Eh, I’m not so convinced that the relationship is direct - Usage is going up and power efficiency is also going up, but I’m not convinced the two are necessarily linked.
I spend roughly the same amount of time at the computer as I did 20 years ago, but my old desktop PC and CRT monitor was certainly not as power efficient as my (bigger) current monitor and Mac mini.
"I spend roughly the same amount of time..." the paradox works if you define usage as energy consumption, not time spent.
20 years ago, you were not streaming 1080p videos or downloading 50 GB video games. Even kids do that on a regular basis now and a bigger share of the population worldwide has access to similar services
No, but I was torrenting those movies to my seedbox which was on 24/7.
IMO I don’t think usage scales to power consumption - this sounds like correlation vs causation to me. It sounds like use has also increased while efficiency has increased, not one because of the other (ie I would personally still be streaming the same number of movies if my AppleTV used twice the power, and if they release a new version that doubles the energy efficiency that won’t cause me to watch more)
I spend roughly the same amount of time at the computer as I did 20 years ago, but my old desktop PC and CRT monitor was certainly not as power efficient as my (bigger) current monitor and Mac mini.