Green Apples

On Apple's website for their new Macbook computers they state the following:

The new MacBooks. The world's greenest family of notebooks.

The highly recyclable, even more energy-efficient MacBook family has been designed with the environment in mind.

And a bit further down:

Reduced packaging.

The new MacBook packaging is up to 41 percent smaller than the previous generation. And smaller boxes are much better for the planet. Because smaller boxes mean we can fit more boxes on each shipping pallet — up to 25 percent more. Which means more products will fit on each boat and plane. Which means fewer boats and planes are used, resulting in fewer CO₂ emissions. It’s just one seemingly minor change. But it has a major positive impact on our environment.

Interesting. It appears that a major selling point of the new Macbook is that it's "environmentally friendly", even before the customer purchases it.

So you can imagine my surprise to learn from a nameless source (an official Apple retailer in New Zealand) that it's standard Apple policy to ship all unsold stock back to the USA when demand exceeds supply, even if there are customers lining up here.

This is a bit troubling - I mean, the implications of this are rather unfortunate. It means that the cute little Macbook someone might buy in, say, Manhattan, thinking they are being environmentally friendly, has in fact traveled both to and from somewhere like New Zealand. Or further! Perhaps multiple times!

Fewer CO2 emissions indeed...