Comment by pjmlp
16 hours ago
Thankfully I don't own any, I rather have computers with replaceable parts, more environment friendly, thus not something I need to worry about.
16 hours ago
Thankfully I don't own any, I rather have computers with replaceable parts, more environment friendly, thus not something I need to worry about.
what computers are you buying that are more environmentally friendly? The MacBook Neo is 60% from recycled materials and Apple offers free recycling for all their products.
How do you recycle your old parts?
Being able to add RAM and replace storage with faster flash typically extend the useful life of a computer, even if the CPU is not replaceable as in desktops.
On my machines the limiting factor is not CPU, but memory and GPU speed. Low RAM and slow GPUs prevent me from running local AI models. These things will only get bigger over time. I wouldn’t expect a developer machine to still be useful 5 years from now with less than 16 or 32GB.
> what computers are you buying that are more environmentally friendly?
Any computer that you can upgrade its parts? SSD, RAM, Wifi cards, etc.
The only parts that wear out on a modern laptop are the SSD and the battery. If I replace those, I can use it basically indefinitely, paying the penalty on performance and energy consumption depending on how old the CPU is.
Why would I throw out (or recycle) a perfectly good computer if I could simply fix or upgrade it? If you're not reusing it, then you could pass it down to somebody who would use it.
20+ year old computers are e-waste at this point thanks to software bloating and lack of hardware acceleration for at least h.264.
15 year old computers are very usable, but unfortunately most use SATA for storage which is definitely not optimal for SSDs.
10 year old computers are from when PC tech plateaued, for most use cases the difference in performance is imperceptible, and maybe you lose power efficiency.
nowadays macbook batteries aren't something i'd call "easy to replace" but it's not something a typical repair shop or meticulous individual wouldn't be able to do – most beater windows laptops don't have user-replacable batteries either fwiw
if the ssd is bricked you do need to replace the whole "logic board" tho which sucks
Thinkpads with replaceable components and PC desktops.