Here’s something I’ve been thinking about, and it’s less cut and dry as I previously thought.
For many people, a laptop is required for their job, as they need to move around with it. However, a desktop is still better for productivity. Assuming you’re not doing work that needs a really high-end desktop with multiple GPUs or exotic hardware, you can just use your laptop as a desktop by obviously just straight up using it on a desk, or if you want better productivity, get a monitor, peripherals, and a Thunderbolt dock, and basically get everything you could want from a non-portable PC.
Obviously, this seems environmentally friendly because laptops tend to be more energy efficient, plus you’re eliminating an entire computer from your life, which saves on materials, including rare earth elements, and reducing E-waste when the compute inevitably breaks or become obsolete to the point of unusability.
However, the major strike against this is the laptop’s battery. Heat, and constantly charging the system is really bad for Lithium ion batteries, and will cause them to fail sooner, maybe even a lot sooner. Even if you got a repairable laptop with a removable battery or one where you just have to unscrew some screws to replace the battery, that’s a still problem as batteries are toxic and their production (and recycling) is environmentally damaging. I also don’t know if those enterprise grade laptops can still work while plugged in without their batteries, but I’m going to say it’s unlikely as higher performance laptops can actually drain their batteries while plugged in if they hit their full load (please let me know if there’s a modern laptop that works plugged in without the battery).
So what do you think of this? Does anyone more knowledgeable know whether the benefits of eliminating a PC by using your laptop as one outweigh the issues of premature battery failure, from an environmental standpoint?
Any internet is massively power intensive because of the vast distances and long chain of devices. For example, I read that sending an email is only a little more carbon friendly than sending an actual letter.
You are going to use the internet anyways for that job, so that point is somewhat moot no?
Not really. The more you use the worse it gets, simply being connected to the internet doesn’t require that much energy compared to sending even an extra megabyte of data. The cloud also keeps the drive storing your data on all the time whereas a local-only server can have its drives set to go to sleep.
You are splitting hair here :) We are comparing it to the production and utilization of a full laptop.
I’d still argue that a laptop is better if you’re transferring large files every single day, but this is just based on the energy statistics of the internet. In the end I honestly don’t know. Plus, for onsite work you usually don’t just have a random computer lying around, nor do meeting rooms (if they did, that’d be even less green).
For the first part: maybe, but at least in theory the internet could be run on renewable energy and the server hardware is shared by many people. It is more like the electric public transport (which also uses a lot of energy) Vs. the individual car that is mostly underutilized but still resource intensive to produce (=laptop).
As for the second part: true, but that is the result of everyone having a laptop. Like cities build for cars because everyone has one. For a counter-example: there a projectors that allow connecting with a smartphone or just plug in a USB stick and thus do presentations easily.
Good discussion, but I’m not shy to admit that I had no idea which is better, and I still don’t. There are just too many numbers we don’t know.
One number I actually know is that people on average buy a new laptop every 4-5 years. And I think that pushes the discussion very heavily in my favour as it is totally unsustainable to have a new computer that often.
Fair enough if one replaces that often.