Do you have a calculation for that? It's not entirely clear that this is the case if you factor in that the old hardware already exists and new hardware needs to be produced.
You're also looking at it from the perspective of not needing new hardware, but I already have both my phone and my Steam Deck.
Incidentally, I bought a Steam Deck in part because it was cheaper than a GPU upgrade for my desktop PC, while being more powerful and efficient than my current setup. My PC has been collecting dust as I boot the same disk on my Steam Deck, at 1/10-30 the power enveloppe. As an added benefit, I don't have to turn this high-power system on while it's 35C in the room.
The actual math of concrete examples we can come up will not change the underlying fact that consumerism fueled by corporations will always trump over whatever perceived or real efficiency gains, and i do not agree it ''pays back relatively quickly'': even the favourable example of replacing an Xbox Original for a Steam Deck demanded at least 2000 hours for the electrical consumption to match the incorporated energy, but this still had to incorporate whatever is needed to reprocess the xbox as the new trash it became (recycling and discarting). What will the math look like in the future ? because over time, the tinier processors demand more and more energy and resources to manufacture, over the older ones. How many hours of use will the (presumably) more eletricity efficient PS6 demand to offset the PS5 it will be set to replace ?
It does not matter if the Steam Deck, which is subsidized by Steam like almost all consoles and because of that it is cheaper for the end-consumer, consumes less electricity, it still made you pretty much discard a fully functional and capable computer and buy another one, a computer that will degrade with time and have less lifespan, that could have continued in use with a technically possible upgrade.
I feel a computing culture that sees normal to discard functional computers every 3-5 years because of minutiae like slightly less eletricity consumption or even more facial hair in characters will never really be sustainable. Eletricity consumption is being solved with renewable energy, hidro and nuclear , but the rate of material and natural resources consumption, and pollution, of non renowable stuff, is not being tackled.
You are being reductionist, and only accounting for the factor of direct eletrical consumption during use, and not the total energy and natural resources spent during the equipments lifetime , specially its manufacturing (which i think is the real measure of ecological efficiency we should aim).
The old hardware was already produced, resources were spent and pollution and emissions were made, so it is a duty that we should use it as much as possible until irrepairable breakdown happens, and reduce our consumption of new stuff that would only replace it. Like your example of a new smartphone or new steamdeck replacing the old Xbox Original: it is almost certain that the electrical consumption gains would not compensate, in terms of total energy and resources spent and pollution made, the discarting of the original xbox (in fact, it would generate more waste that would need to be reprocessed, generating even more pollution).
Remember the 3Rs ? The 1st R is REDUCE, not ''replace stuff every 3-5 years to get slightly less eletric consumption''. It is kind of the point of the Permacomputing movement the OP mentioned: perma comes from perma-nent, make computers that last much longer lifespans than the current system. If people could repurpose old PS3s and Xbox for playing indies, and bigger games we demaked to it, people could keep using the stuff and buy less.
A Few texts for inspiration: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/12/how-and-why-i-stop... https://www.iltascabile.com/scienze/sostenibilita-digitale/
Citation needed. We're talking about a huge difference in electrical efficiency.
https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Embodied_energy#:~:t....
The most coal intensive region of the US is 67% coal.
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/comparative-l...
As an anecdote, my car (ICE) was owned by someone else for about 6 months before I bought it used. I’ve been driving it for the last 16 years.
Can't wait to fire up my 128mb ram modded og xbox today, to test the unreleased debug build of the need for speed game mvg dumpped yesterday. I'll probably play it for 10 minutes before I pack up the console again.
We should have a digital-DNA-Lineage-for [CODE, GAMES, APPS] etc...
Where in 100 years, we can follow a digital evolutionary time-table-mind-mad that routes us through all the code, apps, games that got us [HERE]..
And it will connect logic of thought and problemsolving through generations.
This is a thing we should through a (NON-HALLUCINATING) AI at?
> port [...] to consoles like Xbox original
Uuh, in the name of energy efficiency, let's not. My smartphone is much more powerful and has a much lower power consumption than these systems. My Steam Deck even more so, though it's higher-power than a phone.
Targeting energy-efficient, low power hardware should be the goal, not porting to inneficient obsolete HW, IMO (though it's pretty cool, and demonstrates that you can do a lot with little computing power).
Still, I agree that something that runs well on old commodity hardware can run well on most existing hardware, reducing the need for hardware upgrades.
But my point is, running ond old HW is probably counterproductive if you only value ecology. At best, you could emulate old HW with much more efficient modern HW, and integrate most of the system on a single low power chip.