Obsolete

Yesterday I sold a computer.

An "old" computer - about 8 years, give or take. A Pentium 4 1.8 Ghz with half a gigabyte of RAM, etc, etc. It would probably have cost $750.

It still works. I installed Linux on it, and it boots, runs the latest version of Firefox - no problem.

But it was only "worth" $50 yesterday.

Hardware sales drive software sales; software sales drive hardware sales. It is in the interests of those writing software to keep bringing out new releases with more "features" (bloat), and those making hardware to make things faster to keep that bloat at bay.

It's not that easy, of course. Most users can do as much today with an iPhone, for example, as with that PC. Miniaturisation is amazing.

And in technology, a lot of things simply are *better* now - there is a lot of plastic junk, for sure, but Windows 7 is much better than XP, and the newest Ubuntu is very usable (at least, it was for me on the older hardware I installed it on - the Open Source folks have had time to get all the drivers in place so it just worked from the install CD..).

8 years ago, where were we? Well, a Pentium 4 1.8 - pretty inefficient. In 2001 I got an iBook G3/700MHz which was kinda cool, but kinda slow. The following year I got a Toshiba Satellite laptop with a 1.6GHz Celeron-M processor that was much faster. I guess I was just getting in to iTunes.

The web had intellitext pop-up advertising, but it was much leaner than today - broadband was available, but I didn't get it at home until 2003.

The truth is that, if you are just wanting to browse the web and send emails, you can use a Pentium 3 or original Athlon processor and be just fine (if your computer is not bogged down with bloat). My mother uses a Pentium 3/1.4GHz (which ironically is probably faster than the P4/1.8 I sold yesterday...).

And the crazy thing is that you can buy a Netbook for a couple of hundred dollars - that is, a small laptop. How can the used value of a desktop hold up, when you can get something that weighs a tenth as much, with screen, battery, warranty for so little?

It's a conundrum for me. I know the current model (make money; make more stuff, sell more stuff, make more money) promotes consumerism. I suppose this is where "real cost of" comes in - the cost of the $50 desktop to the environment is net $0 - it's already been made. Yes, it will need recycling, but of course it is better for it to be used than for a new netbook to be built.

I bought a printer last week, and paid a $5 recycling tax on it. I wonder how much relation that bears to the cost of recycling, or if it is just a flat percentage of the purchase cost? The printer was on sale ($70 or so for a printer/scanner... with wireless connectivity), does that mean the cost of recycling is also on sale? I guess it would be "too expensive" to do a proper analysis to see what the true cost of recycling would be for each product. I should research this.