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Because the cost of building a new device uses far more resources than just keeping an old laptop alive with a lightweight distro. My GF's ~14yo laptop (Celeron
by anthk 3y ago
Because the cost of building a new device uses far more resources than just keeping an old laptop alive with a lightweight distro. My GF's ~14yo laptop (Celeron, 2GB, GL 2.1 Intel iGPU) with an SSD still works really fast with Ungoogled Chromium, a deblobbed Slackware and XFCE, even faster than her friends Windows 11 modern laptop with a much better processor and RAM.
- adastra22 3y ago"Resources" is quite broad. Objectively the cost of consumed resources is baked into the price, which as I've mentioned is paid back over a few years in energy savings, without even considering offsets due to recycling the old device. But I assume you mean externalities, which are harder to quantify. I'll use CO2 as a stand-in. Your average laptop generates ~300 kg of CO2 during its full-lifecycle production. That includes refining of materials, electricity used in manufacturing, etc. As mentioned, in 15 years laptop energy usage has gone down about 1/2 to 1/3 of its prior levels, due to a lower baseline power usage and better standby modes. Assuming 8 hours of use per day of a 100W laptop (for round numbers), that ends up being about 300 kWh per year. Which in the USA on average ends up being about 300 lbs of CO2. So in 4 years its lower energy usage has saved more CO2 than was emitted in the manufacture of the new laptop. Replacing old hardware is good for the environment.
- legacynl 3y agoyou're making a logical error. The CO2 is cumulative. So in case of replacing an inefficient laptop with a more efficient one: manufacturing: 300kg use 4 years: 400kg manufacturing new laptop: 300kg new laptop 4 years: 300kg That's 2 laptops, 8 years of use: 1300kg only using the inefficient laptop: manufacturing: 300kg 4 years of use: 400kg 4 years of use: 400kg one inefficient laptop after 8 years: 1100kg. Even if both examples would have the same co2 output, it would still be more environmental to keep using the inefficient laptop, because the act of buying stuff and throwing away old stuff carries costs too. An obvious example is that if people would replace their laptops twice as often, then the world would need twice the amount of laptop factories, twice the amount of resources, twice the amount of laptop recycling stations, twice the amount of space in landfills for laptops, etc. Maintaining and reusing old hardware is good for the environment