San Francisco to Stop Mac Purchases without EPEAT Certification

San Francisco officials react after Apple decided to remove EPEAT certification from its laptops and desktops. It seems that officials in this city have already blocked purchases for new Macs.

 An official from the San Francisco Department of Environment talked to the Wall Street Journal and claimed that Macs no longer qualify for purchase with city funds, so the department will send notifications to all its agencies to stop such purchases.

Employees may still be able to purchase these devices, but it seems that the whole process can turn out being extremely complicated and quite problematic, as officials say. Only about 1 to 2 percent of all the municipal computers are Macs, so this decision will not impact that much the system.

This decision comes after an event involving Apple which occurred last week. Back then it was revealed that Apple has asked EPEAT to remove 39 devices from its list of environmentally friendly products. This also removed certain products which already had the EPEAT certification.

 Now, it looks that Apple’s decision had an impact on the usage of these devices by government agencies. From this point of view, San Francisco may be just the first to make this call.

It is all linked to an order given in 2007, which indicates that 95 percent of the devices used by federal agencies have to be EPEAT-registered products. Since then, numerous manufacturers have tried to obtain this classification with the purpose to qualify some of their products for purchase.

 Why did Apple choose to remove EPEAT from its Mac lineup remains something unknown, at least for now. However, the decision that the company took is extremely curious.

In fact, Apple was the one who worked to create the EPEAT standards back in 2006. Some analysts claim that the choice that the famous manufacturer made now is actually linked to the new Retina display.

This new impressive feature might be the one which makes Apple’s Macs ineligible for EPEAT certification. Others seem to believe that Apple made this decision because of certain changes that the company is willing to bring when it comes to its design direction.

Either way, the only explication seems to be that Apple’s products are or will become ineligible for EPEAT.