Thursday, September 04, 2008 - 7:09 pm
Thursday, September 04, 2008 - 10:34 pm
Nice concept!
I won't buy anything from Walmart.
But I applaud the idea.
Friday, September 05, 2008 - 11:06 am
The story doesn't say that the HP Pavilion in the recycled bag is a Wal-Mart exclusive product. It just says that Wal-Mart had a competition for low environmental impact packaging, and this product won. If you really want a HP Pavilion, I'm sure you could find one somewhere else.
To a large extent, I think that this is a "window dressing" publicity stunt. In my opinion, the elephant in the room is not Wal-Mart but contemporary consumer electronics themselves. Modern consumer electronic devices are expected to have short life cycles. The factors making for short life cycles are:
1) These devices are disposable.
2) Many consumer products today (such as mobile phones, GPS units, laptops, mp3 players, etc.) are made to be portable and as such, they are likely to be destroyed by dropping, crushing, etc.
3) Aggressive marketing of new features and capabilities causes many products to be disposed of while they are still functional.
4) There has been a move away from standardized components, such as batteries with standard form factors. Thus, many laptops and mobile phones become unusable when the proprietary replacement batteries are no longer available.
