I think this kind of comment represents a little bit of denial about e-waste.

You call it “old but capable” but it’s really more close to just “old.”

We really want tech to be less disposable but the problem is that tech is still progressing fast.

Automobiles have barely changed in the past few decades as a fundamental concept and in general capability and road-worthiness and that’s why you see a lot of 20-30 year old examples on the road.

But imagine that buying a 2000 Volkswagen Jetta meant a car that had a 20 horsepower engine that gets 20mpg. That’s what old tech devices are often like. Sure, you can use it as a glorified gas-guzzling golf cart, but not many people need that and they’d rather just get a golf cart if they do.

A 2013 iPad Air is not going to be a very usable experience as the device was originally intended even if you get suitably lean software on it.

This is a dual core device with 1GB of RAM. At this point it can barely browse the web in an acceptably performant way. We can lament our inefficient web apps and fuss and moan but if grandma can’t get her slippers from Amazon without waiting half a century for the page to load it’s not a useful device anymore.

Sure, you can use it as a server or something, or maybe some kind of smart display, it would work fine. But let’s go back to the golf cart analogy: presumably the original XX million units that were sold can’t all be web servers or smart home screens. The quantity of people who originally bought them for the original mainstream purpose have moved on to something newer and aren’t looking for a niche secondary use case. You have to be a very specific person to try to fit that square peg into a round hole.

I have been a user of the OpenCore Legacy patcher. I bought a 2012 Mac mini, excited that I could use it as a Mac server with the latest OS. The experience was sluggish at best even with a brand new SSD installed and RAM maxed out. I also had random kernel panics that I couldn’t resolve. So I ditched the Mac server idea and installed Linux. I went with that for a while but it turned out to have insufficient single core performance for my applications. The architecture also couldn’t accept more RAM even if I found higher capacity sticks, the technology was completely at the limits. I ended up selling it and built a server with much newer (but still mostly used) parts instead.

The calculus for reuse gets even worse if you start thinking about performance per watt and energy efficiency. There are some devices especially in the desktop category where you get to 15 years old and you have a real legitimate “I’ll save more energy and cost on my power bill” argument.

E.g., Let’s say I own an AMD FX 9590 (2013) with its 220W TDP, I can replace that with an Intel N355 15W embedded class chip and it’ll be faster by a double digit percentage with the same number of threads. I know this is an extreme example but it’s still a demonstrator in the amount the technology has changed.

This would be like if my 2013 Toyota got 2mpg.

I think we need to be more pragmatic and accept these devices for what they are: a temporarily owned thing, almost like a lease. They aren’t all that different than buying some fast food that comes in disposable packaging, the difference is the time scale. Once you’ve eaten it, you’ve consumed it, and it’s over. There’s maybe a bit of material you can recover at the end, let’s call it 10%. And we have to grapple with that reality rather than pretending we can fully change it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to argue against right to repair. Yes, they should have things like replaceable components and a requirement to become more open as they age. They should be designed to be as usable as possible when they become older. At the same time, we should be pragmatic and accept that the most likely scenario is that a device like a 2013 iPad Air will still only see 5-10% of buyers reusing the device in this way rather than sending it to the bin even in the most ideal scenarios. Of course, that number is a lot better than some smaller number like 1-5%, with many iPads being thrown out as soon as the battery swells.

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