Make room!
To get better technology, must we keep getting more?
First published in MacUser Vol 30 No 2, February 2014
It was logical for Apple to schedule the new Mac Pro for release before Christmas, but it’s quite appropriate that the first deliveries will now arrive with users towards the end of January. The 24th marks the 30th anniversary of Steve Jobs’ public demonstration of the first Macintosh, heralded two days earlier by the most famous TV ad that was ever shown only once.
The original Mac, later known as the Macintosh 128K, has little in common with 2014’s Mac Pro. By default, the Pro comes with 100,000 times more RAM. A standard app icon for its operating system contains more pixels than the 128K’s entire screen, and can use 16,777,214 more colours. You get the idea.
Yes, the Pro has vastly higher numbers all round — except on the price tag. The Macintosh launched at $2,495, equivalent to $6,000 today. The Pro is $2,999, so even adding a couple of 27in Thunderbolt Displays, along with the mouse and keyboard that Apple no longer throws in, you’ll still have plenty of change from 1984 prices.
But if you wanted an equivalent of 1984’s astonishing, groundbreaking Apple computer, the Mac Pro would frankly be overkill. Try further down the range. Far more powerful, more versatile, more user-friendly and (despite the handle) more portable than the 128K, and with a much wider choice of apps and add-ons, the iPad mini — no need for Retina when we’re comparing with monochrome! — will cost you $299: one twentieth of a 1984 Macintosh.
Little wonder that one of the criticisms recently levelled at a Los Angeles scheme to provide state school children with iPads was that even the poor kids already had iPads. So is making technology accessible actually the greater achievement here than shoehorning more functionality into it?
Making computers ubiquitous over the past 30 years has not only meant more people have computers, it’s also enabled the rapid turnover of innovations that’s made them so much more useful. Sell them the thing, then quick, sell them the next one; that’s how capitalism works, and the shorter the replacement cycle of a product, like the life cycle of an organism, the faster it can evolve, environment permitting.
The problem is that old computers don’t die, they just get thrown away. In the US, only about a quarter of them are recycled; the EU has a target of 45% by 2016. Progress looks impressive when we iterate quickly, but what we’re really doing is expending ever greater amounts of energy mining the remaining accessible deposits of rare earth metals without which most tech products can’t be made, then rapidly spraying them into landfill, from where they’re much more difficult to recover.
We’re not at a crunch point yet. But in 30 years’ time, if there’s a $15 machine that’s better than today’s iPad mini and everyone in the world is buying themselves a new one every six months, it may not mean we’re doing it right. The strides we’ve made in how computers are used are to be celebrated. We may need to think next about how they’re owned.
