No, your devices (phone, tablet, computer) are not less efficient. They just have more work to do and as a result are slower and consume more power.
They don’t provide you with any more services. Twenty years ago, you could already watch videos, make calls, look at classified ads and consult the press online. There’s nothing new under the sun!
And yet they are slower and consume more power. (Consumer portable power consumption trends – Research Gate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Yahia-Benmoussa/publication/279770603/figure/fig1/AS:669977531129856@1536746499004/SoC-consumer-portable-power-consumption-trends-1.png)
The Internet is a client (your device) and server (the provider’s data centre) technology. Content (images, sound, text) is hosted on the server. The web page can be built either server-side or client-side. This operation requires computing power powered by electricity. Since the invention of the Internet, most web pages have been produced by the server. However, with the sharp rise in electricity costs, providers (Facebook, e-commerce, etc.) have modified their sites so that this work is carried out by the client (your device). They are no longer the ones paying for the electricity, but the consumers. The devices are slower because they have to produce the calculations for the web page. They consume more electricity.
Suppliers like Facebook boast that they have reduced their carbon footprint by 85% and advertise themselves as virtuous and committed to sustainable computing. But all they have done is shift electricity consumption into the home.
As a result, consumers are being forced to buy more powerful devices to carry out their calculations, and will end up with higher electricity bills.
As far as the environment is concerned, there is a lot of polluting electronic waste. The construction of new devices is also polluting. Home appliances are a hundred times less efficient at using electricity for the same task than data centres (collections of servers). And it’s electricity whose origin we can’t control, especially in developing countries.
To increase the profits of the suppliers, users get a slower service, which consumes more electricity and therefore needs bigger batteries and the obligation to buy new equipment to make it usable. It’s a total regression.
