I believe many of us are aware of the bigger picture outlined by you, but you keep ignoring the point that the previous 10-year old computers burn much more electricity. And as I already said, the newer more efficient machines have been built already so we might as well use them and help the planet by using less watts.

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.

I'm not completely convinced. The early PCs didn't need heat sinks or fans other than the 80mm PSU fan. They were inefficient, but the total power wasn't that huge. Even for newer computers, I have a Raspberry Pi 2 that draws 3 watts at maximum load and less when idle. It's powerful enough for what it does and even with this energy crisis it would need to run for years before the energy savings would cover the cost of a new model.

Yep, it's not a super clear win. But I was talking about the old desktop or all-in-one machines. They still draw a bit more but you're also right that the amortized cost blurs things. But since I plan on using the refurbished modern machines that I got, for years, maybe the equation will be in my favor... eventually. :)

I wonder if the same is true for a -say- G3 based laptop or desktop. Apple’s laptops would often be usable much longer on batteries compared to its Wintel counterparts.

It is an interesting question. Apple hyper-optimized the OS for PPC when it was still relevant. Even modern PPC OS's with a good 20 years of additional compiler optimizations don't run those things anywhere near as well.

Oh I'm well aware that newer machines use less electricity and that's good; it's just not necessarily true that, looking at the entire lifecycle, it is better for the planet compared to taking your older computer out of the closet.

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.

I agree. It's not 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.

I was going to disagree with you, but a back of the envelope calculation shows that the energy of computer production is probably equivalent to that of a few hundred hours of use, and so if you can save 10% on energy you are probably environmentally justified in switching to a new device. This is very counterintuitive to me.

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 only remark I'd have here is that the cost to produce is amortized over the course of producing several hundred or even thousands of units. It's still there but is greatly reduced per unit I think.

I recently literally took out of a drawer my old Sony Vaio laptop bought in 2011 and converted to a home server, replacing a RPI4 whose SD card just died (I used it for home automation). Well, the performance upgrade has been astonishing for me, probably it was due to the SD vs the SSD in the Vaio but I'm not going back. I'm actually thinking about self-hosting much more now!