With its new miniaturized Mac mini, Apple has a second product — and its first Mac — that qualifies for its “carbon neutral” label. As part of the push, the company is buying enough renewable power to offset emissions generated from customer use of the computers.
For years, tech companies have been tracking, and in some cases reducing, the emissions profiles of their products. Usually that involves querying suppliers about their own supply chains, where they get power to run their operations, and how they’ll be shipping finished products. But in 2023, with the Apple Watch Series 9, the Cupertino-based company made the unorthodox decision to eliminate emissions from product use by making additional investments in renewable power.
Powering something like a smartwatch represents a tiny fraction of the overall carbon footprint of the device; things like chips, displays, and batteries contribute far more to the total.
But with a product like the Mac mini, using the device can generate far more pollution than charging a watch. It’s also a larger fraction of the device’s overall carbon footprint.
Shrinking the Mac mini also likely helped keep the footprint down, though it’s impossible to tell since Apple doesn’t break out specific figures for things like materials and manufacturing in its environmental declarations.
What is notable, though, is the impact that semiconductors have on a computer’s climate impact. Semiconductor manufacturing is energy intensive and uses chemicals that have significantly higher global warming potential than carbon dioxide. Making and shipping the base model Mac mini, which has 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, generates 32 kg of carbon pollution, even after Apple accounts for its low-carbon power investments. The top spec version includes far more chips inside, providing 64GB of RAM and 8TB of storage, and that nearly quadruples the carbon footprint to 121 kg.
In the end, Apple says it zeros out those figures for any Mac mini by purchasing carbon credits from nature-based projects like sustainably managed forests and restored ecosystems. But the difference between the bottom and top specs reveals just how much carbon remains embedded in the computing industry, and just how hard the last bit will be to eliminate.
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Tim De Chant is a senior climate reporter at TechCrunch. He has written for a wide range of publications, including Wired magazine, the Chicago Tribune, Ars Technica, The Wire China, and NOVA Next, where he was founding editor. De Chant is also a lecturer in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing, and he was awarded a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT in 2018, during which time he studied climate technologies and explored new business models for journalism. He received his PhD in environmental science, policy, and management from the University of California, Berkeley, and his BA degree in environmental studies, English, and biology from St. Olaf College.
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