as big as Apple you need an astonishing manufacturing operation, peerless marketing, the ability to see into the future and floundering rivals. Apple has all of those things now, but it didn't in the 90s.

In 1997, Wired magazine famously put the Apple logo on its front cover with a simple one-word headline: "Pray." Apple's biggest problem in the 1990s was Windows, which became the dominant personal computing platform. Apple, who had given Steve Jobs the boot back in 1985, responded to the threat by making lots of barely differentiated products that it hoped would compete with the Windows juggernaut. It didn't work, and Apple ended up with stacks of Macs people didn't want and huge waiting lists for the ones people did.

TIME magazine went so far as to describe the Apple of the time as "arguably one of the worst-managed companies in the industry." Apple Incorporated was bleeding money, and in 1997 its share price hit a 12-year low: while today Apple is worth more than Microsoft and Google combined, in Q2 1997 it was worth just $2.17 billion. Microsoft, meanwhile, was worth $141 billion.

The second coming of Steve

Steve Jobs

In 1996, the exiled Jobs told PBS's Wall Street Week programme what he felt was wrong with the firm he had co-created. "Apple stood still," he said, arguing that "people have caught up with it, and its differentiation has eroded, in particular with respect to Microsoft… the way out is not to slash and burn, it's to innovate. That's how Apple got its glory, and that's how Apple could return to it."

When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, he simplified everything from Apple's range of products to the number of advertising agencies it used, and he also changed the company's focus. Jobs knew that trying to compete with Windows PCs was a race to the bottom, so he didn't even try to compete in that market.

There's a famous quote by hockey star Wayne Gretzky: "A good hockey player knows where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be." Jobs wanted Apple to be great, not good, so he bet Apple on where he though the puck was going to be: the internet and digital media.

The 1998 iMac transformed Apple's fortunes, becoming the most popular personal computer in America. By 2000, Apple's finances had recovered, and Jobs told BusinessWeek that "we should be in an incredible place as this convergence of computing and communications explodes in the next few years. I think it's ours to lose."

Apple didn't lose: a year later, it had the iPod. The iPod wasn't the first MP3 player, but it was the most desirable. Where other firms loaded their devices with every conceivable feature and option, Apple kept it simple and beautiful and sold shed-loads.

The iPod wasn't just significant for its industrial design, though: tight integration with iTunes and later, the iTunes Music Store offered an overall experience that rivals, such as Microsoft's PlaysForSure partners, simply couldn't deliver. Factor in some truly wonderful marketing, as well as packaging that made you feel that you'd bought something truly valuable, and it's clear that where other firms were making gadgets, Apple was making objects of desire.

By 2005, the iPod 'halo effect' was a recognised phenomenon: in a 2005 survey by Morgan Stanley, some 43% of iPod owners said they were considering a Mac as their next computer. Apple's market share of the PC market has continued to grow, and today it has more than 10% of the traditional PC market.

Beware of cannibals

iPod

Cannibalisation is when a new product destroys the market for an existing one. Apple hasn't suffered from it so far, largely because Apple is its own cannibal: Steve Jobs was quick to see that the biggest threat to the iPod was the smartphone, so rather than try to protect the iPod, Apple created a smartphone with an iPod in it.

The iPhone, of course, has done very well. According to ComScore, Apple has 30% of the US smartphone market - and according to Asymo.com, while Apple only has 9% of the global market it rakes in 75% of the profits. The iPhone business alone is bigger than Microsoft.

Apple is also cannibalising the PC. The iPad is starting to take a big chunk out of PC sales, and it's destroying the market for netbook PCs. Despite the best efforts of rivals, the tablet market is almost entirely Apple's - and if you class the iPad as a PC, then Apple is already the largest PC manufacturer on Earth.

Apple learned valuable lessons from the bad old days of the 90s, when it had Macs it couldn't sell and orders it couldn't fulfill. Under the auspices of Tim Cook, Apple closed its factories and warehouses, outsourcing production and cleaning up what CNN called "the atrocious state of Apple's manufacturing, distribution and supply apparatus."

Cook described his approach as being like that of the dairy business: "If it gets past its freshness date, it's a problem." Cook didn't just reduce inventory and outsource manufacturing, though. He also arranged deals that give Apple enormous competitive advantage. So, for example, when Apple launched the iPod nano, he pre-paid suppliers and effectively bought the world's supply of suitable Flash memory.

Apple signs similar deals for other crucial components, such as TFT displays, and it even helps its suppliers finance new manufacturing facilities: in 2011 it announced that it would pay nearly $4 billion for "inventory component pre-payments and capital expenditures" over the next two years. $4 billion is a lot of money, but it's worth a lot to Apple: it gets enormous economies of scale that keep prices low, and it gets guaranteed supplies of crucial components.

That can make life exceptionally difficult for rivals, so, for example, nobody so far has been able to make anything as good as the iPad at the same price as the iPad. As an industry source told BusinessInsider, "If it weren't for Tim Cook, the iPad would cost $5,000".

Can it last? There certainly don't appear to be any dents in Apple's armour. Each quarter's financial results are more staggering than the previous one's, and while rivals may have caught up with Apple in some sectors, such as smartphones, Apple's still the innovator, the firm whose products people love rather than like. In 2000, Jobs said that the market was Apple's to lose; 12 years on, it still is.

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