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Comment by bloateddevtards | Hacker News Reader

A very good point, we should have a metric that establishes how much carbon is released extra into the environment from cpu cycle wasting crap like atom and even more bloated versions of word. Clippy could pop up: "I can see you would like to release an extra ton of carbon into the atmos, why not upgrade word now!"

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Yeah, and then we could see how small the differences would actually be.

A 15" Macbook Pro has a 99.5Wh battery and lasts about 8h; that's 12.5W. A program that decreases battery life by 20% would only mean an increase of 2-3W. Even if the machine and program are running 24/7 and all the energy comes from coal, that means an increase of less than 0.03T of CO2 per year. For comparison, the average carbon footprint of an US citizen is 20 Tons per year.

Apple has started doing something about energy efficiency, probably because most of their computers are laptops where energy use is quite important. OSX tracks energy efficiency, which somehow calculates how much power a single application uses (CPU + GPU if I remember correctly). But I don't think they do anything with that info at the moment.

I guess it would be a nice incentive for developers if OSX could notify you that an app that is on background is using a lot of energy at the moment, maybe even with a quit-button when on battery power. At least I wouldn't want my app to end up on that kind of a popup.

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