Apple - page 46

A bit of fun, here. Multiple websites and stock reporting services today briefly misreported that modest gains in Apple’s stock today (2 points as of 11 a.m.) was actually a titanic leap of 40 points, or more than 33 percent of its gain.

As submitting reader SBI notes:

“WTF?  Just checked AAPL and almost had a heart attack.  I thought maybe Redmond and Enderle just spontaneously combusted.  In all honesty, I don’t know where everybody draws the stock data from, but I saw this on at least 3 diff sites.”

Amazing. Apple announced great results, but that would be something else…

More pics below.

What’s the worst kept secret in China?

The features and dimensions of Apple’s new iPod Touch and iPod Nano, which are hush-hush here in the U.S. ahead of their expected September unveiling, but are well-known in China.

According to more than a dozen pictures of new cases acquired by CoM, the new iPod Touch and iPod Nano will both get cameras.

The big surprise is that the iPod Touch’s camera is in the center of the device, not offset like the camera in the iPhone.

The Nano’s new camera is placed in the bottom left corner, which becomes top left when the iPod is held horizontally to take a picture, with fingers on each corner.

The outside dimensions remain largely the same as previous models, but the Nano gets a widescreen display, the better to take photos with the camera on the back.

This has all been widely rumored, of course. iLounge detailed the new Nano back in May.

But the dozen pictures of new cases below all but confirm the rumors. Chinese case manufacturers are so certain of the features and dimensions, they are already sending out samples of the cases. They wouldn’t do this unless they were pretty confident.

“My company had got full information and dimension,” wrote a Chinese distributor in an email to a U.S. reseller. “Enclosed some image and instruction for your reference. Most of the sample available now. If you need some sample check quality please freely let me know.”

Hit the jump for dozens of new cases exclusively unearthed by CoM.

Malcolm Gladwell is a very sharp guy, on a whole lot of topics (heck, he liked my book!). One of the most enjoyable reads of the past month is his point-by-point thrashing of Chris Anderson’s book Free in the New Yorker, which basically established that, all protests to the contrary, charging money is a better business than giving things away for free.

But in the course of this deconstruction, Malcolm made a pretty big arithmetic error that made it sound like Apple was on the verge of making the content it sells for its devices more important than the hardware itself:

“And there’s plenty of other information out there that has chosen to run in the opposite direction from Free. The Times gives away its content on its Web site. But the Wall Street Journal has found that more than a million subscribers are quite happy to pay for the privilege of reading online. Broadcast television—the original practitioner of Free—is struggling. But premium cable, with its stiff monthly charges for specialty content, is doing just fine. Apple may soon make more money selling iPhone downloads (ideas) than it does from the iPhone itself (stuff). The company could one day give away the iPhone to boost downloads; it could give away the downloads to boost iPhone sales; or it could continue to do what it does now, and charge for both.”

Actually, Apple is really, really far away from making more money selling iPhone downloads than from the iPhone itself. Let’s take the most recent data we have.

Ogle this “mesmerizing” new window display at Apple’s flagship store in Palo Alto featuring billions of iPhone apps flying towards you.

It’s “the coolest window display I’ve ever seen,” says TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid, who filmed the display above.

It is pretty trippy.

A security official has been suspended by Hon Hai Group after the suicide of an employee who lost an iPhone prototype, Bloomberg reports.

Hon Hai Group, one of the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturers, suspended a security official and turned the case over to Chinese authorities, the company said in a statement, but didn’t provide further details.

The security official is identified only by the surname “Gu.”

Last week, Sun Tanyong, a 25-year-old employee at Hon Hai’s Foxconn International Holdings unit committed suicide after losing one of 16 iPhone prototypes he was charged with mailing to Apple in California.

Tanyong leapt to his death off a dormitory at Foxconn’s factory city in Shenzhen. He had reportedly been subject to an illegal search and rough treatment by Foxconn security.

Hon Hai says it is unaware of the reasons behind Sun’s suicide, according to the statement.It offered the company’s condolences to Tanyong’s family.

Apple says it is awaiting the outcome of an investigation.

“We are saddened by the tragic loss of this employee,” spokesman Steve Dowling told Bloomberg. “We require that our suppliers treat all workers with dignity and respect.”

Foxconn is one of the largest contract makers of mobile phones, and produces Apple’s iPhone and iPods at its walled factory city. Home to 270,000 workers, the walled city has its own fire station and hospital, stores, restaurants, and recreation facilities. The giant factory also produces cell phones for Nokia and Motorola, Sony Playtation and Nintendo Wii, as well as PCs for Hewlett Packard and Dell.

Link.

Despite worldwide economic recession, Apple enjoyed its best non-holiday quarter ever in its 2009 third quarter ended June 27, 2009, the company said on Tuesday.

Apple made a whopping $1.23 billion profit on revenues of $8.34 billion. The gobs of cash came from robust sales of 2.6 million Mac computers (up 4% from last year thanks to a MacBook refresh in the quarter), and blockbuster sales of the iPhone 3GS, which sold 5.2 million units, up an unbelievable 620% from a year ago.

This when other tech companies companies like Nokia are tanking.

“We’re making our most innovative products ever and our customers are responding,” said Steve Jobs in a statement.

Other highlights:

– the traditional iPod is on the way out. Apple sold 10.2 million iPods during the quarter, down 7% from a year-ago. The market is saturated and customers are buying iPhones instead.

– Gross margin was an amazing 36.3 percent, up from 34.8 percent in the year-ago quarter. (Dell makes about 5% margins on its products).

– The iPhone 3GS and $99 iPhone are a huge hit. Apple shifted 5.2 million iPhones during the quarter, up 626% from a year ago.

– Apple is a truly international. Overseas sales accounted for 44% of the quarter’s revenue. This will jump when the iPhone goes on sale in China later this year.

Apple’s full unaudited financial statement after the jump.

Multiple reports Tuesday indicate a 25 year-old employee of Foxconn, one of Apple’s OEM suppliers in China, killed himself last week after losing a 4th generation iPhone which he had been instructed to ship to Apple headquarters in Cupertino, CA.

Sun Danyong was a recent engineering graduate who worked in product communications for electronics manufacturing giant Foxconn in Shenzhen, a city in the booming industrial corridor between Guangzhou and Hong Kong.

On Thursday, July 9th, according to the first English-language report on the incident at Venture Beat, Sun got 16 prototype phones from the assembly line at a local Foxconn factory. At some point in the next few days, he discovered one of the phones was missing.

On Monday, July 13, he reported the missing phone to his boss. Then, that Wednesday, three Foxconn employees illegally searched his apartment. Accusations have reportedly been flying about the Chinese language Twittersphere that Sun was detained and physically abused during the investigation, although this has not been substantiated.

Shortly after 3am on Thursday July 16th, security cameras at Sun’s apartment building show him leaping to his death from a window in his apartment.

Apple is due to announce Wednesday its earnings for the quarter that ended June 27, and you know what that means: wild speculation by analysts followed by pouting and a drooping stock price when Apple out-performs expectations.

But lately, it’s gotten still more insane: now, these same analysts are trying to infer some read of the overall economic condition based on Apple’s earnings. Which, to me, is a comically fruitless exercise, because Apple operates in a different universe from most companies. It has radically differentiated offerings in all of its businesses, and its focus on innovation is such that it always comes out with a new market-defining product that the rest of the industry can’t match. Apple’s an especially bad indicator of the rest of the consumer tech sector during this recession. Apple doing well doesn’t mean that Dell’s in good shape, or vice versa.

BusinessWeek’s Arik Hesseldahl, a long-time Apple-watcher, has a very sober account of this lunacy, which suffers from the problems associated with a lot of traditional business reporting — in pursuit of balance, he can’t actually address the questionable premise that Apple, a company that was out-performing the market before it collapsed, might signify the end of the recession by continuing to out-perform the market.

I can say this much: Apple will have great earnings on Wednesday. And that means that it remains good to be an Apple stockholder, even as the rest of the world is in chaos. It doesn’t mean we’re getting back to normal anywhere else.

UPDATE: the original headline and a reference to “wireless” syncing in this article have been changed to correct a misunderstanding on the author’s part.

Apple has confirmed that Palm Pre will no longer be able to sync with iTunes versions beginning with the latest update, killing a sales feature that Palm had long relied upon in billing its phone as a major competitor to the iPhone.

“iTunes 8.2.1 is a free software update that provides a number of important bug fixes,” said Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris, in a BusinessWeek report Wednesday. “It also disables devices falsely pretending to be iPods, including the Palm Pre,” she continued, adding, “As we’ve said before, newer versions of Apple’s iTunes software may no longer provide syncing functionality with unsupported digital media players.”

For a device roundly touted as iPhone’s most worthy competition in the smartphone market, Palm’s Pre has not made many waves since being released on June 6 by Sprint, and remains hampered by an online app store with very little product.

There is some disagreement among analysts about how well the Pre has been received so far by the market, with some crowing that expectations have been more than met, while others say not so fast.

While the news of iTunes’ Pre lockout is no surprise, and Palm could still easily craft workaround allowing Pre users to sync with newer versions of iTunes, including using third party solutions to do the job, the lockout news is further evidence that Apple is not about to let up the pressure on a company now run by some of its former employees.

As flash memory and solid state drives steadily become the storage media of choice for portable electronic devices, Apple’s iPod Classic – the device widely credited with kickstarting the company’s rise from the ashes of the John Scully era – may not survive to celebrate its 10th birthday in 2011.

1.8 inch hard disk drives manufactured by Samsung and Toshiba, the last two manufacturers standing in a once-robust market for small, high-capacity spinning disk drives, sit languishing in the supply channel, according to a report at Ars Technica, and industry trends do not bode well for the future of Apple’s signature gadget.

When Apple launched the first iPod in 2001, the hard disk was the only vehicle capable of storing large amounts of data flexibly at reasonable cost. Since then, however, advances in Flash memory and SSD technology have made those two storage options the industry standard for everything from netbooks to iPhones and the entire line of Apple’s portable music players, with only the Classic continuing to rely on the 1.8″ HDD.

The trend toward Flash memory and SSD technology has been building for at least the last couple of years, with Apple having been ahead of the curve when the company introduced its Flash memory-based iPod nano in 2005.

SSDs typically offer higher performance–often much higher performance–than hard-disk drives and are more durable since they have no moving parts. While the larger question of where the technology is headed remains somewhat in debate, in large part over concerns about data’s long-term reliability in SSD storage media and Flash memory’s eventual degradation related to writing, erasing and re-writing its memory blocks, the fate of the 1.8 inch HDD seems dire.

The industry’s current disdain for small-form HDD products, and Apple’s apparent design trajectory for its mobile PMPs and handset devices, suggest the time has come to prepare farewells for the iPod Classic.

Apple has disabled AT&T tethering in the latest iPhone beta released to developers on Tuesday.

The iPhone OS 3.1 beta 2 disables a popular tethering hack for the AT&T network. The hack works on iPhone 3.0, even though AT&T does yet officially support it.

The hack enables data tethering (and sometimes MMS)  by altering the iPhone’s IPCC carrier files. It’s easily enabled by visiting sites like BenM.at using mobile Safari on the iPhone.

AT&T has promised tethering later this year, but has yet to release details. The company is expected to be enabled in late summer and cost about $15 extra.

Thanks QuickPWN.

Image credit: Randy Stewart

And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultations
They’re quite aware of what they’re going through.
– David Bowie

One day, people may point to an article published Monday at PCMag.com (perhaps the preeminent Windows-foucused tech magazine around) by long-time Apple-baiting columnist John C. Dvorak, as a signal for the storming of Microsoft’s figurative Bastille.

“If I was going to buy a new laptop this minute, a MacBook Pro is probably what I’d get,” are words almost no tech watcher of the past 20 years would ever figure to come from Dvorak, the smart, engaging veteran columnist who has taken over the years a nearly perverse glee in stirring up the bee hive of Apple loyalists in tech journalism.

But that’s exactly what Dvorak had to say after seeing first-hand “all these whiz-bang features” of his son’s brand-new MacBook Pro that, he said, “make me realize that I have fallen behind.”

But don’t go thinking Dvorak has fully consumed the kool-aid or that his enmity for Apple will abate completely anytime soon. The real reason he’s kindly disposed to an Apple product at this point, aside from “that hard aluminum unibody that makes the thing feel like a rock,” is a piece of software his son required, DEVONthink, which organizes and sorts PDF files into manageable database blocks – and has no Windows-based counterpart. “It’s about as close to a killer Apple app as anything I’ve seen since VisiCalc in the late ’70s,” he gushed.

Of course no Dvorak piece would be complete without a pointed jab at something Apple, and he dutifully reported his son’s experience at the Apple Store as something akin to “a car dealership in the ’70s, with layers of various salespeople, each trying to screw you.”

“I actually think that the Apple Stores are barriers to sales, and people only buy Macs because the machines have clearly moved ahead in genuine usefulness,” he wrote, saying, “overall, it’s a pathetic indictment of the entire PC scene.”

Well, perhaps it’s a reach to tar the entire PC scene with the same brush, but clearly change is in the air and more and more people such as Dvorak’s kid are coming around to just how far Apple machines have moved ahead.

It’s at least a bright sign that someone like Dvorak has finally noticed.

With new rumors about the much anticipated Apple tablet hitting Monday, it seems fair to ask how one is supposed to decode the storms of speculation that have long whirled around the company and its products.

Some thrive on rumor and innuendo about Apple – the largely well-regarded Macrumors attracts over 6 million unique visitors per month, AppleInsider nearly a million – and with Apple’s penchant for absolute secrecy over its design department and product development it’s no surprise whispers and baseless fantasy comprise much of what passes for “news” about Apple.

If Apple really is coming out with a tablet in October, or AT&T really is going to open tethering to the US iPhone market in September (a persistent rumor AT&T continues to deny with respect to both price and timing), does it benefit anyone to know about it now? And if it turns out there is (again) no tablet, or that tethering comes tomorrow for free (you wish), how does that affect the way one is supposed to receive the next rumored news item about what they’re up to in Cupertino?

These questions are one small aspect of the larger debate about the ways news and journalism are changing in the Internet age. Traditional news organizations have been cutting resources for true investigative journalism for years, in favor of selling ads and eyeballs with cheap sensationalism, in part because it often seems that’s what the public wants, but also because it’s easier to publish a rumor than it is to get at the truth or to take time to think about and craft a well-reasoned opinion piece.

Monday’s rumor about the Apple tablet originated with a report at the China Times, which is no tabloid sheet, and appears to be based on information about companies high up in the Apple supply chain that a respectable news organization would be able to source and confirm before printing as news. Do standards of journalistic ethics prevail at major news organizations in Asia? Have budgets for investigative journalism survived the impulse to feed the public’s insatiable desire for knowing what the future holds?

The answer to such questions holds the key to understanding how to receive a report about what Apple has up its sleeve. What you believe comes down to whatever you can know for yourself and who you can trust to tell you the truth. Ultimately, no one really knows until the lights come up at the next Apple “event” – and, after all, anticipation is more intoxicating than feeling you already know what’s coming.

Two weeks after an iPhone 3GS was dropped in a swimming pool while recording video, the phone is still frickin’ working says its owner.

“I’m talking to you on it now,” says Khena Kara, the iPhone’s owner, speaking from his home in Nashville, TN. “It’s still going strong.”

Kara’s iPhone 3GS gained internet fame after Kara accidentally dropped it in a swimming pool while recording a video. The iPhone kept recording as it sank to the bottom, and as he fished it out. “It still frickin’ works!” he says in surprise as he pulls the iPhone from the pool. Kara posted the footage to YouTube, and it spread fast on blogs and Twitter. It has now been watched more that 500,000 times.

But many questioned the video’s authenticity. Most notably, Mashable wondered whether it was real.

“Yes, it’s real,” says Kara of the video. “It was the pool in my subdivision.”

Above is a video still of Kara taken from the iPhone video right after it was fished from the pool. And below it is a new picture of Kara taken with the same iPhone.

The new picture’s metadata appears to back up Kara’s story.

The United States Department of Justice has taken the first baby steps that could eventually lead to an official investigation of the Telecom industry and the effects its exclusive carrier agreements have on consumer prices and choices, according to a Wall Street Journal report Monday.

The initial review looks to determine whether large U.S. telecom companies such as AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. have abused the market power they’ve amassed in recent years, according to people familiar with the matter.

Largely moribund and hamstrung by internal politics and inefficiency during the Bush administration, DOJ under President Barack Obama has seen renewed relevance as an arm of the Federal government and has lately signaled business as usual could soon be ending for an industry left to its own devices during the past decade or more.

Many people have long decried exclusive carrier agreements that make popular gadgets such as Apple’s iPhone available only to consumers willing to sign multi-year service agreements with AT&T and likewise Blackberry’s Storm to those who’d sign with Verizon.

The Wall Street Journal quoted the Justice Department’s antitrust chief, Christine Varney, saying she wants to “reassert the government’s role in policing monopolistic and anti-competitive practices by powerful companies.”

Apple’s iPhone has recently become the most popular camera on Flickr, one of the Internet’s most well-regarded photo sharing social media sites.

Expressed in “percent of members” terms, the iPhone has lately bested two models of Canon’s EOS Digital Rebel, of which the XTi had long been the clear favorite choice of Flickr members.

UPDATE: Since this post was originally published, the Flickr site’s graph has been changed, and now shows the iPhone is the #2 camera among Flickr members, resting just behind the Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi, which has apparently enjoyed a bump in popularity for which the previously published graph did not account.

[Thanks Rafael, for the heads-up on the graph change!]

Among popular camera phones, the iPhone has outdistanced its rivals since its release two years ago and recently widened the gap between its nearest competitor, the Nokia N95, by a huge margin.

The data is to be taken with a grain of salt as anecdotal and largely unscientific, but it is interesting to note such graphic evidence of popularity for a phone camera that had been denigrated by many as one of the most pitiable features of Apple’s popular smartphone.

Apple recently upgraded the specs on the iPhone camera, giving it a boost in pixel capacity and adding both variable focus and video capabilities, which should only increase its attractiveness going forward.

Spot the difference? One of these is a $30 iPhone Stereo Headset from Apple. The other is a $14 knockoff from the Philippines.

Thing is, the $14 copycat is as almost good as the original. It’s nearly physically indistinguishable. The sound is exceptionally good. And the microphone/remote works the same as it does on the genuine article.

Even the packaging is remarkably realistic.

Except there’s a few things that are off — a few minor details that give them away as fakes. Plus, they broke down after a week.

The audio manufacturer Shure is known for its excellent headphones, which makes it a favorite target of counterfeiters.

In May, Shure helped Chinese authorities bust knockoff shops run by two Shanghai companies that were making copycat Shure headphones. The raids uncovered large quantities of Shure E2c and E4c earphones, which sell for about $70 and $170 respectively, as well as headphones branded JVC and Audio-Technica.

Unlike copycats of yore, today’s counterfeiters are amazingly sophisticated and accomplished, turning out high-quality knockoffs that in some ways rival the originals. Flickr user digaderfox bought a pair of fake Shures on eBay last year, and documented the surprisingly high quality of the knockoffs on the photo site.

Apple is also is becoming a target of copycats, with amazingly good knockoffs of iPhones and headsets coming onto the market.

SEE ALSO:

Marvel At the Ingenuity of the Chinese iPhoney, iPhone Knockoffs Now Near Perfect

Copycats Target $30 Apple Earbuds, And These Are Perfect

Paul Applebaum, Shure’s Executive Vice President and General Counsel, said counterfeiters are increasingly sophisticated. Some are setting up convincing factory-direct websites, or hijacking U.S. eBay accounts to make it appear goods are shipped domestically.

Full interview after the jump.

For all of its public perception as a great censoring overlord, the Chinese government leaves plenty of wiggle room for computer manufacturers, including Apple, to avoid complying with recently mandated strict Internet filtering requirements.

While foreign and domestic makers of computers running Windows will eventually have to ship their machines with controversial Green Dam Youth Escort software, other machines running Mac OS X or Linux, for example, will be exempt from the mandate, according to a report at Yahoo Tech.

An Apple sales representative in Beijing indicated Green Dam is not being bundled with Macs sold at the Apple Store there because the software, which blocks pornography and “sensitive” political content, is not compatible with the Mac’s operating system.

In addition, a Lenovo spokesperson confirmed its computers running Linux are also being shipped without Green Dam and said the Ministry of Industry and Information and Technology is not requiring non-Windows machines to come with the program.

A source connected with Green Dam developers said they are testing the software on non-Windows platforms but did not indicate when or if an OS X compatible update might be released.

Updated: Police have confirmed that a 26-year-old female Apple employee was shot in the shoulder and injured at the Apple Store Clarendon in Arlington, Virginia, during a “violent armed robbery” at about 10.15AM.

The suspect rang a doorbell at the back service entrance and shot a female employee as soon as she opened the door, the Washington Post reports. A police spokeswoman said it is unclear if the employee had words with the shooter or put up resistance to the robbery.

According to the Post, only two employees were in the store at the time, the shooting victim and another employee who was in the main showroom. The other employee called police as soon as they heard the gunshot. It’s unclear if there were customers in the store at the time, the police said. The shooting occurred about 15 minutes after the store opened.

The shooting victim was injured in the shoulder. The injuries are not considered life-threatening, police said.

The suspect is described as a medium build black male, aged between of 35 and 45, with facial hair. He was wearing a dark baseball cap, a light-colored shirt and pants. He fled on foot, carrying a handgun.

Security camera footage of the shooting may be released to the public to help the search, police said.

The store is located in the tony Market Common outdoor shopping district, which is considered a quiet, safe area.

“I think it’s a sign of the times, the economy, when you have someone desperate enough to rob an Apple store in an area like this,” said a shopper who was planning to buy a new MacBook.

As the issue of overheating iPhones heats up, Apple might be preparing to point the finger at iPhone owners who fail to keep their iPhones within acceptable temperatures.

Apple recently updated its knowledge base advising iPhone owners how to keep their devices within acceptable operating temperatures.

For many, this was not the answer they were hoping for because Apple’s solution to an apparent defect appears to be to place the burden on the user to ensure their iPhone’s temperature remains within an acceptable range.

What’s troubling about Apple’s position is that it sets the stage for Apple to adjust its iPhone service policy based on the argument that damage caused by overheating the iPhone is the fault of the iPhone’s owner — not Apple.

Remember how Apple resolved the problem with the iPhone’s oversensitive moisture sensor, which some claimed was activated by sweat?

That’s right, if you bought an iPhone with a defective moisture sensor that subsequently gets tripped by sweat or humidity you have to pay Apple $199 for a replacement under the theory that Apple cannot confirm that your iPhone was not exposed to water.

Sound familiar?

Apple now has overall market share leadership in the worldwide smartphone segment, having overtaken former frontrunner Nokia based on browser calls for mobile ads. A recent report at BNet Technology cites AdMob statistics that show Apple with 49 percent of mobile ad traffic in the first quarter of 2009, compared to 32 percent for Nokia.

The market shift may have less to do with customer preferences for Apple’s hardware, however, as a recent smartphone industry analysis from Gartner notes; services and applications have become the primary drivers of smartphone success.

The stats appear to vindicate Apple’s approach to application distribution via the iTunes App Store. William Volk, CEO of entertainment and business apps vendor PlayScreen, said on a professional forum posting that “other stores simply aren’t matching the ARPUs [average revenue per user] of the Apple App store.”

The iPhone OS also enjoys a comfortable lead over every other mobile operating system, including Symbian, Research in Motion (RIM), Palm and Windows, with May numbers showing iPhones had 68% of the browser requests in the survey.

Apple has a support document called “Keeping iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS within acceptable operating temperatures” to which the company has directed those with concerns about alleged overheating problems with 3G and 3GS models of the device.

In addition to offering practical advice such as “Don’t leave the device in your car” (as car interiors can exceed the recommended operating range of -20º to 45º C [-4º to 113º F]), the document also warns that CPU-intensive applications, such playing music or using the GPS while in direct sunlight may also overheat the iPhone.

The OS has a temperature warning screen built in, that appears to indicate when the phone could be running into problems and may not work properly.

Using the iPhone in temperatures over 95 degrees can trigger the temperature warning, according to at least one report. “Low- or high-temperature conditions might temporarily shorten battery life or cause the device to temporarily stop working properly,” Apple warns in the support document, though it says when the temperature warning appears, the phone “may still be able to make emergency calls.”

Recent anecdotal reports of 3GS iPhones overheating, with some white models turning pink as a result, have led to speculation that Apple may have a recall situation on its hands, but the company so far is relying on the fact that “iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS comply with the safety standard for Safety of Information Technology Equipment, IEC 60950-1,” and has had no further comment on the overheating issue.

[GearLog]

Despite touting its green credentials in new TV ads, Apple is ranked fairly low in Greenpeace’s latest survey of green electronics.

Greenpeace’s quarterly green scorecard was released on Wednesday, and while Apple got high marks for reducing toxic chemicals, it got low marks for not supporting global recycling initiatives or using more recycled plastics.

Overall, Apple scored 4.7 out of 10, putting it in the lower half of a pack of 18 electronics manufacturers. Nokia came top with a score of 7.45, and Nintendo came bottom with a score of 1.

Apple has been advertising the green credentials of its new MacBook line in TV ads — proclaiming them the greenest laptops ever.

Greenpeace’s 12th Guide to Greener Electronics ranks tech companies on three main criteria: reducing overall environmental impact, eliminating toxic chemicals, and recycling efforts.

Apple rightly has a reputation for making quality gear. The company doesn’t make junk that breaks down in a few months, or even years. Or even 20 years.

MacMedics, a repair shop in Millersville, Maryland, recently serviced a Macintosh IIci, which was on the blink after two decades of faithful service.

Introduced in September 1989, the Mac IIci is one of the most popular early Macs. It was the first to have built-in color video, three Nubus expansion slots, and a 40 or 80 MB hard disk. It originally sold for $6,700.

The machine was putting up funny patterns on the monitor. The client thought it was the screen, but it was actually the main logic board. He’d been using the machine for 20 years — 20 years! — and had no interest in upgrading to a modern Mac.