Where price is concerned, the 27-inch iMac Pro and twenty collective years of education for the underprivileged Nepalese girls will cost you the same amount of money (about 2,000 USD). So to decide on the right option, we need to turn to features.
The new iMac boasts a stunning display with over a billion colors and a 1200:1 contrast ratio. This puts Apple on the cutting edge of lifelike graphic technology. At the same time, being placed in a school will keep these two Nepalese girls safe from sex trafficking, which affects over 20,000 Nepalese girls from poor communities every year. While the new iMac has four USB 3 ports and a powerful 4.2GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 processor, the Nepalese girls, given the opportunity of education with an only 3% dropout rate, can become safe, empowered, and valued in their communities after graduation.
The education for the girls seems to be winning except for the fact that it’s you yourself (or a close family member) who will enjoy the iMac. This has been boasted by Apple as a clear advantage to the iMac. After all, the education and safety for two underprivileged Nepalese girls will be enjoyed by the two Nepalese girls, not by yourself.
Upon closer examination, however, the fact that it is you yourself who will enjoy the iMac actually doesn’t provide a rational basis for buying it, unless your happiness at having the computer were more important than the vast and sustained improvement in the quality of life for these girls.
To objectively pick the best product, the educations or the iMac, one must ask oneself what one would prefer in this situation from the perspectives of all parties involved and also determine whose preference is stronger. You know that you want the iMac. And you know that if you were one of the girls, you would prefer that the money be spent on the education. This means, as the philosopher Richard Hare notes, that you yourself have a current preference that the education would be bought if you were one of the girls. Since this preference probably outweighs, in strength, your other current preference for the iMac, we can rationally conclude that this is where you should put your money.
(We might also add in the preferences of the exploited factory workers who have tried to kill themselves only to be thwarted by the anti-suicide nets set up in Apple’s Foxcon factory. We can presume that they have a strong preference that you boycott Apple until conditions for workers improve).
So while the iMac’s Bluetooth 4.2 wireless technology is exciting, the improvement in the quality of life for two Nepalese girls wins out in the long run. Plus, you can get a tax credit if you get the education for the girls and buy the iMac anyway, if you want to have and eat your cake. Alternatively, there’s always the $100 Lenovo Thinkpad, which only costs one year of education for a Nepalese girl.
The iMac is available here.
And the education for the girls is available here.