This product contains sensitive components. Do not drop, disassemble, open, crush, bend, bake, deform, puncture, blend (guess we'll never know if it'll bend), shred, incinerate, paint, bring to the moon, or insert foreign objects into the device. Do not spill liquids, rocks of any size, or food on the device. Do not expose the device to water, moisture or rap music.
I had the same weird feeling watching that video. There is something fundamentally wrong there. I'm especially worried about the last part when the little girl destroying the last CR-48: she was so calm to do that without a blink. I was shocked. This is not the way we teach our children.
[edit]: there's a tagline said by the demo guy in the video: “good thing I get a new one every time”. This kinda thinking bothers me.
I wonder what you think the net benefit to society of all those years and billions of dollars for Alcohol and Tobacco advertizing where? It's possible for a parasitic relationship to be wonderful for the parasite, but that says nothing about the host.
PS: For many products advertizing does not increase sales rather it allows a higher price per unit to be charged. Depending on the demand curve restricting supply, increasing price and spending money on advertizing can be better for a supplier than producing more product of identical quality.
Secretly murdering people and then robbing their house has a positive ROI for the murderer too; what a bogus form of argument. You don't look at one party's ROI, you look at the costs and benefits for everyone.
Two companies (let's say Coke and Pepsi) are engaged in an advertising war.
Coke hires a graphic designer to draw a cool logo.
Pepsi has to fire back and do the same.
In the end both of their brand statures remain them same, and two artists who would rather have spent their time working on something else had their time wasted, due to a particular incentive structure.
Everyone acted in their own interest, and individually had a positive ROI. Yet collectively, the ROI was negative. Coke's action had a negative externality on Pepsi; Pepsi fired back with an action that had a negative externality on Coke.
> Advertisers don't waste money. They carefully use money by investing it in advertising which (when done properly) nets them a positive ROI.
Back before the Internet revolutionized advertising, this was one of my favorite quotes about advertising: "I know half of my advertising money is wasted. The problem is, I don't know which half."
My take is that the lower powered devices tend to be retired much faster. I would expect on average a CR-48 would last (in the sense of people actually using it) much shorter than a, say, MacBook Pro. Also a used MacBook Pro (or a comparable high end machine) tends to sell better as a second hand. You probably won't want a second hand CR-48 after two years usage I guess?
On the other hand, the raw materials used to build a CR-48 or a MacBook Pro are almost equivalent. They also contain comparable amount of toxic heavy metals. At the end of the life eventually they'll be shipped to some villages in China to be disassembled to get the expensive metal like gold and silver, but the rest will be burned and buried, causing long term pollution and damage.
I know this is too much environmentalist talk and not making business sense, but I just cannot ignore the sad facts after watching a video about the life of people who live those villages…
And don't forget the issues of mining/refining the rare earths and other minerals used to make the components in the first place. Beside the environmental issues, there's the way they are implicated in crimes in places like Congo.
I completely agree. This video is not amusing: it is offensive and I see that man as a complete idiot. I have no idea what this smug destruction is intended to signify.
No one would've ever heard of Blendtec without them. I'm sure they've sold more than enough to recover the couple thousand dollars they've spent on the videos.
I’m pretty certain that this marketing campaign stars prominently in the wet dreams of many marketing guys and girls.
The iPhone and the iPad “Will It Blend?” video have ten million views each on YouTube, other videos usually clock in at between a few hundred thousand and a few million views. The videos themselves have shoddy production values, I would be surprised if producing one costs more than a few thousand dollars. All this makes for a ridiculously low CPM. Oh, and those ten million views are high quality contacts, they all actually wanted to watch the video, unlike, say, a pre-roll ad on YouTube that’s forced on them.
A pre-roll ad on YouTube has a CPM between $10 and $15. Blendtec could have spent $100,000 on the production of their iPhone video (I doubt they spent even a tenth of that) and still pay less than a company which tries to get an ad on YouTube the normal way. (Those companies pay for the production of the spot, just like Blendtec, but they also pay Google for running the spot.)
With that question in mind, BlendTec is the only blender company that I know of. Granted, I don't exactly pay much attention to the blender market, but I think that's the point.
Its all about mindshare, I am sure this series places BlendTec in your top 10 list of blenders. If you have never seen the series, it would never get on your top 100 (if there are that many).
While funny etc. We have so much waste in the world as it is - the last thing we need is the toxic waste of a perfectly good machine being blended and thrown out.
I have never had respect for the 'will it blend' concept, regardless of how funny one may find it. It is simply wasteful.
It's advertising. Admittedly, I don't have the numbers to back it up, but I would imagine that the economic impact of this advertising is worth more than the cost for Google to send a CR-48 to be blended.
It might still be cheaper than some kind of elaborate ad with a lot of actors, scenes and stuff, and even have lesser environmental impact (one laptop is much less waste than, say, flight to some distant place to take the shots for an ad). So, yes, it can actually make sense.
But still, I just don't like the culture which shows that it's perfectly ok to smash and destroy stuff just for pleasure and marketing. Imagine that they would blend people in the show. Can't we have some respect for our machines as well?
It's just a bunch of atoms. It was a bunch of atoms before the manufacturers got to it -- mostly goo, some rocks, a bit of sand. They rearranged the atoms into a different order. Then Blend-Tec guy put it into a blender and rearranged the atoms again, now it's dust instead of goo. What has been lost, apart from a bit of irreplacable time out of the lives of everyone involved (including me writing this comment and you reading it)?
Toxic chemicals were used during production of the components, probably leaving waste to be dealt with, toxic gases vented, etc. The components of the computer were made using minerals possibly sourced from conflict-ridden, corrupt places like Congo. Some of the minerals involved may become significantly more scarce in the foreseeable future.
If you're going to incur these (ethically, if not strictly economically) non-trivial externalities of manufacturing an electronic device, the ethical thing to do, it seems to me, is to at least make an effort to use the device as it was intended for a reasonable service life, rather than destroying it in a cheap stunt in a way that renders it unlikely to be recycled in any meaningful way and impossible to cannibalize for working parts.
This is especially so if your company pretends its motto is "Don't be evil".
As for the marketing value for the blender firm: They could always fake it. Put a "No Cr-48 Laptops Were Harmed During Production Of This Advertisement" disclaimer up at the end.
Sure, that would probably reduce interest in later ads, but frankly the whole thing is just played out now. "Wanker posts video of a gadget being destroyed as cheap stunt to draw pageviews. Yawn." They'd probably get some PR for the switch to faking it, then they could bow out of the whole tired thing.
Yes, the notebook was used up for a frivolous purpose. But consider, the vast majority of game consoles are used -- and used up -- for frivolous pruposes, and over their lifetimes, they'll have used more resources (e.g. electricity). Or consider large sporting events that costs lots of money to stage and large amounts of energy for the crowd to get there.
A lot of human resources are used for frivolous purposes. do you want to ban them all?
I think you overestimate the non-frivolity of proper laptop use and life in general.
Beyond providing the bare essentials of survival to yourself or others, you're just playing around. Call it Serious Business if you like, but if you don't need to do it to survive then it's no more important than blending laptops to entertain the internet.
>What has been lost, apart from a bit of irreplacable time out of the lives of everyone involved (including me writing this comment and you reading it)?
Short answer, we've gained entropy. Over time, entropy will be the end of us, and therefore it is our responsibility as lifeforms to hold it back wherever we can. Otherwise what's the point? May as well just give up on the whole spontaneously emergent complexity deal altogether if you're just going to go wrecking up the place.
Entropy is what kills every one of us. Entropy is what makes us "run out" of rare metals. There are a lot of ways for entropy to kill us that don't involve the heat death of the universe.
We can't just spontaneously arrange atoms for free. Turning, say, lead into gold is possible, but consumes a lot of energy for a very small result. Some transformations are effectively "one-way".
It's all nice to say "it's just a bunch of atoms", but some toxic compilations of atoms can't (without more "one-way" transformations to tap the available chemical energy) be easily transformed back into useful combinations.
It's about how useful those atoms are in a certain arrangement. Everything is composed of basic elements and we all know that. That doesn't mean that everything can be instantly devalued by saying "it's just a bunch of atoms!"
If we take a useful arrangement of element and transform it into a useless arrangement without a good reason, what we've done is a net loss for whoever or whatever found the previous arrangement useful. The atoms can't be destroyed, but their immediate utility can.
I find your second paragraph unsettling and it took me a while to see why. It's because, I believe, your premise is (mostly) wrong. The advertisement is effective because the culture does not condone destruction of perfectly good gadgets. Instead it makes us cringe, it's like burning a twenty; it's just not done. And that's why it's effective.
As I ponder the implications of Google engaged in this publicity stunt, I wonder. Was this device, sent off to sacrifice, my CR-48, lost in shipping?
As my desk maintains an empty spot, so carefully cleared, in anticipation of the arrival of the CR-48, perhaps now, my eagerness and expectation will turn regret, as I consider the future that may never be... Google, I beg you, send me my CR-48. <sob, tear>.
>...economic impact of this advertising is worth more than the cost for Google to send a CR-48 to be blended.
I know what it is called - but it is still clearly waste.
I was not referring to the economic impact but rather the environmental.
Sure, we can all say "who cares" -- I do, which is why I ask.
Have you seen the garbage problems we have? The toxic waste dumps that are china and other places.
I am not trying to be some tree hugging hippy here - I just dont see the need/value of such advertising.
If they want to advertise - why not go give the things to even more people who want/need it?
How about give one to every student in a school of their choice?
This is utter stupidity on the part of the advertising industry and proves how little value they provide society other than more and more thought pollution on top of the actual pollution they produce.
You do not have nearly enough information to make this determination. If tablets like this reduce the demand for bigger laptops and desktops, making them more popular through various forms of marketing may in fact reduce overall environmental impact.
"Various forms of marketing" - of the nearly infinite range of marketing approaches, "wasteful destruction" is only one, and oddly enough, most successful marketing campaigns never stooped to that level.
And even when damaging the product is the approach taken, it's not usually a pointless stunt. When Timex abused their watches in commercials, the point was to show that the watches would keep working.
The blending thing is just stupid web-meme fan service, that is unlikely to make a notable contribution to selling Cr48s. Or blenders, for that matter.
It is not just simply an environmental cost - there are other costs associated with the preponderance of disposable possessions, and the leaking over into the category of disposable of things that were once considered permanent.
To start with, it is simply wasteful for the reasons you describe. However it also contributes in a small way to the paradigm of exponential growth that permeates everything about human civilisation, which we as hackers know represents certain death.
EDIT: I'm not saying google have created a "disposable computer." However all this advertising definitely shifts us culturally in that direction.
I'd love to have a laptop whose sum parts are made out of reusable/biodegradable materials as much as possible.
Corn/potato based cases, even if they need to be replaced often - or solid aluminum ones that are a set form factor and I simply replace the guts every time I upgrade.
I wish that apple would require/request/desire that any old apple product gets returned to them for disposal/credit when it reaches true EOL.
It has been said too many times by others greater than myself; Our garbage and waste will be the downfall of our species.
Unfortunately it's prohibitively expensive compared to conventional options, as you would expect. And you obviously can't fab the boards from card and the chips from potato, as it were.
>It has been said too many times by others greater than myself; Our garbage and waste will be the downfall of our species.
We can learn to recycle our waste. Mining landfill is going to be big business one day. It will however be much harder to repair the environmental and human damage caused by the extraction of the raw materials in the first place.
The case is probably the most recyclable part of a computer, unless there's something funky about the plastics used. An aluminum MacBook Pro case could be melted down, or, hell, probably used as-is as raw material to machine new small parts.
That's not necessarily true. Advertising helps sell products, and getting the idea of Chrome OS into people's minds will lead to more people buying it. And through Google's professed indirect and obscure schemes leads to more internet usage and advertising exposure, leaving more revenue for Google to give them to children. It might seem strange, but it seems that much of what Google does seems to follow such logic.
This video was part of the Chrome Demolition Lab http://www.google.com/chromeos/demolab/ and the four colors on the bottom strip are labeled "Learn", "Apply", "Recycle" (the green one) and "Legal". Recycle says "Electronic waste is piling up globally at a rate of 40 million tons a year. That's the same weight as 5 loaded buses every minute. Enter your zip code to locate electronic device recycling centers in your area"
"The US produces 8% of the world's electronic waste per year (8% = 3.2 Million tons)"
"Americans only recycle 13.7% of their electronic waste, leaving 2.9 million tons per year"
"That's a big pile of electronic waste. So far this year 038,992,672 (increments by one every second)"
The legal tab says "Google does not now, nor has it ever, endorsed or encouraged in any fashion, the hazing of or harming of electronic devices for entertainment purposes, anger management or stress relief. The demolitions and tests are performed using prototype notebooks. Chat interaction and user data are not being recorded. Do not try this at home. Please Recycle."
When I saw a BlendTec commercial for the first time, I thought: "that's wasteful!". Then I thought about it some more and realized that it was a tiny fraction of the waste that's being produced by viewers. I realized if viewers would keep their electronics 10% longer it would make many times as big a difference as putting a kibosh on this commercial series. So it actually raised awareness for me.
It's not a tiny fraction, it's an undetectable fraction. Keeping electronics 10% longer wouldn't many many times as big a difference, it would make many orders of magnitude more difference.
Commenting that this is waste is like commenting that all the astronauts coming to the launch site in personal vehicles is a waste of fuel. You're about to burn in 10 minutes more fuel than anyone will likely ever use in their entire life. It doesn't matter at that point.
Please don't misunderstand me. I don't mean that since you can't change the big picture, you shouldn't do anything at all. I'm just saying you shouldn't blow things out of proportion.
Heh - indeed. Is blending any less wasteful than someone using this notebook to download a bunch of porn, post a few hundred vacuous tweets, and then toss it on the trash heap after 11 months when a newer slimmer version comes out.
While we sit here thinking about this though much worse waste is going on it the world unseen. My uni gets big dumpsters and throws out 100's of computers each year. Granted they are usually getting old though.
WTF don't people understand about how wasteful this is?
Also, this machines toxic+precious components are being munger to the point where any hope of recycle is lost. If you aren't already paying attention, countries like China are securing the next 50-100 years worth of natural resources, required for the information age lifestyle, in Africa in such a way that the US will be relatively 3rd world in the next 25 years (with respect to our ability to produce that which we need).
So even though we are focused on the micro - the problem and question are macro.
Can't prove it, that's the sort of thing that's dependant on how guided/misguided you are. ;)
Look at it this way. Our society can operate at at a high scale of efficiency, where everything is used to maximum utility and absolutely nothing is wasted, or it can operate extremely inefficiently. It _only_ makes sense to consider the societal-wide efficiency--as you say, the problem and question are macro. So we can posit some ranking, some percentage of total efficiency.
However, 'Will it blend' is hardly large enough to make a huge dent overall in the larger percent. The resources lost from one netbook per time segment are not comparable to the resources lost in even a tenth of a percent decrease in efficiency, if you pardon the approximation.
Furthermore, 'maximum utility' is rather difficult to determine because 'utility' is variable. It turns out that
apparently there's enough 'utility' in making "Will It Blend?" videos that we could even argue that this is positive efficiency!
Do you also get upset when cars and pianos are destroyed for movies and tv shows? Would you have us exert _more_ energy to generate the illusion in order to save good tools?
Yes it is wasteful, we are on the same page there. I just think we have a tendency to focus on isolated examples when the big picture is bigger than we can all really get our heads around.
Christmas is a perfect example, I'd wager a great deal of netbooks will be brought this Christmas that are never used or only used sparingly. Schools force one on every student even if they already have perfectly good laptops (my sister's school has done this).
Our society has all the basic metrics wrong of what is productive and efficient.
The environmental cost per viewer is infinitesimally small, so I don't buy that argument. An argument about it leading viewers to carelessness would be a sad statement about humor.
Evil has many shades of grey but wasting a computer that could literally educate an entire schoolhouse in Africa and keeping this old, stupid joke going must be somewhere south of good.
Who's to say this old, stupid joke of a publicity stunt won't sell them enough cr-48's to give TWO cr-48's to schoolhouses in Africa instead of the one they started with? That's what business is, the classic best answer to "you have one egg. How do you make two?"
My point is that there are more positive ways to make two than by destroying one. If Google is just interested in getting publicity for the cr-48 they might as well join Cheerios on Days of Our Lives.
"Do not crush, incinerate, blend (guess we'll never find out if it'll blend...), ...(several other things)..."