In digital, pollution happens during construction way more than usage. It still makes sense to use a decade-old computer.
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
> It still makes sense to use a decade-old computer.
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.
A decade ago was 2013, the pentium 4 is at least 13 years old now, but entered production 23 years ago.
There's still a lot of utility to be had from a 10 year old machine. My daily driver laptop os a lenovo t420 which came out in 2011. Sure it can't play games but it'll do fine with youtube, programming, etc.
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.
If you have a need and you already own it - knock yourself out.
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.
Helpful thought process, as I've defaulted for a while to older machines I have around, but now I question how much power they're drawing. I've never really considered power more than how long do my laptop batteries last.
Do you have any pointers what sort of equipment to use to measure the power draw? Are you simply measuring it from a UPS?
These are always handy to have around. The first day with one is like the first day with a label maker. You test everything!
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.
The short answer - Live somewhere very hot and humid. In my case - Atlanta.
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.
Yep, I was talking about the environmental argument, where drawing 40W idle might not be that bad compared to what happened at construction. Especially when you can source electricity from low-impact sources.
Replacing really obsolete machines used as servers by RPI does certainly makes sense power-wise (as long as you don't need storage), so not arguing with the point you make about that.
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).
> Replacing really obsolete machines used as servers by RPI does certainly makes sense power-wise (as long as you don't need storage)
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).
My post was mainly answering to the OP comment and your follow-up.
> 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.
Sadly mine is not per-socket. I have an old APC that shows load in watts for the sockets under battery backup, and also load in watts for the entire load (it's split and offers overdraw protection to everything, but battery backup only to half the sockets on the back).
Usually I just leave the new machine as the only thing idling on the sockets without battery backup and compare the two.
I agree that extra pollution comes from manufacturing and said as much in my post already.
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.
I think we need to take a step back and see the big picture. There are 10-year olds computers sitting unused; as a whole, it can fill a percentage of usages.
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.
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 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.
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.
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'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.
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!
I still use a 2015 MacBook Pro daily. (Also have an Apple Silicon MacBook but I keep the Intel-based one downstairs and pretty much just use it as a web browser.) It's had its battery replaced (and the screen replaced under warranty for a defect) but it's just fine for my needs.
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.
> It still makes sense to use a decade-old computer.
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).
Manufacturing pollution is a localized problem. Using energy inefficient machines lead to more energy consumption and CO2 emissions that are threatening global climate.
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