The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs » Going green

More Live Earth backlash

Steve — Sun, 20 May 2007 12:32:00 +0000

This time in Australia. See here. Poor Al. I told him, Before you go out on a limb on this thing, make sure it’s gonna fly. Oh well. You ever wonder why he got his ass beat by Bush? The guy has zero political instincts. Zero. Meanwhile see this from New Zealand. I’m no scientist. I’m not saying who’s right or wrong. I’m just saying, Al pushed this thing too hard and he’s going to get whacked in the backlash.

Daltrey to Gore: F-f-f-f…

Steve — Sat, 19 May 2007 16:17:00 +0000

Roger Daltrey has figured out that the Live Earth concerts are a load of crap. So has Bob Geldof. Question: If even frigtarded drug-addled rockers realize that it makes no sense to burn lots of fuel in order to raise awareness of global warming, how come Al Gore doesn’t see this? And how soon till people start to figure out that this isn’t about saving the planet, it’s about Al? See here.

Our new Mac recycling program

Steve — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 18:22:00 +0000

Peter Oppenheimer just raced into the Jobs Pod (okay, he kind of lumbered, actually) after reading this item from my blog earlier today about the guy with 100 old Macs in his house. Peter says he figures there must be loads of other computer loonies out there who want to fill their houses with old computers. Peter’s idea: We use these guys for a recycling program. He figures we might even make a few bucks if we charge people five hundred bucks to take back their dead machines and then sell those dead machines to collectors for some outrageous sum. And everyone gets a “little green Apple” sticker or something that they can put on their Prius to show how much they care about the planet. You know what? I’m liking it.

Every time you buy a Dell, a baby seal dies

Steve — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 17:26:00 +0000

This slogan showed up on the eighty-foot-by-twenty-foot multi-touch screen in our lobby this morning. One of the guys in Jon Ive’s lab found some photos we could use with it. Some showed actual seals being clubbed. Too graphic, I thought. Another idea was to have some baby seal silhouettes dancing with iPod cords on their heads, and then keeling over when Dell makes a sale. We could put it up on billboards with a Dell sales unit counter. But you know me, Mr. Minimalism. I like the cute baby seal photo all by itself. Simple, direct. I think maybe we’re on to something here.

Guy Kawasaki has come back to Apple

Steve — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 14:25:00 +0000

Guy Kawasaki, the motorcycle designer and former Apple employee, has come on as a consultant to help us with this green stuff. Guy’s attitude, which I think is the correct one, is that all of this green stuff and global warming stuff is mostly about marketing. In other words, you really don’t need to do very much. You just need to get on message and stay on message. The difference between the companies that get high praise and the companies that get put in the doghouse (like Apple) really isn’t that great. The difference is mostly about advertising and messaging. Guy is the master of this concept. He calls it “hollow marketing.” I think he’s doing a book on it, with Shel Israel collaborating.

So Guy came over yesterday and we spent about an hour hanging upside down in our gravity boots, doing an ab workout and trying to think different about green computing. It’s not as easy as it seems. (Both the ab stuff and the thinking.) Guy’s a great guy for dreaming up ideas. But I’m really much better at non-thinking. Like my ideal situation is to have other people come up with lots of ideas, and I tell them all that each idea is total shit. If they come back with a refinement of an idea I figure they must be really super passionate about it, and as you know the key to doing anything really super in life is to be super passionate, and that’s what we are all about at Apple is the passion. So if I sense there is real passion behind an idea I’ll take that idea and do some non-thinking about it in the Tassajara meditation room for a day or two and see what its karma says to me.

So. Long story short. Guy and I didn’t really come up with much. Let’s face it, it’s hard to get passionate about green stuff. It’s like trying to be passionate about wool socks. I mean, wool socks are great. I like wool socks. Especially with Birkenstocks. I just don’t get a boner thinking about them. Nobody holds up a pair of wool socks in a store and goes, “Whoa, check these out! Hell yes!” There’s no sense of childlike wonder in wool socks, that’s for sure.

So what’d we dream up? Well, we can use more low-power-consumption chips from Intel. That’s not exactly a big breakthrough. We can put a hand-crank on our MacBooks like the One Laptop Per Child machine. Maybe as an option. We’ll make it shiny white plastic and sell the crank for a hundred and twenty-nine bucks and patent the connector so other companies can’t make a knock-off for two bucks. That was it. Mostly we just hung there trying to do upside-down crunches and bumming out about how old we’re getting. Well, it was day one. You have to start somewhere.

New resolution: We’re going green

Steve — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 13:27:00 +0000

After seeing Arnold on the cover of Newsweek touting his big commitment to the global warming cause, I said you know what? That’s it. We’re going green. We’re gonna be greener than everyone else in the world put together. No more losing out to Lenovo and Dell on this one. No more fighting Greenpeace. To hell with it. We’re gonna pay them off. Name your price, Greentards.

Yesterday I called together my best people and told them to go out and figure out some great ideas and bring them back to me, and no matter what it costs, let’s get going on this initiative. By the end of this year I want Apple to be known as the greenest company in the world — not just in tech but in everything. If we’ve got to make hydrogen-powered computers and iPods that run on solar energy, so be it. Let’s get this done. And readers, if you have ideas, send them along. We want your input.