Thoughts on Apple's 2030 Environmental Initiative

Tech people should, like, really not be talking anymore.

via Apple

I came into this year's iPhone news cycle expecting absolutely nothing. Like, zero. The only speculation I caught on Twitter had to do with colors and USB-C. The ground is parched in Appleland, but that somehow didn't stop me from having opinions around their event.

Really, only one thing stuck out to me…

This was the most engaging segment, arguably the only engaging segment, of the keynote.¹ A lot of people are crying foul that it's some self-congratulatory corporate thing. While it could've been, say, three minutes instead of five and a half, I found it great. It made the point it was supposed to. (It’s literally the only part of the keynote that showed any personality.)

Like, these are legitimate things to flex. I think what terminally online people can't seem to grasp is that these are incredibly difficult things to do if you’re a company as large as Apple. Becoming eco-friendly is not just a throw-money-at-the-problem sort of deal.

Upper managers have to communicate the intent to every department on every level, middle managers have to constantly monitor and regulate processes and communicate what they find to upper managers, engineers have to work out what's feasible while adhering to Apple's higher design standards.² Upper managers have to make sure that over time, everyone still gets the mission, and that every person and material asset is aligned to that mission consistently over weeks, months, and years.

I remember a mentor with colleagues at Apple said that the secret to their good design is that everyone, across all departments, understands that design is paramount. The video, however gaudy or corporate it comes across, is them showing the world a similar deep commitment to the environment.

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Before working as a designer, I'd been naive to how product design works in a corporate setting. I thought that as long as I did my best in defining what the design is, as long as I communicated everything I could about a design, through my words and quality of work, that everyone else down the line would just get it, and that them simply doing their job would be enough.

From the minute a design leaves the designer's hands, you have to know that there are dozens if not hundreds of layers—decisions upon decisions made by all sorts of technicians and managers on the production side of things—that affect how the product on the shelf turns out. For example, if a material might have experienced a global supply shortage, an alternative might be picked down the line, which could in turn affect something like comfort, or even the product's lifespan, if it's of lower quality. These things tend to happen without the designer's knowledge—they don't need their permission.

I think the process of designing physical, mass-produced products is infinitely more complex than the design of almost anything else—more than apps and websites, that's for damn sure. It’s not just you designing the product per se, technicians have to “design” the machines and tools and rigs that will be making them at scale as well. It's why production for the iPhone 2-3 years down the line has to start now. Factor in Apple's 2030 commitment, that process just gets more complex.

Just think for a sec.

Every gram of waste material, CO2 emitted, every watt of energy expended, every milliliter of water used for cleaning and cooling, at every stage of development and production and distribution—that info has to be tracked and communicated to Apple HQ. That requires strict compliance from the third parties they outsource their production to.

Every material thoroughly considered—it's not enough that it's durable, malleable, water-resistant, UV-resistant, whatever. Now it has to be “carbon-neutral”, whatever that means. (Not everything can be made biodegradable, especially in a tech product.) If the material isn't off-the-shelf, that can drastically add to time and cost engineering a new material ie. an alloy or woven fabric, then having to show said third parties how to work with that new material.

That bit at the end where they present to “Mother Nature” the Apple Watch Series 9, their first carbon-neutral product, is monumental, if you ask me. It's an artifact of what's possible across the board—when those hundreds of layers of decisions are all made right. If they're able to make all their products carbon-neutral, what does that tell the rest of tech, the rest of the world? If the biggest company in the world can achieve carbon-neutrality, why can't you?

There tends to be a trickle-down effect in tech, wherein other companies copy what Apple does in some respect.³ ⁴ If this translates over to Apple's environmental initiatives—if companies start using better or less materials, less wasteful processes, etc.—this could be a huge win across the whole industry, if not also adjacent industries where plastics and metals are also commonly used.

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It's these major implications that makes me shake my head at how colossally narrow-minded some people are towards the whole thing. It’s as if Apple, almost $3 trillion in market cap, simply exists to make happy times for people that say things about them.⁵ It’s terminal consumer brain, and the way I’ve seen things, Apple people have had the worst case of this for years.

So yeah, this whole thing just became my soapbox for why I just can’t anymore with tech discourse. I’ve hit my Apple quota for... *checks notes*... ever.

That's it, that's the post.

1. They really need to do these keynotes live in person again. They're soooo boring. But I digress...

2. It’s not the other way around where design adheres to tech.

3. My guess when it comes to product design is that a lot of production companies have left-over materials and tooling from previous Apple models, or at least the CADs of it, and they let smaller companies in places where IP law doesn't apply as strongly repurpose them somehow.

4. Then again, Apple kinda do the same, seemingly delaying the release of features that Android phones have had for years. But that's for another time...

5. Although prices are one issue I do continue to get riled up about, they do be crazy sometimes. Regarding the Apple Vision Pro—Gen 1 products tend to have absurd prices. At this point, I think they're simply trying to limit demand so supply can keep up, so the $3.5k price tag makes perfect sense to me.