Given the awful environmental cost of "disposable tech", everyone should care about reducing waste and extending the working life of our hardware if only for that reason.
Of course it's also bad for society that we have so little effective competition in tech markets now that users think substandard products and user-hostile behaviours are normal. The race to the bottom is bad for everyone, and everyone being sold those products is being abused in the name of profit, whether or not any given individual is aware of how much it is happening to them or understands that better alternatives exist.
This attitude is the reason why we have so much e-waste. We need to stop treating technology as disposable.
"The worst-case scenario is I’ll get a new one if it stopped working for some reason." Sure, just chuck it in the trash and let it end up in the ocean—or dispose of it properly and it ends up in an e-waste pile halfway around the world.
I disagree. The difficulty of replacing tech changes one's relationship to one's devices. Things that I see people throw away as "e-waste" are really, "Things someone couldn't be assed to repair or repurpose." For example, broken TVs could be repurposed as large light panels (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JrqH2oOTK4), or their main boards could be hacked for fun and profit (https://hackaday.com/2022/11/14/a-single-board-computer-from...). When I see a broken TV, even one I don't own, that's where the pain comes from. Same with phones, laptops, etc. We throw away so mny perfectly good general-purpose computers, it's insane. When we run out of a necessary resource for their manufacture, will we just be scavenging them?
I agree. Electronic waste is only getting worse over the last decade, with everyone getting a new phone every year, new laptop etc. Even if everyone optimally buys/sells used, the devices still end up in landfills because the hardware is no longer supported. Not acceptable anymore.
for starters waste. Electronics aren't degradable and throwing hardware away prematurely does contribute a fair amount to the poisoning of the environment.[1] Not to mention that cheap is relative. Not everyone's on a software engineering salary. The last winter quite a few people in rich countries had to choose between food, rent and heating. Being able to replace a battery rather than buying a new laptop makes a lot of financial sense.
It is not just simply an environmental cost - there are other costs associated with the preponderance of disposable possessions, and the leaking over into the category of disposable of things that were once considered permanent.
To start with, it is simply wasteful for the reasons you describe. However it also contributes in a small way to the paradigm of exponential growth that permeates everything about human civilisation, which we as hackers know represents certain death.
EDIT: I'm not saying google have created a "disposable computer." However all this advertising definitely shifts us culturally in that direction.
I really hate the idea of buying semi-disposable items, particularly electronics. It just becomes one more item in the landfill, one more thing to replace with a newly manufactured version. We're seeing that with computers and it's becoming a real problem. It isn't that I don't love new things but part of the reason that new things are so nice is because the things we're manufacturing are not designed to last. If only there was more money in environmentalism. Then maybe some smart hackernewsers would produce solutions.
Being wasteful, in my mind, is wasting resources, energy, effort etc. for slight conveniences and superficial benefits. Most of the things people do are wasteful, but I think what's important is a matter of degree. And no, not being able to convince people to buy into that is completely irrelevant to the argument.
Where is the computer you were using before now? Chances are that someone else is using it, which more than cancels out any perceived efficiency gain. Chances are that you just threw it away, which is more detrimental to the environment than continued use. Maybe it's just collecting dust in your attic, where it will stay useless until any of the above two scenarios happen.
More importantly, I'd like to propose that what drives innovation in computer hardware is largely our attitude towards wastefulness. You couldn't sell and develop new hardware at such a rapid pace if people weren't readily throwing their old stuff away to have it replaced. I'm arguing that the whole process is wasteful, never mind that your machine performs better per Watt. Your old laptop probably had a greater cost to the environment in its manufacturing process and after you got rid of it than whatever energy you spent using it during its lifetime, and even more definitely the cost of manufacturing your current laptop was more than what you save by using it instead of the old one.
Let's get into farming, food production and food packaging if you still aren't convinced.
We can't have good things. There are so many products nowadays with pointless embedded disposable electronics that are impossible to recycle. It's absolutely nuts.
agreed. e-waste is a massive problem that most techies would rather ignore. most of our toxic electronic waste ends up in the third world, poisoning environments.
> public sector, developing countries, lower income groups
there are also people who think that the incessant production of e-waste through planned obsolescence is obscene and a crime against nature (and eventually ourselves). devices should be reparable, long-lived, upgradeable by design. and don't get me started on privacy and the grave risks from normalizing the ubiquitous collection of data.
no need to mention names but you can perfectly well be a "tech titan" and a moral dwarf. each tech company (and each one of their employees) must assume their responsibility for what kind of world they are (literally) engineering
If you're just realising this now I feel like I have some bad news for you. The whole hardware market (as green as it tries to be) is a big landfill creation machine.
The world of disposable electronics is definitely something we would be moving away from if we were smart enough to cooperate a bit as a species. We should be managing complete product life cycles for the best efficiency by way of recycling, reuse, durable designs, etc.
Are we normalizing throwing computers in a landfill when a $50 part dies, and it's only because the manufacturer was too cheap to upgrade their base model with another $10 in memory?
It's more obscene that they negatively impact the environment and artificially limit the lifespan of the devices by soldering the memory and the hard drive.
I'm sure the 'third world' is bracing for the ecological disaster this will create. Anybody with a device more than four years old will toss it right in the trash and buy something new.
Sure, it will create lots of devices for us *nix people, but that won't stop tens or hundreds of thousands of working computers going to "recycling". Of course, we don't actually recycle e-waste, we just put it on a barge and take it to SE Asia or Africa where children burn it to harvest the metals.
The "greenwashing" of new devices is harmful - the best thing we can do is continue to use the ones we already have, and make them more repairable and supportable. A big part of that responsibility falls to Microsoft, who has done something reprehensible here.
Of course it's also bad for society that we have so little effective competition in tech markets now that users think substandard products and user-hostile behaviours are normal. The race to the bottom is bad for everyone, and everyone being sold those products is being abused in the name of profit, whether or not any given individual is aware of how much it is happening to them or understands that better alternatives exist.
reply