The contention that "it will last for years" might run into some difficulties... some would say that you'll encounter them right after your warranty runs out.


Seriously, though, Apple hasn't the greatest track record with product longevity, due to technical issues (the iBook logic board failing, the Cube overheating, Powerbook battery recall, iPod Nano screen breakage, etc...), and also because they're constantly frothing up excitement for the next new thing. Evidence for the latter: the gift-giver could have bought a used iPod, but didn't.



Not to rain on your parade though; I wouldn't turn down a gift Nano :)

Hear hear! Even if I bought a new nano in non recyclable packaging every year, I would still be generating a vastly smaller volume of garbage than if I had a good quality stereo and still bought CDs, and I could continue living in a tiny house.

CDs and full size jewel cases are a menace and a waste -- I just put a box of jewel cases in the garbage for lack of other disposal options.

Any manufactured product that soaks up more money for a smaller package has a decent chance to be more eco-friendly, from a landfill and lifestyle footprint perspective, than a cheap large manufactured product.

(Nano versus stereo, city condo versus suburban McMansion, one Italian organic wool suit versus 100 cheap cotton t-shirts)

It may be green, but only unintentionally. What's not green is the shockingly fast new electronics go obsolete.

What's interesting is that the savings in packaging and shipping of tons of music media is all incidental; the savings of shipping all that stuff and manufacturing it, and all that waste simply means it's a wee bit easier to make a buck. But to compete, they had to keep prices low. Sure, bandwidth use and electricity use associated with all that are up a little, but over all, less energy is used and less waste is produced by going physical-medium free.

I'm hoping the paper-less, physical-medium free trend goes beyond selling music into the offices; offices generate huge amounts of paper waste.

You can't possibly be serious.

I love my iPod (you know, the complicated one with all the moving parts), but calling it a "green" product?

It's got a battery. And a circuit board. And some memory. None of which can be produced in industrial quantities without some fairly horrendous byproducts.

I really thought I'd learn stuff reading this blog. I'm pretty disappointed.

I agree with the points you made, but the battery will die in 1-3 years, leaving behind a bit of lead and a dead iPod. It can be replaced, however, and I imagine it is less waste than continuing to buy jewel cases would be.

As a side note, it'd be interesting to see how much energy each form of media requires. It'd be especially cool to see how each step of their evolution fared. I guess that print would be the most effecient, being at it's best when it was all oral history, and at it's worst when it became mass printed. The internet probably stands somewhere in between.

Technology may have a bad rap for its use of strong chemicals, but lots of data in very small places is key to everything we do to make our world safer and greener... including the not so often seen things like memory cards that have in-built wear levelling software that makes sure all parts of a memory card get the same usage to extend their life, because the do wear out but only after hundreds of thousands or millions of reads and writes.

While ipods are great (i have one myself), i did find out recently that apple doesnt have the best reputation of properly disposing electronic waste, this is only made worse by the nearly constant flow of cutting edge products. So be sure to dispose of your electronic waste properly and encourage apple to "think different" and do the same.

I agree to some extent, but just keep in mind that the battery is fixed inside and has to be replaced by Apple. Most lithium ion batteries will only give you around 3 years max before they don't hold enough charge. A new battery every 3 years means more waste. If the battery costs too much people will just buy the newer model (they probably will regardless!).

Well, I got a refurbished iPod mini for christmas, and I was quite pleased to get it, I do think that--although it does have moving parts, etc--it was the better choice for me. Where the nano is too small to function well, the mini is the right size to fit in my hand...and I think that as far as the recycling of electronics that apple does, I have heard that although it's generally not so good, the iPod may be an exception--they do pay you money to turn in an old iPod in order to buy another one, and then refurbish it, and sell it online (albeit, kind of hard to get to...anyone who's looking for a refurb iPod and can't find one on the site can email me, and I'll tell you how to get there).

Point by point:

1. You must have a very small music collection for it to fit on a nano. Plus, any ipod needs some kind of support system, such as a PC, whereas a CD just needs a player, ultimately, I'd call that a wash, unless you have an extremely large collection (>5000 CD's).
2. Hard drives have about the same life-expectancy as flash memory these days (though flash memory is improving).
4. You still need amplifiers and speakers to listen without headphones. A more apt analogy would be to a Walkman, and it is smaller than a Walkman.
3 and 5 are both subjective. I think the inherent limitations of the ipod make it as usable as an albtross around the neck. There are much better designed MP3 players, and MUCH more effective music distribution software than itunes. But, that's just my opinion.

Personally, I think a Cold Heat soldering iron or a shaker LED flashlight has much more of a case for being "green" than an Ipod nano.

The assertion that the iPod nano is an environmentally friendly product is pretty ridiculous. I'm surprised that anyone literate enough to use a computer can be so short-sighted as to think the environmental cost of an object is measured by its size. It takes resources to manufacture electronics components, batteries, etc. According to the BBC, it takes 75kg of raw materials to manufacture a mobile phone, I doubt the figure for an iPod nano is much different. Meanwhile, this is a device which has a shelf-life (not taking into account obsolescence) of maybe 3-5 years, due to the hard-wired Lithium-ion battery.

The truth is that the iPod nano is not "green" at all. Rather, it is admired and loved by the sorts of people who like the idea of "green" products and they don't have the cajones to admit to liking so blatant a consumerist, materialistic product without a cover-story.

Este articulo piensa igual que yo.