Comment by speedgoose
10 days ago
Manufacturing and shipping a new computer can be worth it long term. Improvements in performance and energy consumption can offset the environmental impact after some time.
Of course for entertainment it’s difficult to judge, especially when you may have more fun on an old gameboy than a brand new 1000W gaming PC.
> after some time.
This is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this sentence.
What you're talking about is called the embodied energy of a product[0]. In the case of electronic hardware it is pretty staggeringly high if I'm not mistaken.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_energy
Yes it can be. Last time I did the maths for one of my use cases. It was a matter of a few years, when replacing a few old amd64 boxes by a single Mac mini.