I gave my son the 2012 MacBook Pro when I purchased the M1 MBP this year. He uses it for everything now. I have tried giving older Macs to other family members

I gave my son the 2012 MacBook Pro when I purchased the M1 MBP this year. He uses it for everything now. I have tried giving older Macs to other family members, that didn't work out so well. So there are limits. In general, used Macs have crazy high resale value, and if they work out ok, no problem with that. Both ends of the transaction receive value from the exchange. I am in the process of clearing out quite a bit of e-waste, but we are talking fried PowerPC Macs and some iPhone 4 devices that I cant get working again. I have noticed that the Macs tend to be physically smaller than thier counterparts from the same era in my collection; that might suggest less e-waste overall, but of course the variation is all over the place. The oldest operational x86 machines in my setup are two tower Mac Pros, a 2007 one and anither from 2009. These are somewhat upgradeable: you can use SSDs instead of rotating rust (duh), max out the RAM (easy), put in newer GPUs (drivers and BIOS permitting), or max out the CPUs (you need a moderately weird tool to get at the heat sink screws). The fate of our electronics is indeed worthy of concern, but I don't see that Apple approach leading necessarily to more trash. (oh yes: I am typing this on an ipad 4. I'd love to keep using it for another 14 months, it will then be ten years old. but it's getting a bit unreasonable. Works for hacker news though)