Apple has been polling owners of its MacBook laptop, essentially asking: “Hey, would you be angry if we removed the headphone jack, screwed consumers and produced a mountain of electronic waste?”
Count us among the millions who will answer, “Um, YES!”
Apple is already receiving a massive backlash for removing the standard headphone jack from their iPhone 7, costing users a whack of cash to replace their hi-fi headphones -- and more importantly, immediately creating a mountain of e-waste that probably won’t get recycled.
We’re not above saying we told you so, Apple. But we told you so. Over 300,000 SumOfUs members called on Apple to not to remove the standard headphone jack from the iPhone 7.
Tell Apple to stop pointlessly producing endless e-waste and gouging its customers for sport. Keep the headphone jack on the MacBook.
Anyone who uses Apple products probably does it because at some point, they were impressed by Apple’s innovation. The iPod, the iPhone, the MacBook Air. We get it -- we were impressed too. But when Apple started polling its MacBook users how much they used their headphone jacks, you better believe we got suspicious.
There comes a point where innovation for the sake of innovation not only doesn’t make much sense, it’s legitimately dangerous. E-waste as a result of “planned obsolescence” is becoming an environmental crisis -- the United States alone dumped over 7 million tons of e-waste in 2014 alone -- almost all of it ending up illegally dumped in Asia or Africa.
Join us in demanding that Apple not make the same mistake twice: ditch planned obsolescence, not the MacBook headphone jack.
Apple has always faced criticism for its lacklustre environmental credentials -- from its coal-powered servers to the poor environmental records of its overseas factories. It’s been trying to repair its image by investing in renewable energy. But so long as it’s happy to singlehandedly make countless headphones across the globe obsolete in an obscene cash grab, it doesn’t get any Green-cred cookies.
More information
OregonLive. 15 September 2016.
CNN. 7 September 2016.