Cost does give a sense of how significant things are. That's the point here - the cost ($ and environmental) in terms of paper and energy is not significant.
A plastic straw or bottle costs almost nothing to produce - but an enormity to remove from the environment. So much so that they have been banned in many places around the world. And that's all there is to know about using "production cost" as a metric.
As others have mentioned, trees are a renewable resource. I don't believe the cruise industry (which I see you switched from Disney) was regularly wiping out national parks, despite printing stuff for some time.
If reforestation/replanting is the only strawman left, let's address that as well.
A new oak tree takes about 20 years to start recycling CO2 at full scale and 40 years to produce acorns. When you take one out, you remove decades of hard work. Even if you replant a seed immediately, you will have to wait 20 years or longer to get the benefits of the replacement of what you just cut down. (That's assuming 100% replanting.) Meanwhile, the air quality and wild life habitats have already taken a beating.
The success of reforestation and parks in the last few decades isn't the goodness of, say, paper mills' hearts. It's the tough environmental laws. They work - but slowly. You need to reduce the demand too. Tough US laws do it here, but a lot of the rest of the world is open season. Just google the details of the deals Bolsonaro had been cutting in the Brazilian
Amazon over the last 5 years, and all that sargassum ending up on your favorite Caribbean beach.
That's actually more than I'd have guessed, but is still something like just 0.1% of the energy a ship is producing. I don't know what the cost of power at sea is, but 42kWh is not that much on land.
Overall energy use of a ship is irrelevant. Most of it is for propulsion, HVAC, and critical electrical systems. The appropriate comparison is with another discretionary device - such as a TV. If your average stateroom TV consumes 0.265 kwh per hour:
https://samsungtechwin.com/how-many-watts-does-a-samsung-tv-use/
Using that one printer for one hour = using TVs in almost 160 rooms non-stop for one hour.
Plus, the TVs last for years. These printers and their cartridges, used so heavily every day, will need replacement or servicing every few weeks. You need several of them on board all running in parallel.
Well, there's also the wifi - each access node is maybe running at 10W, so 240Wh per day. I guess you'd need about 175 of them to equal the copier energy. I don't know how many they have onboard, but it's probably not that many (over what they'd have anyway), though 15 per deck might not be out of line.
Still - perspective: this is an insignificant amount of energy (and paper) compared to what the ship is already generating. There may be lots of reasons to get rid of paper navigators, but environmental reasons aren't it - they are insignificant noise in that regard.
The routers are already installed. They handle all the TVs, telephones, comms, cameras, on-board systems, etc. The marginal power of maintaining a wireless signal for periodic app use is so tiny that it's not even worth a calculation. My wireless travel router can work off a tiny battery for days.
Umm - no, software development (at this level) is nowhere close to a one-time cost. While I don't know Disney's software development process, an in-production critical app is not one you have a one-time cost for, and there will be ongoing maintenance. While the team will be drastically reduced from initial development, they'll almost certainly have someone(s) who actively maintain it, if for no other reason than they will need to make sure someone is familiar enough with the code base to ensure it works for future phone operating systems and can deal with critical bugs that pop up in the future. And, I'd be really surprised if they aren't continuing development and adding features, possibly even working on the next version. Plus, the app itself is only the front end - there's back end stuff that they probably are also updating, and the back-end is not independent of the app - they build stuff there so that it can be shown on the app.
Let's get the development and maintenance terms right. No major new features have been introduced in the last year. It's more or less maintenance at this point. The app is providing a guest interface for the data already in use. Data such as for on-board operations, website, bookings, crew scheduling, venue scheduling, etc. All guests see is a query off a table in a database on an existing server.
And it's managed most likely by the same team that's maintaining other Disney apps. The person responsible for
DCL spends a few hours a week to test new OS updates and debugs. Maybe more in some week and less in others.
I don't know that the app as a whole is that poorly designed - there are a lot of parts to it, and it does a lot more than just display schedule info. But, it's not just personal preference. For the display of time-based information, there are objectively (as in, you could measure how well people can use it to perform tasks) better ways to display the simultaneous schedule than the app currently does. Again, there's not a reason they couldn't do something similar in the app - they've just decided not to, it seems (it would probably cost $ for development, though).
Again, layouts are personal preference. I assume you don't carry printed navigators of your TV's channel list at home? (hint: rhetorical) What's objectively better is real-time schedules, filters, details of each event, etc. And all the data that comes with it,
