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Comment by ppf | Hacker News Reader

This article is very light on details. I'm also not sure what the difference between "traditional data centres"and "cloud data centres" is.

It also completely ignores (as does everyone else) the 700lb gorilla in the room - the embedded energy content of all of the computing equipment, from the video camera used to film content, to the networking equipment and data centre servers, to the final device used to consume that content. Manufacturing semiconductors is an incredibly energy-intensive (as well as very resource-intensive) process, and product lifecycles are ever-shortening.

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Apple themselves claims that roughly 80% of the emissions of an iPhone comes from production; with the remainder being transit, use, and end of life recycling. As far as electronics are concerned, the best thing you can do is defer upgrading as long as possible.

Interestingly enough, the same is true for cars. It’s often better to just keep using an older car until it dies from a CO2 perspective (sometimes older cars emit other pollutants that makes this more complicated). Depending on the exact mix of electricity production in your area, it can sometimes be greener to use a used gasoline car than a new EV, although that is changing as energy production shifts towards renewable sources.

Agree eith everything you've said, but with one caveat - the resale market for cars and consumer electronics is completely different. Everyone I know has a drawer full of old laptops/chargers/phones that were purchased new and are only destined for landfill. Meanwhile, cars get reused long after their first owner gets rid of them even if they replace them every two years.

It’s certainly much easier to keep a used car running for a decade than it is to keep a used phone running, that’s for sure. And there’s a market specifically designed to support that too.

I think the most realistic choice here is to not upgrade phones every 1-2 years, but stretch it to 3. The recent trend of Apple to not include all the accessories in the box is probably a net good, given how many chargers almost consumers have already too.

4 is definitely doable. More if you're in the apple ecosystem. iOS 15 (not yet releases) still supports the iPhone 6s which was originally released in 2015. I bought one last year as a testing device for work, and it's still a great phone (and much cheaper - £120 and had recently had it's battery replaced). On the android side you have to be more lucky, but my Samsung S7 (releases 2017) is still going strong and recieved a security update last month.

I'm still using the iPhone 6s that I bought in 2015, and it's practically as good as new. It's still using the original battery, which doesn't seem to hold charge for as long anymore, but even so, it's doing remarkably well.

I use a iPhone 5s. Works fine and I have no reason to upgrade at all. I think I have it for like five years now. I did get the battery replaced last year though

I just regrettably got rid of my iphone 5S this year. God I miss that eighth inch jack... Why did I get rid of it again?

My Nokia 6500 is starting to get a bit flaky, but it's done a good 12 years or so... (It's hard to find a better phone with the same form factor.) I get very attached to my devices, not sure I could deal with a 2-3 year turnover.

my motog lasted 6-7 years just replaced it with the latest G9

It's sad that 3 is considered a stretch. In Norway, you actually have 5 years of "reklamasjonsrett" (right to get it repaired or replaced if there's some fault the producer should have known about). And Samsung gives security updates for 4 years these days, so you don't even need to run unofficial Androids for the first four years (though really there should be some law about providing security updates, cf. the recent mybook incident and Internet of unpatched Things)

I wish this was the case for gpus now though. They've actually appreciated.

It's kind of hard to keep a drawer full of old cars in your house.

Could not agree more. If you halved the rate at which you replaced electronics (TV, laptop, phone, etc), you would probably do more good towards reducing CO2 production than buying an EV.

> It also completely ignores (as does everyone else) the 700lb gorilla in the room - the embedded energy content of all of the computing equipment

Yes, I’d love to read more about that. i wonder if anyone here has a link to some research that looks at the full-er picture.

This is a good link to start exploring the issue:

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/06/embodied-energy-of...

Low tech magazine has a very definite agenda but I've found their writing really informative and I think they do a good job in raising how enormous an issue this really is.

> "traditional data centres"and "cloud data centres"

There is no difference hardware-wise. The difference is our cloud overlords have been promoting "on-demand scaling" as a proof "serverless hosting" is superior to traditional ways because it's greener and "we can shutdown machines when there's no demands". Which is arguably true, but so short-sighted it hurts to think journalists will fall into this trap.

> to the networking equipment and data centre servers

Sorry i don't have the data at hand, but some people estimated just that. Internet infrastructure as a whole was estimated to use several percent of the world's electricity. Those numbers did not count resources/energy for production of the hardware or the infrastructure, only recurring "costs".

Actually I think it’s more that density is higher with the cloud.

Although eu-west-1c ran out of nodes the other day so YMMV anyway.

> There is no difference hardware-wise

The difference between sophisticated (Google, Amazon, Facebook) cloud data centers and traditional corporate data centers is Extremely Large™. Traditional ones are characterized by things like big central UPS systems, redundant AC/DC power supplies in each host, remote-control PDUs, overblown air conditioners, etc. Cloud data centers are typified by non-redundant power supplies with either distributed UPS systems, or no UPS, DC-to-point-of-load, and marginal ventilation where the cold aisles are hotter than the hot aisles of traditional data centers.

> Internet infrastructure as a whole was estimated to use several percent of the world's electricity

Well, if you define "several" as "almost 2%" then yes, but mostly in traditional data centers. Moving to clouds improves this figure. It is estimated that half of global IT power consumption is in cooling and power delivery, meaning the industry as a whole has a PUE of 2.0, whereas Google, Facebook, and Amazon have PUEs of about 1.1. In other words, moving workloads to the cloud can save almost half of the power.

> I'm also not sure what the difference between "traditional data centres"and "cloud data centres" is.

Vendor lock-in is the only difference.

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