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How do you recycle your old parts?
Any computer that you can upgrade its parts? SSD, RAM, Wifi cards, etc.
The only parts that wear out on a modern laptop are the SSD and the battery. If I replace those, I can use it basically indefinitely, paying the penalty on performance and energy consumption depending on how old the CPU is.
Why would I throw out (or recycle) a perfectly good computer if I could simply fix or upgrade it? If you're not reusing it, then you could pass it down to somebody who would use it.
20+ year old computers are e-waste at this point thanks to software bloating and lack of hardware acceleration for at least h.264.
15 year old computers are very usable, but unfortunately most use SATA for storage which is definitely not optimal for SSDs.
10 year old computers are from when PC tech plateaued, for most use cases the difference in performance is imperceptible, and maybe you lose power efficiency.
if the ssd is bricked you do need to replace the whole "logic board" tho which sucks
On my machines the limiting factor is not CPU, but memory and GPU speed. Low RAM and slow GPUs prevent me from running local AI models. These things will only get bigger over time. I wouldn’t expect a developer machine to still be useful 5 years from now with less than 16 or 32GB.
