"The throw-away society is a human society strongly influenced by consumerism. The term describes a critical view of overconsumption and excessive production of short-lived or disposable items over durable goods that can be repaired."

— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Throw-away_society

Isn't it also a natural consequence of rapidly improving technology.

Even if a laptop were built to last 20 years, who would want one when a new one is an order of magnitude better?

My Asus 1215B netbook from 2009 has served me well, until it died last year.

There was nothing in 2025 laptops that I would have replaced it for, the use cases haven't changed from my 2009 requirements in computing on the go with a cheap laptop like device.

Its replacement is now Samsung tablet with DEX capabilities, which I will likewise use until it dies.

Cheap netbook-like devices are widely available from China these days. They'll probably be cheap enough even accounting for the new tariffs. Or you can just buy an older 'ultrabook' laptop on the used market.

The 'cheap' angle is something I wonder about, especially for the coming year with tariffs, and especially when Microsoft is trying to tell a lot of people that they need to buy new PCs to get off win10 and I doubt a huge proportion will be able/willing to do the remaining bypasses or learn another OS. It seems like a perfect storm if you're trying to be frugal, so I assume 'frugal' is going to translate into a lot of people on unsupported systems.

They might be, but I rather favour the local businesses.

The 1366x768 resolution is small, there are websites which are hard to use at that resolution.

Not everything needs a retina screen to be usable.

My lenovo is 1400x900 and even the ubuntu installer is too tall for the screen.

Developers have become incredibly lazy.

I would like to point out 20 years old it's was in 2005, which isn't very old imo,

Some stuff is usable, but not fun.

I have a Centrino laptop from 2004, and it's single core, with 1.5GB RAM and, of course, spinning rust.

It works, but even playing a video on youtube can be taxing. I'm not arguing for "performance" tasks here, just sitting on the couch and surfing, and clicking random links.

Then again my home server is a 2013 i5 that does everything it needs to do (except be super power efficient). So I'd say ~10-14 years is the sweet spot, but 20 is historic and mostly useless, sadly

Mpv + yt-dlp + https://alex.envs.net/dillectory

20 years is a bit much but a 10 year old laptop can still browse normal websites. Just not the javascript loaden addfactories.

Doesn't mean you dump it after 2-3 years because a new fancy models comes along or the battery is not repairable because it's welded shut.

If it's two orders of magnitude cheaper then plenty of people could want one. It's handy to have a spare laptop or two around and with a lightweight linux on there old ones can be perfectly functional

> would want one when a new one is an order of magnitude better

It's not, you're just ignoring two obvious points:

1. a person with no laptop would prefer it

2. a repairable laptop can also have its parts upgraded, so a 20 year laptop could have 1-year old parts

Cheap laptop I've bought in 2011 went through several upgrades: replaced ram doubling amount of GB. Replaced HDD with SSD, added HDD instead of DVD reader. Even replaced CPU to get more cores!

Nowadays I can only replace m.2 stick to get more storage. Everything is soldered.

Compared with 8 bit home computers appliance nature, that wouldn't be a big problem if we had repair shops all over the place, which could nonetheless take over replacing/upgrading soldered items.

I do agree having back user upgradable ram, disk and GPUs on laptops would be much better alternatives.

Today there are also plenty of cheap models that support memory expansion and have an additional slot for an SSD. The only exception is the ability to replace the processor, which is extremely rare. So you should rather ask yourself why you, as a consumer, chose a non-upgradable model.

> Even if a laptop were built to last 20 years, who would want one when a new one is an order of magnitude better?

Someone living in poverty whose life may be markedly improved by having one?

Not really. Building a laptop that will last 20 years is several times more expensive than building one that will last 5-10 years. So they will be less accessible to poor people.

They will be less accessible initially to poor people, but if the laptop actually does last 20 years then there will be a lot more on the used market therefore driving down the cost when someone buys a used one. That is the avenue most people who can't afford a new one will likely go.

It makes it more expensive to be on the cutting edge and turning over your laptop once every couple of years, but it makes the used purchases cheaper.

>but it makes the used purchases cheaper.

In fact, no, because they will also become less accessible to the less poor, and less poor will start using them longer and will also buy used ones.

New laptops, phones also last a lot less (borked storage, borked motherboard), forcing us to buy another - which I think is the point.

We have one refrigerator that's still going strong after 50 years whereas one of our 'newer' air-conditioners had to be replaced after 6 years.

>> We have one refrigerator that's still going strong after 50 years

In that particular case, it might not meet energy efficiency standards anymore.

But I agree appliances breaking the day after the warranty expires is evil. Depending on the country, warranty may be meaningless, or close to that

We still have here in Switzerland "repair cafes" run by volunteers, where mostly elderly bring their usually outdated devices to be repaired, while having a coffee and socializing. It works, as long it works...

Starting to exist a bit around here in Germany as well.

I think it would be fun to volunteer at a repair clinic, but there's none nearby and it probably wouldn't work well with a low population density rural area.

In the early 1990s, Portugal had a GDP per capita of less than $10,000 per year. Portuguese people today just have much better things to do with their time than fix old toasters.

I repair my own stuff for fun, but there's absolutely no way I could make a living from fixing other people's stuff. The phone repair business in my area is dominated by illegal immigrants, because fixing iPhones is only marginally more lucrative than delivering pizzas.

Go tell that to the folks earning minimum wage, splitting 800 euros for everything a family needs.

Yeah Portugal is a great experience when visiting with tier 1 country salary.

Stuff still is repairable these days, it’s just most of us live in countries where labor is so expensive locally it makes more sense to just buy a new one than to pay someone to replace components on a circuit board.

Right? If the replacement is $500, and the repair guy is going to charge $100/hr in labor to diagnose the issue and repair it plus an unknown cost of replacement components, the risk of spending more on the repair is quite high.

This is the reason.

I've fixed old electronics myself sometimes and quite often it's doable and the spare parts usually cost approximately nothing. However, paying someone 50 euros for half an hour worth of work to fix a thirty euro Christmas decoration doesn't feel like a good deal. Maybe for 10 or even 15 euros it would be.

Your lord and savior the government cannot do anything about the fact that it's cheaper to manufacture new than to repair. Unless you want to de-industrialize, which of course is a popular ideology among Europeans.

We only need to throw into the arena the mighty power of executive orders, and great wall of Europe.