I was interviewed by a reporter from Bloomberg regarding Apple’s decision to withdraw from EPEAT ratings and what Wellesley is planning to do about it. Since I don’t control how my responses are going to be used in the story, I felt that it is important to state what I said 🙂

EPEAT ratings provide guidance on how environment friendly the computer systems are. It has been widely known that Apple hardware are not rated very high in EPEAT, whereas some of the PC manufacturers have gotten them pretty high. We purchase PC hardware that are rated gold. In terms of Apple hardware, we do not have the same options that one has with PC hardware.

We make purchasing decisions based on many factors, environmental concerns as well as use cases. In certain academic disciplines they use software to teach that runs only on certain computer platforms. If it is essential to have a Mac based on this reason, the fact that it does not have the stellar environmental rating is less important, because one has no other choice. So, we provide some best practice guidelines on energy conservation and expect the users to follow them.

One of the questions that I was asked was, is Wellesley going to decide to stop purchasing Macs because of this. This was based on the decision by the City of San Francisco to stop purchasing Apple hardware based on this story. My answer was that we will watch how this develops very carefully and decide on further actions such as joining any collective initiative to let Apple know the need to be environmentally conscious in producing their hardware. Apple claims that their hardware is energy efficient, of course.

I also mentioned that I usually watch the discussion on EDUCAUSE CIO Listserve to see how this develops further. It is also the case that we do not have a laptop program and therefore we do not determine what computers the students purchase. We do provide recommended configurations.

So, this is in essence what I conveyed, but who knows how the story will come out!!!