Dell VP Turns Green with Criticism of Apple’s Environmental Claims

When it comes to competition, the one between Apple and Dell often breaks out beyond traditional metrics such as revenue, profits, market share and units sold.

Many years ago, before Apple reinvented itself under the return stewardship of Steve Jobs, Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell was famously quoted as saying the best thing a new commander could do with the Apple ship would be to shut the company, sell its assets and give the proceeds to the shareholders.

This fall, around the time of Apple’s most recent quarterly earnings call, when Jobs took a rarely exercised opportunity to bask in glory of his company’s recent success in a lighthearted, congenial chat with analysts, many technology writers were quick to point out that Apple had more than enough cash on-hand to buy Dell outright, should the Board choose to do so.

In a recent blog post, Bob Pearson, Dell vice president of communications and conversations, sought to extend the competition between the companies to a battlefield on which many will be made and broken in the next decade – the environment.

Apple is all talk and no walk, to paraphrase Pearson’s criticism. He is apparently unappreciative of new Apple advertising touting Mac notebooks as “The World’s Greenest Family of Noteboks.” Pearson goes on to list some specific measures Dell has taken to reduce its carbon footprint and describes interactions with suppliers that will reduce Dell’s responsibility for millions of pounds of unnecessary shipping and packaging waste. Apple’s advertising is dismissed as “wild claims” and mere “rhetoric.”

Fighting words, perhaps, to some. Edible Apple has a nice critique of Pearson’s post – much ado about nothing, in short – though I can speak to one suggestion Pearson has for Apple that they might consider at One Infinite Loop. Pearson says “be part of the conversation,” and goes on to whine about Apple employees not being permitted to write blogs, which seems an off-the-mark complaint.

But I have been working on a story for a green designs publication for over a month, trying to get someone at Apple to speak with me about the very things the company advertises in its “greenest family” spots – and I’ve run into a brick wall. There are over two dozen Public Relations Vice Presidents on my list of Apple contacts, and from what I can tell none of those people seems interested in speaking to journalists – even to those of us who are nominally interested in helping Apple tell its story to a wider audience.