Mark: Hey, I'm Mark Licea and this week we get the skinny on the PS3 Slim. Newsweek named the greenest companies in America. And Honda’s U3X gets us up to speed at 4 miles per hour. The Green Show starts now.
The PS3 slim is almost half the size of the original, it's also less expensive. But what about the power consumption? We spoke to one of our Cnet editor to find out.
Hey, I'm here with one of our senior associate editor, Matt Moskovciak. And in front of us here we have the PS3 and the PS3 Slim. Matt, you wrote an article on Crave recently on how the PS3 Slim is much more energy efficient. So how much more efficient are we talking?
Matt: It uses about half the power of the original 60 gigabyte PS3 that we've look at. And we tested a variety of things where there is plenty of blu-ray movies or if we just have it on idling or playing a game. And each case it used less than half the power.
We tested the original XBox for power consumption and that came in at about like 180 watts. So it’s going to be significant than the XBox 360.
Mark: So just give us a quick example of some of the different test that you guys run to measure the efficiency.
Matt: Sure, the first one we did is just idling. So you just turn it on and you're on like the main menu screen. And surprisingly, that uses most of the energy just having it on. You're up to 75 watts already. Then we threw in a blu-ray movie, we use Pirates of the Caribbean, it has a lot of drop menu and stuff like that. That bumps you up to about 80. So you're only actually using 5 more watts to watch a blu-ray movie than you do just by idling. Now if you play game, that where you get the most energy consumption and that bumps you all the way to about 96 watts.
Mark: So we’re saving all this wattage with the PS3 Slim, how does that covert to dollars?
Matt: Not that much. When you look at it, it looks like a lot of watts, but even if you are to play like 20 hours a week for a whole year. The difference between the two will come down to less than $15.
Mark: Great. Thanks for all the information.
Matt: Thanks for having me.
Mark: Newsweek magazine took a look at 500 American companies and ranked them on their environmental policies. Now even though the PS3 Slim is more efficient, Sony still a Japanese company, thus not eligible for consideration. But some other major tech names top the list. IBM ranked 5th. It’s had environmental policies since 1971. Intel came in 4th as the largest corporate buyer of renewable energy. And Dell whose company headquarters is run entirely on renewable energy took the number two spot. The highest ranked company on the list was Hewlett-Packard. They're the first big IT company to report green house gas emission. Some other notables were Microsoft at number 31. Google at 79. And Apple which ranked 133rd.
Speaking of Apple, they may not be happy with Newsweek’s score. The company just updated its website so consumers can quote get the full story on Apple’s environmental footprint. If you go to Apple.com/environment. You can see the impact to product has on the planet base on life cycle and consumer use. According to information on the site manufacturing Apple products accounts for 38% of emissions. While consumer use is responsible for 53%. Apple says majority of greenhouse gas emission they account for are produced when Apple products are used by consumers. So it’s all our fault, we can't blame Apple for being so popular.
Moving right along, Honda showed off their U3X prototype and it moves like an electric unicycle. Honda’s unicycle Segway like device has a lithium battery that last 1 hour and it reaches a top speed of 4 miles an hour. The seat does not actually look sturdy and Honda says they have no plans to release it to the public. They say the U3X is more about showing off an engineering breakthrough, but that it could be useful for the elderly in places like airports or hotels. I don’t know too many elderly that will be comfortable on an electric unicycle, they don’t need it.
That’s it for this week. Send your feedback to greenshow@cnet.com. I'm Mark Licea, thanks for watching.
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