Is a computer green?
Not yet. I can imagine a day when they are built completely by solar powered nanobots, fabricated from graphene and carbon fiber that’s been distilled from the atmosphere using wind powered artificial trees.
Till then, Apple’s been working on lowering the energy and materials footprint for their flagship hardware platform – a lust object for those of us that labor in front of big screens. I’ll be using my current workhorse Mac-Pro for quite a while, but I like to drool over hardware as much as the next guy.
With OS X Mavericks, Apple has made a big effort on the software side to make its computers more energy-efficient and extend their lives. On the hardware side, they recently released a completely redesigned version of their top-of-the-line professional workstation, the Mac Pro. There too they tried to make things as streamlined and efficient as possible without compromising performance. The results are pretty impressive.
The first thing that is obvious – as you can see in the image below – is how much smaller the new Mac Pro is. The small black cylinder with connection ports in the back is not just a few percents smaller than its predecessors. You could fit a few new Mac Pros in the old one!
This results in a 74% reduction in aluminum and steel use, and 84% less packaging by weight compared to the old version. That’s pretty significant since, according to Apple, about 2/3 of the life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions of a computer like the Mac Pro come from production, not use.
On the energy usage side, the 2013 Mac Pro “outperforms the stringent requirements of the ENERGY STAR Program Requirements for Computers Version 6.0, utilizing less than half the allowable energy limit”. In idle mode, which is what a computer spends most of its time in unless you are rendering video, compiling code, playing a demanding video game, etc, the new Mac Pro uses 68% less power than the previous generation. Its power supply, which converts AC electricity from the wall outlet to DC, is 90% efficient, which is very good.
Apple can still improve a lot, but it’s obvious that they are taking this as seriously as anyone in the industry.
As you can see above, it meets most of the big things you might expect. But it also improves on some aspects that few people think about, like noise levels:
So the new Mac Pro definitely isn’t for everybody. Like most pro tools, it’s expensive, but it should handle pretty much anything a video editor throws at it, which is the point. Even pricing is competitive with similarly equipped workstations from competitors (though notice how big their physical dimensions are), as this table from the excellent AnandTech review shows:
The new Mac Pro is able to claim a lot of materials savings, but it takes out a ton of stuff to do so. There’s only a flash drive inside, no multiple hard drives, and there’s no DVD burner. You’d have to buy those separately, offsetting the savings. Mac is advertising multiple displays these days, too, so many people will have several screens instead of one.
The other BIG problem with highly proprietary designs is re-use. There’s no great reason (except for charging $3K+ for a new computer) why we can’t standardize computer design to simply input new modules (new processor, new hard drive, new graphics card, and so on) within a system that lasts 20 years plus. Instead, we insist on building computers that have to be thrown out and replaced every 5-10 years – and Apple products are the worst at this.
The energy efficiency of the power supply is obviously a big plus, but again that will be partially offset by all the extra cables and plugs for the external devices. It just seems to me a bit of greenwashing for marketing purposes here. It’s outsourcing the materials and energy and labeling it “green”.
This is the Tesla Model S of the computing industry…wait…the Tesla Model S is the MacPro of the automotive industry…wait…
ps there’s always the Raspberry Pi
I don’t know. I fully charged my brand spanking new MacPro, and I couldn’t even drive it to the corner store.