Yes, Even Macs have become Disposable Computers


At the shiny new Apple Store at Carousel Center. Syracuse Saturday, crowds lined up, swarmed in and bought gleaming 17" PowerBooks, iMac G5s and gazed admiringly at Apple Cinema Displays.

Meanwhile, just a few blocks away, a Lime iMac sat discarded in a bin. That's the lesson of recycling day, as the Syracuse Post-Standard reports.

"The average life of a computer is three to five years," said Jeff Cooper, recycling operations manager for the Onondaga County Resource Recovery Agency, who is quoted in the article.

One man brought along an old Mac and printer. He was just one of many with car trunks loaded with old Macs, PCs, TVs and even Palm Pilots.

Just this one Saturday in one town saw 105,000 pounds of televisions and computers brought by 1,175 for recycling.

Analysis: If you hasn't already worked it out, there's a frightening amount of landfill out there. Problem is, it's hazardous stuff too, like CRT monitors. And it's landfill in parts of the Chinese hinterland. Not to mention a huge pile of Lisas buried out there somewhere in the mid-1980s.

Problem is, if we don't keep buying, Apple doesn't make money, even though I kind of liked the fact that an acquaintance of mine did an international trip a couple of years back writing all his notes up on an ancient PowerBook 100 (no, no battery life left - need you ask?), and stayed in touch using Eudora 1.5. It worked. And he even sold it at a profit.

It sort of begs the question: does, say, a liberal arts college student require much more than a PowerBook 3400 running OS 9 to access the web, read a PDF, type a few Word 2001 docs and run email? Not really. No, its batteries don't run 5-6 hours, but it does connect to ethernet networks. And it's cheap.

I may be suffering from new Mac envy because I still do all my stuff on a 400MHz Lombard, but I also have a 500MHz Indigo iMac in my office which is virtually unused because use the PB. I'll buy a PB G5 when they're available, but I still burn DVDs, edit video and audio, run OS X, do Powerpoint presentations and write books on a machine that, by virtually anyone's standards, is close to becoming ancient in computer terms.

What's your end-of-useful-life/replacement time down to? Two years? Three years? Or 'use it 'til it breaks'?