A Greenpeace report shows an interesting fact about how green are products today. Even if manufacturers like Apple managed to lower power consumption on their devices a lot, eliminated poisonous materials from the production process, there are a lot of things to take into consideration when you call a modern gadget ‘green’. The most important it seems to be the need for cloud computing synchronizations and the data that stays on remote servers, that are always on.

    Think of it like this: even if you have a very efficient laptop and connect to your Gmail account only from time to time, or do just a few searches per day, the cloud computing servers are always on, waiting your you. That’s not efficient by any means and the increasing demand in data centers will grow in a few years (by 2020) to such a point where power consumptions will pass the one required by France, Brazil, Canada, and Germany combined. This is what Greenpeace is trying to tell us, and I believe they’re right. I don’t believe though that the solution to this problem is to cut consumption as much as finding an alternate and clean source of energy. What’s your take on this matter?

    iPad is green. Of envy?

    iPad is green. Of envy?

    Source: Crunchgear