Apple Now Generating Clean Energy for 100% of its Operations in China
BEIJING — October 22, 2015 — Apple® today announced two new programs aimed at reducing the carbon footprint of its manufacturing partners in China. The programs will avoid over 20 million metric tons of greenhouse gas pollution in the country between now and 2020, equivalent to taking nearly 4 million passenger vehicles off the road for one year.
Apple also announced that construction on 40 megawatts of solar projects in the Sichuan Province is now complete. These solar installations produce more than the total amount of electricity used by Apple’s offices and retail stores in China, making Apple's operations carbon neutral in China.
“Climate change is one of the great challenges of our time, and the time for action is now,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “The transition to a new green economy requires innovation, ambition and purpose. We believe passionately in leaving the world better than we found it and hope that many other suppliers, partners and other companies join us in this important effort.”
First, Apple is significantly expanding its clean-energy investments in China. Apple plans to build more than 200 megawatts of solar projects in the northern, eastern and southern grid regions of China, which will produce the equivalent of the energy used by more by than 265,000 Chinese homes in a year and will begin to offset the energy used in Apple’s supply chain.
Second, Apple is launching a new initiative to drive its manufacturing partners to become more energy efficient and to use clean energy for their manufacturing operations. Apple will partner with suppliers in China to install more than 2 gigawatts of new clean energy in the coming years.
Apple also will share best practices in procuring clean energy and building high-quality renewable energy projects, and provide hands-on assistance to some suppliers in areas like energy efficiency audits, regulatory guidance and building strong partnerships to bring new clean energy projects to China.
As part of Apple’s industry-leading program, Foxconn will construct 400 megawatts of solar, starting in the Henan Province, by 2018. Foxconn has committed to generate as much clean energy as its Zhengzhou factory consumes in final production of iPhone.
“We are excited to embark on this initiative with Apple. Our companies share a vision for driving sustainability and I hope that this renewable energy project will serve as a catalyst for continued efforts to promote a greener ecosystem in our industry and beyond,” said Terry Gou, founder and CEO of Foxconn Technology Group. “Sustainability is a core pillar in Foxconn’s strategy and we are committed to investing in green manufacturing.”
“Being responsible, protecting air and water, and driving clean energy are at the heart of Apple’s commitment to China,” said Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives. “These projects go beyond Apple’s operations in China to help our suppliers adopt clean renewable energy.”
Apple has taken significant steps to protect the environment by transitioning from fossil fuels to clean energy. Today the company is powering 100 percent of its operations in China and the US, and more than 87 percent of its worldwide operations, with renewable energy.
Apple in China Apple operates 19 corporate offices and 24 retail stores in Greater China, directly employing 10,000 people. In total, Apple has helped create and support over 4.4 million jobs in China, including at least 1.4 million iOS app developer jobs and other positions related to the iOS ecosystem.
Developers in China have earned more than $4 billion through the worldwide sale of apps on the App Store®, with over half of that amount paid in the last 12 months alone.
Apple revolutionized personal technology with the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984. Today, Apple leads the world in innovation with iPhone, iPad, the Mac and Apple Watch. Apple’s three software platforms — iOS, OS X and watchOS — provide seamless experiences across all Apple devices and empower people with breakthrough services including the App Store, Apple Music, Apple Pay and iCloud. Apple’s 100,000 employees are dedicated to making the best products on earth, and to leaving the world better than we found it.
Twitter's "favorite" button, the service's primary way for users to signal agreement, acknowledgement, laughter, support, and occasionally (and perversely!) utter hatred, is officially dead. The company said today that it is replacing favorites with "likes," to be represented in its apps and on the web by red heart icons. The changes, which also apply to Twitter-owned Vine, represent the company's latest effort to simplify the user experience as it looks to attract new users. "We want to make Twitter easier and more rewarding to use, and we know that at times the star could be confusing, especially to newcomers," product manager Akarshan Kumar said in a blog post. "You might like a lot of things, but not everything can be your favorite."
Favorites were born in 2006, around the dawn of Twitter. As best as I can tell, they pre-date both Tumblr's red hearts, which arrived toward the end of 2008, and Facebook's "like" button, which was introduced in 2009. Favorites were initially designed as a way of bookmarking tweets — a feature that feels fairly insane for a service whose messages are limited to 140 characters and (at the time) could not include photos or videos. But from the start, third-party developers sought to make the feature more useful. A service called Favrd sprung up to highlight popular tweets in real time based on the number of favorites, and it quickly became popular among the newly minted profession of Twitter humorists. (Favrd closed in 2009 after the emergence of Favstar, a more robust competitor that endures to this day.)
A VERSATILE BUTTON THAT WAS OFTEN MISUNDERSTOOD
In other words, favs, as they came to be abbreviated, were one more instance of Twitter's community understanding the power of the service more completely than the people who were building it. They added hashtags to organize content around keywords; retweets to spread content virally; and through brute force converted a near-useless bookmarking feature into a powerful multi-purpose tool. I've favorited more than 60,000 tweets over the years, and in that time I've come to appreciate how versatile that little button is. I use it as a kind of read receipt to acknowledge replies; I use it whenever a tweet makes me laugh out loud; I use it when someone criticizes me by name in the hopes that seeing it's one of my "favorite" tweets will confuse and upset them. It often works!
Today, a star is unborn. After testing hearts this summer, Twitter is now rolling them out across the user base. I'm told tests showed that people who had hearts enabled on their accounts used them more often, and I believe it: likes and hearts have become a kind of universal currency of the social web, from Facebook to Tumblr to Instagram. And there's probably some benefit to Twitter in having a standard icon of approval across its suite of apps — Vine previously used a smiley face, and Periscope debuted with hearts. Now they'll all be the same, and perhaps a bit more comprehensible to all the new people Twitter hopes to lure in with Moments and other products.
AN ADMISSION OF DEFEAT
All that said, it's hard not to feel defeated by the sudden death of Twitter's star. For all its faults, the favorite was unique to Twitter, and part of what makes the service distinctive. Most people may never have understood the multivalent power of the fav, but those who did found it surprisingly elegant and powerful. In this, the fav was a microcosm of Twitter itself: a bit of work up front, in exchange for a social experience as rich and surprising as anything in the world.
That version of Twitter attracted many of its most loyal and influential users, but it hasn't been of much use to advertisers, and Wall Street has punished the company's stock accordingly. Returning CEO Jack Dorsey has promised a series of "bold moves" to reignite user growth — the company added just 4 million net active users last quarter — and dumbing down the fav lies somewhere on that roadmap.
A star is not a heart. A favorite is not a like. The newest mode of engagement on Twitter is a bit less versatile, a bit less powerful, a bit more compressed. Like Moments, its big bet on casual users, Twitter's likes are basic, in all senses of the word. I'm sure we'll get used to them in time. I'm less sure I'll ever really come to like them.
Google today announced a new feature coming to its Inbox email app that will automatically suggest short replies for incoming messages. Dubbed Smart Reply, the new feature is designed to make it easier to reply to email while on a mobile device.
Google says that Smart Reply will present three short replies based on the context of the message, from which you can just choose one and go, or add more information as necessary. It works by scanning the incoming emails and then using machine learning to formulate a natural language reply. Google notes that the more you use the feature, the better its suggestions will become. According to Wired, most of the early suggestions will be basic things, such as "thank you" and "how about tomorrow?", but the system is capable of replying with 20,000 different phrases. You can read more about the underlying technology behind Smart Reply at Google's Research Blog.
The new Smart Reply feature will be available for both the iOS and Android versions of Inbox later this week.
Sling TV has finally delivered something its subscribers have long been waiting for: Google Chromecast support. Today the company announced that its internet TV service can now be beamed to the television using Google's $35 streaming stick. And if you prepay for three months of Sling, you'll receive a free second-generation Chromecast at no extra cost. There's also a perk for existing Chromecast owners; Sling TV says they'll get access to a "limited-time" two-month free trial of the base "Best of Live TV" package that runs $20 per month.
You'll be able to activate the trial through Chromecast's offers page later today, though it sounds like this one's limited to new customers only. The addition of Chromecast ticks off a big box for Sling TV in its mission to be a viable cable substitute for consumers. The Dish-owned company hasn't yet revealed plans for an app on Apple's fourth-generation Apple TV set-top box. But similar to Netflix and other services, Sling TV has every interest in being everywhere, so it may only be a matter of time before Sling has a full presence on Apple's new black box.
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