One notable exception is the PC Engines APU 2, though that’s stretching the definition of modern.
Seriously: Pick a laptop SKU that is still being manufactured and has similar ergonomics to a MacBook Pro or classic thinkpad (centered keyboard + trackpad, 4K screen, all the other bits in the right spots, reasonably quiet, 8 hour real world battery), and mark it up by $200. Sell it from a site that OpenBSD links to.
Make sure the manufacturer agrees to build that exact laptop for at least 5 years. (Moore’s law is dead, after all.)
Have the project test 100% of the hardware devices in that laptop on each point release, and donate the $200 markup to the project.
For me the thing that keeps me from running OpenBSD 100% of the time is my Steam library, but I'm considering demoting my PC to a living room gaming device and handling my modest desktop computing needs via something small and fanless running OpenBSD.
It makes me appreciate what we have, how good it is, and reminds me that maybe I don’t need to constantly upgrade for the sake of it.
Most stuff I can buy is overpriced branded crap
The guy bought it from AliExpress. Since then I bought a bunch of electronics from there and was always satisfied.
And Chuwi have official store there btw.
The second-hand market is filled with material that was built at same point; you having access to your nice second hand laptop is due to newer laptops being built all the time. It is still sending a signal upstream that such a computer can be sold.
I do agree that buying second hand is much better than buying new, but not even buying is still better here
Economically the incentives are not aligned this way though, if you pay for grid power... you still have to pay for the electricity, and there's also the opportunity cost of that payment (e.g. you could spend the money you save on your electric bill on carbon credits or green charities or whatever).
Economic sense is not always relevant. I might even argue that economic sense is at odds with environmental sense
I don't really think it does, at least not some of them.
A lot of those older machines are just running really, really high idle power draw. Ex: Pentium 4/5, Core 2 Duo, Athlon64, etc. Running from 40 to 100 watts idle.
For comparison, a new RPI will go as low as ~1-3 watt idle, tops out at ~5-7 watts under full load, and will generally have better performance characteristics.
I run a lot of old machines in my basement because it can make sense (I throw them in a k8s farm), but I also generally have them spend a week on an electricity meter first (honestly, just a function of the UPS I run down there) and anything drawing more than 20 watts idle gets sent to the recycling instead.
The bad ones tend to run high + hot + loud, and they absolutely aren't worth it.
My server box is also a 2012 era machine, it's a 3770k build. It's perfectly fine for what I use it for. Yeah it takes a bit more power than a modern intel chip, but it sure beats the alternative of throwing it in a landfill to save a few watts at idle.
But comparing spending 40 bucks on craigslist or ebay for an old pentium/core 2 duo, vs getting an rpi... You're probably better off with the Pi (assuming you can source it, which is not a given atm).
I don't even buy most of mine used, I just get hand-me-downs from friends/family because they want to get rid of the machine and ask me to wipe the drive in exchange for the hardware, but even at an upfront cost of free, a machine using 100 watts over a year is 80 bucks in my region, and my power is right around the US average.
Plus power in my region is tiered, so the first 650kwh per month are cheap, the next 350 are avg, and the rest are expensive. So adding machines at this point is actually closer to ~$130 a year at 100 watts idle (paying for t3 rates).
Personally, it's just not worth it to me to take a freebie that runs me $100+ in costs a year. Not even accounting for the knock-on costs, like the extra AC needed because 100 watts is a small heater.
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So sure - lots of older machines do just fine (the end of the core 2 duo line is quite reasonable, and most laptops are actually fine) but it's really probably worth measuring the power draw.
The five year cost of operating that rpi is ~$30, the five year cost of operating a 100 watt machine are ~$450. And I can run a LOT more low power machines and stay in my t1/t2 pricing for power.
Do you have any pointers what sort of equipment to use to measure the power draw? Are you simply measuring it from a UPS?
Some figures from around my house.
Lenovo Tkinkpad T400 - 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo Laptop idles at about 10 Watts and peaks at just over 30 watts.
Lenovo Thinkpad T420 - 2nd Gen i5 is about the same.
Lenovo Mini 10 - 1.66Ghz Atom doesn't seem to know how to idle its power regardless of OS. Runs at a constant 10.5 Watts - 15 watts if using a Hard Drive installed instead of SSD.
Core 2 Duo Mac Mini - 8 watts idle - 24 watts peak.
Sony Bluray player - 0.5 Watts idle. 5 Watts during Bluray. 3 Watts during DVD.
Desktop PC - 2nd Gen i7 + Geforce 1650. Idle 61 Watts - Peak in game 95-101 Watts.
Sony AM/FM Radio - 0.5 Watts. That one was actually really neat to know just how lower power it takes to run.
Also why would you just keep running extra machines all the time? I understand a personal machine and a server but more than that.. for what?
Add an old house on top and throw in working from home, and usage can creep up on you very quickly. We average around 1000kwh a month, but summer months where it's 95+ and near 100% humidity means the AC reasonably needs to be on.
Jun/Jul are the worst, we hit 2200kwh over those months last year.
As for the machines - like I mentioned, they run a k8s cluster I host numerous services on. I run seafile/bookstack/jellyfin/keycloak/homeassistant/email/dns/mealie/snipeit/etc on them. Most idle around 5watts and aren't a big deal. I recycle the machines that would end up costing me real money in power usage.
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I'll add - my next personal project is going to be moving the entire cluster over to a dedicated solar system. As long as I don't do any grid-tie, I can do it without permits. Just waiting to find a decent deal on inverters at this point. Since I already have a pallet of used panels.
I have an i7 3770 and it's still ok for gaming even.
Usually I just leave the new machine as the only thing idling on the sockets without battery backup and compare the two.
I also have one of these (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08LD53F3P/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...) floating around, but you have to be careful with it since it's not a surge protector. That said, it's cheap and will monitor each socket individually.
However, I agree with with the OP comment that computer should not be replaced simply because newer, more energy efficient alternatives exist: at least not for anything made after 2010.
When comparing whether it is worse it or not to extend the life of a device that still does the job its intended to do, it's almost always worth it to extend the device's life.
As an exemple, if we go by Apple's data: a 2016 13' Intel MacBook Pro create a yearly impact of 18 kg of CO2eq through usage (electricity).
The 2021 13' MacBook M1 is a better machine environmentally by all account: manufacturing it polluted less than the 2016 machine (168kg CO2 vs 386kg), and it is more energy efficient (13 kg / CO2 per year).
Still, you would need a whooping 33.6 years for the use of the more energy efficient laptop to cover the CO2 from manufacturing it. And that's using global carbon data, if you live in a low carbon grid country, it could take a century to recover the greenhouse gas emitted during manufacturing of the new laptop.
(Not saying I would not still buy a M1 over keeping the slow Mac Intel but please don't claim your are helping the environment when doing so).
Source: https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/products/notebooks/13i... https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/products/notebooks/13-...
You do need storage, but you need it for all of them anyways. I certainly won't trust the original spinning disk HDD that comes with hand me down machines with anything more than an OS image. Everything else goes on the NAS.
> However, I agree with with the OP comment that computer should not be replaced simply because newer, more energy efficient alternatives exist: at least not for anything made after 2010.
This - this is where the answer is to measure it. Sometimes the result will surprise you quite a bit. Most machines made after 2010 will be fine, but trust me, it's really worth plugging it into a watt meter and making sure.
Turns out all sorts of things adjust power draw, and one of the least maintained parts of old machines is the PSU - usually it's filled with dust/dirt, and as long as the machine still runs no one has paid it any mind in the last 10 years.
> Not saying I would not still buy a M1 over keeping the slow Mac Intel but please don't claim your are helping the environment when doing so
Who the fuck is talking about replacing an intel macbook with an m1? I'm talking about getting old tower machines from office/school closeouts or as hand-me-downs and repurposing them. An intel mac (even a 2010-2013 era one) is still worth WAY more than an RPI (~$200 vs $40), and laptops in general use a very different power curve (batteries matter - who knew...?).
Not to mention you can't even run a decent OS on the modern intel macs after 2016... (although at least Asahi is making progress these days) so trust me - I'm hardly suggesting a macbook update (I would strongly suggest purchasing from a different company, though - but that's a different conversation related to a different set of morals).
> It still makes sense to use a decade-old computer. >> I don't really think it does, at least not some of them.
I totally agree with you regarding the homelab topic (although personally, I started using low-powered refurbished x64 thin-clients (using about 10W) in place of a RPI cluster, mainly to get real sata ports on them.)
My point is that, environmentally, continuing to use a 10y computer rather than buying a new one is generally a sound advice (assuming it does still what you want it to do).
Since I didn't have data for a 10y old computer, I used what I could find: the 2016 vs the 2021 Macbooks Lifecycle assessments from Apple. The same point would probably stand between a 2010 computer and a 2023 computer. Even if the old one is less energy efficient, the 150 to 300kg+ of CO2 you save not building a new device goes a long way.
And instead of consumer devices or RPi, if you are talking about datacenter-class servers, then you save even more CO2 by prolonging your device life since a new server's manufacturing footprint is more like 1500 - 3000 kg CO2eq.
But I believe the fact that this laptop can last at least 10 years + it will consume a single order of magnitude less power over these 10 years adds up to more environment care.
The production is already completed. The damage has been done. Let's use the machines at least because they are 10x more efficient and we can slow down the environmental damage.
Also to many of us outright not buying machines means we gotta switch industry. And a lot of us don't want to.
> It is still sending a signal upstream that such a computer can be sold.
That's a bit out there though; it only signals the vendor that people hold on to their older machines for longer time. If anything, the laptop I got second-hand is no longer even listed on the vendor's AliExpress store. It only has a marketing page on the website and you can only find it second-hand or here and there on the internet.
If it does then the people using them don't need to buy another one, new or refurbished. If they don't need to buy, other people can't sell as easily. If they can't sell as easily, they might use it longer, and not need/want to buy another one, old or refurbished, etc...
It's a whole market and if constructors see that the overall tendency is of using longer, they will get the signal that there can be less sales overall. And thus build less.
Everything we do is part of a larger system, and I believe we should understand what the system is like and how it works if we want to have a real impact.
The process you describe is yet to happen e.g. the computers I have I don't want to replace unless they crash and burn. So in 5-ish years I believe vendors will slow down manufacturing indeed because many people do like I do: they get the newer more power-efficient stuff and then hold on to it for longer periods.
Again, I'm not saying what you're doing is bad, if everyone could fulfill their digital needs and wants out of second hand, that'd be awesome. I only wanted to point out that using less electricity isn't automatically better.
It's a balancing act between what we need to get our jobs done, what are our ergonomic preferences -- I have the so-called "lap desk" (basically two parallelepiped-shaped pillows and a well-designed plate with USB extensions to put on top of them) where I like to work on the couch or the bed -- and what is kinda sorta good for the planet.
I can't hyper-optimize only for the planet. I am doing my best but obviously everyone else has to help a little bit as well.
Thanks for entertaining this discussion, it was interesting.
To first order the upper bound for carbon cost of production/recycling is going to be a multiple of the energy required to melt the components. Call that multiple four: production of raw materials + reshaping in factory + recycling of materials at EOL + energy cost for assembly. So a rough upper limit of the energy to switch a computers would be four times the energy to heat the computer's mass in water (4 J/gC) up to the melting point of silica (1900 C), and a rough lower bound would be the same using the heat capcity and melting point of iron (10x lower heat capacity, 1500 C), and neglecting assembly. For 1 kg of material, that gives a range of 1.8 and 32 MJ. Now you can compare to the energy used. For myself, I'm on a 2 kg laptop that draws up to 250W, but conservatively 50W. That adds up to 32 MJ/kg in 400 h. If I can reduce the energy use by 5W with a new model, that will pay itself back in 2 years of workday computation. Crazy.
Caveat: there will be additional non-CO2 environmental costs. Most components are not recycled, and resource extraction is also environmentally damaging.
The power issue is more with large desktop systems. I was setting up a moderately old but fairly hefty system as a file server. Couldn't get it working--which I discovered belatedly was an issue related to my network switch--so I bought an unpopulated Synology box. But, given power consumption, I also realized that was probably the more cost-effective thing to do anyway.
Appreciate the dedication!
My desktop PC, which is over a decade old, performs fine under current releases of Linux and Windows. My laptop PC is a bit over two years old. Performance is lacklustre under the current release of Windows. Newer isn't always better, particularly when you're comparing laptops to desktops. I also doubt that many laptops would have an equivalent lifespan to a desktop. They have more perilous lives due to their portability and portability means they are frequently built with more compact and less robust components. That is especially true when you consider that laptops are more difficult to repair (due to more integration and more difficult to obtain parts).
Granted, the iMac G4 is in a different league since it is a 20 year old machine that was produced when performance jumps were more meaningful. I can see it being a useful machine for someone who has limited interest and use for computers or simply wants something disconnected to get work done. I took the latter approach in the early 2000's and it worked quite well. (The fastest machine I had was a 68040, and I did run NetBSD on it.)
But again, power consumption.
And I'll grand you that it's possible that this Chinese laptop I got will have its logic board burn long before the 10 year mark. Sadly that's likely, yes. But as mentioned, when I am not programming or doing anything that requires more CPU power, it performs perfectly for what I need, and I feel better knowing it consumes ~17W on average.
There are likely sweet spots e.g. get a Ryzen R1000 or V1000 mini PC and stuff it with 2x NVMe and 2x SATA SSDs and have it drive 2-4 displays at home. The displays will likely consume 20x the power of the machine itself (lol), and that machine is very likely to last for a long, long time.
For my needs however a Chinese laptop that costed me 160 EUR and has proven it can last anywhere from 7 to 11 hours, is perfect. (Though I'll get pissed if it lasts less than 5-6 years for sure.)
There were likely several versions of lcd panels with it - the t420s's I got were way better than the t480 and e580 I picked up recently, even though there's 6 years between them. I believe the ones I have are either 1920 x 1080 or 1600 x 900 (whereas the t480 is inexplicably only 1366 x 768 ; and e580 is 1080p but awful contrast or gamma or something)
Is there a good site for recommended upgrades by model? I'm pretty pleased with this as is for Linux use already. (8 GB RAM, 250 GB SSD).
Which is great when it's -30 outside, like today. :)
Yes, you listed them and they are valid, except
> including long-term environmental sustainability
Err... no not really ! The environmental impact of pretty much all consumer electronics is by (very) far dominated by the impact of its manufacturing (mining, water for manufacturing the chips, oil for transport, robots for assembly in countries where electricity is made with coal, etc), therefore anyone trying to be serious about "environmental sustainability" understands that it mostly implies to extend as much as possible existing equipment and avoid buying new ones (even if the old ones are bulky, noisy and consume a lot of electricity compared to the new)
And in the end I was left with a machine that ran well over 300 watts to do what a Raspberry Pi4 can easy do in well under 5 watts. I should have known, I was there when the 1st Intel Mac Mini came along running as fast as these things on launch - I knew they were a slouch even then. I should have known better.
Eventually something went wrong with the power supply and I ended up scrapping everything but the case which now has my PC mounted in it.
I use old laptops. My daily driver until a year ago was a Dell e7470 which worked well enough for browsing and coding in VSCode.. until the keyboard broke, twice. Now it's gathering dust because I'm too lazy to change the keyboard again but it should work fine on linux atleast.
My current daily driver is a thinkpad t490 with an i7-8565U and 16 GB of ram that was provided for me at work and which I can buy used for 500$ atm.
But if what you want is fanless and decent hardware I'd recommend a NUC.
I'm not sure which Celeron J you're referring to, but I know some models were affected by the infamous LPC clock bug --- which might explain why there seems to be a surplus of machines with those CPUs available for amazingly low prices.
I like computers the same way I like my cars, loud and hot ;-)
Eco-virtue-signaling, the other modern plague...
But I also don't like paying a lot for electricity. :)
Virtue signalling is dumb and I hate it. In this case I happen to also have a personal interest.
Feels like we jumped 10 years forward in a single iteration.
1. Physical space. Most of the older tech takes too much space. I don't live in a mansion and I have no dedicated rooms just for big bulky computers.
2. Power consumption, heat, noise. I would love to be less consumerist and use stuff from 15 years ago and stop feeding greedy corporations but... the old stuff consumes 90 to 200 watts, heats up easily and noticeably, and can get loud.
Both parts of this problem are trivially solved by modern tech. I got a 13" Chinese fanless laptop second hand for 160 euro; it has a Celeron J CPU with 12GB RAM and 256GB SATA SSD. It can do anything I need that's not programming or rendering -- including playing 60FPS video -- and last time I checked it, it consumed 30W under full load (all CPU cores at 100%) and idled at 11W or so.
Modern tech is not only about its buyers being mindless consumerist drones. It offers tangible benefits, including long-term environmental sustainability.
Yes a lot of CO2 was likely released due to its production but I'd wager that tech that heats up less and uses less power can last 10-13 years and will pay off its environmental footprint with a generous interest on top.
So unless you're a retro collector or want to write compilers for older CPUs, there are zero reasons to be excited about older computers.
(That being said, if somebody finally creates a modern 6502 CPU computer e.g. in the shape of a 10" netbook I'll buy it immediately, provided I can also program it through USB from my workstation.)