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?
deleted by creator
Not if one is required for your job, like if you do a lot of onsite work, go to a lot of meetings, etc
Eh, I wouldn’t trust any cloud with my data, nor would I expect to be able to boot from USB off any random computer. The latter might even have legality issues. Plus, with a laptop, you can use full disk encryption on your own hardware and be reasonably sure (at least more sure than with a random computer) there aren’t any deeply entrenched rootkits that can steal data.
Fair point if your organization requires a separate laptop, but the consideration can still be useful if it doesn’t or if you’re a freelancer (I know a lot of the more “hip” companies just say you can use whatever the hell you want, and I’d imagine security issues can be mitigated by dual booting into an encrypted work-only partition). Overall, a laptop is more versatile and for the majority of jobs, if given the choice between a desktop xor a laptop, the laptop makes more sense.
It also depends on whether we’re talking about environmentalism beyond literally everything else, or environmentalism just as a priority. I actually had that discussion on here a few months ago, and got varying responses and attitudes, with the consensus it’s more capitalism that needs to go rather than personal conveniences.
deleted by creator
That’s better, but one also has to consider the fact that the internet is actually extremely unsustainable. If you use the cloud a lot, I’d wager that it’s actually more environmentally friendly to get a more powerful local computer.
deleted by creator
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.
deleted by creator
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.
deleted by creator