Re:My Favourite Laptop
by Grombobulous on Monday November 02, 2026 @07:12PM
(#50346185)
I don’t think there’s any such thing as a PC with a 3 year lifespan, that’s incredibly short. Even if you buy a new laptop every 3 years and trade it in, the trade-in contractor is definitely reselling that to someone who is going to use it.
From what I can tell from a quick google search, producing one laptop is about 5-10,000MJ, about 70% of the energy used over its lifetime, pretty much just as you said.
This is about a month or two worth of household electricity usage.
It is equivalent to driving somewhere between 1,000-5,000 miles in a car depending on whether it’s gasoline or EV.
I think my guess was somewhat close. If the average American is driving 10,000-15,000 miles per year per person in a gasoline car, we might surmise that buying a laptop is equivalent to about a month or two of an average person’s driving habits.
From what I can tell from a quick google search, producing one laptop is about 5-10,000MJ, about 70% of the energy used over its lifetime, pretty much just as you said.
This is about a month or two worth of household electricity usage.
It is equivalent to driving somewhere between 1,000-5,000 miles in a car depending on whether it’s gasoline or EV.
I think my guess was somewhat close. If the average American is driving 10,000-15,000 miles per year per person in a gasoline car, we might surmise that buying a laptop is equivalent to about a month or two of an average person’s driving habits.