Wiens, whose job is to dissect gadgets and create easy-to-understand repair guides for users, is passionate about “sustainable technology” or the recyclability of products and their contribution to electronic waste, as I learned when talking to him for a story last month. His attitude is that when products are hard to repair or are not built to last more than two or three years, they are more easily tossed in the landfill, and contribute to e-waste. Hence his strongly worded opinion about EPEAT’s standards.

He’s suspicious of EPEAT’s investigation, which it outsourced to an independent lab, to reassess whether ultrathin laptops from Apple, Toshiba, Samsung and Lenovo, met the group’s standards for green electronics. The group’s rating is critical to large businesses’ and government agencies’ strict standards for purchasing green computers, so it wanted an outside opinion to back up its findings. It did find that the tools to take apart these notebooks are easy to buy, and that they can be taken apart in less than 30 minutes.

Wiens writes:

At best, the interpretation of the EPEAT Gold standard is laughably out of touch: it claims proprietary Pentalobe screwdrivers [which MacBooks require] are ‘commonly available tools’ and a USB thumb drive is an ‘upgrade.’ At worst, it may mean that recyclers a decade from now will be faced with a mountain of electronic waste they cannot affordably recycle without custom disassembly fixtures and secret manufacturer information.

Wiens isn’t the only high-profile voice to take issue with EPEAT’s recent findings. Greenpeace also voiced disapproval, saying in a press release on Friday, that the group’s decision “to include computers with difficult-to-replace batteries in its green electronics registry will result in less recycling and more e-waste.”

EPEAT did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the criticism.

Apple touched off this brouhaha over EPEAT standards when the company suddenly opted out of the EPEAT rankings earlier this summer. After an outcry from businesses and environmental groups, Apple backed down and admitted that opting out of the certification process that so many companies rely on was “a mistake.”

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Apple’s selling points for the new connector: Lightning is 80 percent smaller than the old connector, and it’s reversible, so it doesn’t matter which way you put the plug in, unlike the old solution. The size issue is indeed the primary consideration, said Wiens in a phone call on Friday. But it’s not just about making room for more components into the new iPhone: there’s the future of its full mobile lineup Apple has to think about.

“Apple was running into limitations” with the current 30-pin dock, he said. “You can see with the iPod nano, the dock connector was the limiting factor” in Apple’s ability to shrink down the size of the company’s tiniest music player.

That makes sense, and we know there’s precedent for these particular kind of design considerations at Apple: see the decision to ditch the Ethernet port on the MacBook Air back in 2008.

But the change wasn’t only about design. It’s about bringing the entire mobile and Made for iPod/iPhone/iPad ecosystem (a program in which Apple certifies manufacturers’ hardware to work with its iDevice lineup) up to date, Wiens theorizes. “Thirty pins is a lot for a computer connector,” he said. Apple used that many because it was easier for accessory makers to be compatible and do more things with the iPod, and then eventually iPhone and iPad. (Here’s a handy chart explaining what each of the 30 pins is used for.)

“The new connector is moving from a combination of anolog plus digital to pure digital. They’re saying, ‘Hey, if you have an accessory, like a car stereo, you have to talk over USB or a digital interface,” said Wiens. “They’re forcing accessories to be a bit more sophisticated.” Luckily, he added, that’s not really a challenge for most accessory makers any more the way it would have been nine years ago.

But if size is such an important concern, why did Apple come up with its own Lightning connector instead of using something small that almost everybody already has lying around, like micro-USB, which is already a standard in Europe? It’s very likely about money and control.

Though he admits it’s a “cynical view,” Wiens says a main benefit of going with a new connector like Lightning is Apple’s ability to charge “big bucks” to license the use of it to accessory and peripheral makers. He estimates through his talks with peripheral makers that Apple charges from $1 to $2 per device to make stuff compatible with the iPod, iPhone or iPad.

Apple, a famously controlling company, has a very clear view of future product roadmaps, and that includes what kind of connectors it does or does not want hooking up to its devices. The licensing model allows that.

We won’t know the true performance benefits of Lightning (is it really faster, as Apple says?) until the iPhone and new iPods start shipping and users get the chance to test them out. But we do know that thanks to the change, there’s a potentially large pile of e-waste headed for landfills over the next couple of years as hotel alarm clocks, old battery cases and cables will eventually be swapped out as Apple’s new wave of Lightning-capable devices grows in size.

Still, “they kept connector for nine years,” Wiens said. “Good on them for keeping it as long as they did.”

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Check out a few screenshots I took of the app on my HTC One S below:

iFixit launched an app for iOS last fall.

Also worth noting: The app is open source, and developers interested in kick-starting their own Android efforts can take a peek at the source code on Github.

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Now the company plans to parlay the Amazon Web Services and Rightscale infrastructure underlying the iFixit site to take on the problem of product support and documentation for businesses with a new division and content management system called Dozuki.

The thinking is that the days of paper manuals and documentation are (or should be) numbered. But the useful features of those manuals–the step-by-step photos and instructions–can be replicated and improved online, said Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit. That’s what Dozuki wants to provide business customers including big retailers and manufacturers.

A beta version of the service has been used for months by Lezyne, the high-end bike parts maker and by Cal Poly, which is using it for instruction manuals and other material for internal use. Chip maker Micron’s Crucial division is also using early Dozuki code.

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Each cable has a controller at either end, which is used to regulate the speed of data transfer and boost the signal to make Thunderbolt’s extremely low-latency transmission possible. Each end contains 6 chips, including 2 Gennum GN2033s and 4 smaller ones, making for a total of 12 chips in each cable. This makes the Thunderbolt cable an “active” cable that has its own internal firmware and allows it to manage the high two-channel independent 10 Gbps transmission speeds.

But it also isn’t cheap. And for right now, Apple is the only game in town when it comes to Thunderbolt cable suppliers. As Ars Technica points out, the situation bears some similarity to the early days of FireWire, which was initially very costly and limited to Apple because of unfavorable costs when compared to USB. Apple didn’t help things by initially requiring licensing fees for the use of the FireWire trademark and logo. Ars argues that the similar high costs of Thunderbolt could limit its ability to gain a real foothold.

I see the similarities between Thunderbolt and FireWire, but I think it’s too early to assign them the same ultimate fate. For one thing, Apple is well aware of how the FireWire situation panned out. The Mac maker isn’t likely to repeat the same missteps with Thunderbolt if it really does intend for the tech to have wide applicability. Second, Thunderbolt is like FireWire, but they also can’t really be compared in terms of what they allow a user to potentially do. Display connectivity, along with speeds that basically allow Thunderbolt to act as an external PCI connector, give it a much broader scope in terms of applicability. Want to set up a server with upwards of 50 terabytes of storage running through a Mac mini? Easy (and relatively cheap using the new Pegasus RAID drives), once an updated Mac hits the market. Plus there’s always the scenario of the computer-on-a-drive that can be booted from any Mac, apps, files and settings intact.

Apple is also in a much different position than it was when it introduced FireWire. Its share of the PC market has never been stronger, and it continues to experience growth in that sector. It also has a huge chunk of the rapidly expanding mobile industry, thanks to the iPhone, iPod and iPad. While Thunderbolt tech hasn’t yet made an appearance on the mobile side of Apple’s business, I think it’s only a matter of time before it does. And then it doesn’t matter who else embraces it.

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Fixit produced another of their legendary tear-downs today, this time examining the inner workings of the Logitech Revue Google TV set-top box. What they found reminded them very much of a plain old netbook: Logitech’s Revue features a regular-sized Gigabyte motherboard, a 1.2 GHz Atom CE4150 processor that comes with a with a 400 MHz GPU
, 1 GB of RAM and a total of 5 GB of Flash memory.

Of course, the Revue isn’t just a netbook with a different label. It has a number of special-purpose hardware extensions, including an HDMI port used for picture-in-picture viewing of live TV and websites. iFixit also took apart the keyboard and found a Synaptics T1021A touch controller, which is the same as the one used in the Microsoft Kin 2.

How does this compare to the Apple (a AAPL) TV? Apple used one of its new A4 processors in its living room device, clocked at 1 GHz, and added a generous 8 GB of RAM. Essentially, the Apple TV specs were very close to the iPad, but Apple tried really hard to give the device a very different form factor. Logitech’s Revue specs, on the other hand, are very similar to those of a netbook, and the company clearly didn’t bother to hide its ancestry all that much. Whether consumers care remains to be seen.

Image courtesy of iFixit.

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