Forget the cost, but the waste!
> That was my homework: go away and think of an immediate reason not to smoke. When I came back, I had my answer ready: “I spend two laptops per year on smokes. That money goes directly to the dirtiest companies on Earth, the literal inventors of the science-denial playbook that is responsible for our inaction on climate change. Those companies’ sole mission is to murder me and all my friends. I’m going to quit smoking and I’m going to buy a laptop this year and every year hereafter, and I’ll still be up one laptop per year.”
"With all the money you've spent on cigarettes in your lifetime, you could have bought a Ferrari."
"Do you smoke?"
"No."
"Then where's your Ferrari?"
It's a good question. Most of us have the financial capability to be extremely extravagant with a few select areas of our life, but instead we average everything down to boring mediocrity.
There is a severe ecological impact to the wider environment that comes from electronics, let's not kid ourselves. That doesn't mean buying electronics makes you like, a terrible person, but if you're sitting around prostheyzing on blogs like Doctorow about how these companies are killing you, it's a bit funny to essentially go from a thing that kills people you know in the first world to one that only kills people in the third world you never cared for. Modern comforts like cutting edge electronics have extreme externalities. Like, okay, let me just throw the "murders people I care about" problem over the fence, where it will surely not be an issue for all those people halfway across the planet from me (that I coincidentally do not care or think about.)
In general I'm not trying to be too hard. It's not like anyone else deals with this level of cognitive dissonance much better, and I say that as someone who mostly quit cold turkey over a year ago...
I feel like you're not really representing his argument on why he quit fairly. He does talk about the effects of tobacco on the developing world for one and also his overall reason seems to be more relating to the wider idea of tobacco companies being pioneers in the misinformation industry.
Otherwise it's always Sure, I'll quit - tomorrow
Willpower is a muscle. It fatigues. So simply willing your way out of an addiction is not effective for many people.
What a stupid comment. He saved the money and spent it on what he wanted. The hell?
He should save the money and you should call your grandmother.
The cigarettes are probably better for Nature since you'll live a shorter life.
After the fourth or so time of doing this, and after getting higher-paying jobs, I ended up biting the bullet for a more expensive computer, and it lasted me five years, and I only replaced it because I wanted more RAM.
Point is, if you're lower-income, it's fairly easy to get stuck in the "one laptop a year" trend, because, while probably a better deal in the long term, it's really hard for lower-income to justify a multi-thousand dollar expense. I'm a proper tech bro now so buying a good computer isn't the worst thing in the world for me, but that wasn't always the case.
I got a business class laptop in 2007 for probably 3 times as much. That laptop lasted me until last month. I maxed out the RAM and replaced the HD with an SSD about 7 years ago, but it was ultimately the now-anemic CPU and graphics that got me to buy a replacement. I'd have replaced it last fall but laptop stocks were too low.
I think there's more junk at the low end to avoid, but it's not as if the high end doesn't have a lot of junk to avoid. Either way, you have to do careful shopping.
It's like just my opinion, but a lot of higher end laptop spending seems to be on increasing the screen's DPI, which is then run with scaling, at the cost of more CPU, more RAM, more GPU, and more software BS. Buying a cheaper laptop with fewer pixels that just runs 1:1 saves all that extra computation and BS, and maybe looks a bit less nice. Sometimes glossy screens are reserved for the high cost laptops, which is like wait, I want a matte screen, so I have to save money to get one, great!
For example, I used to have an Asus computer whose plastic surrounding the screen decided to start coming detached from the monitor flap. This made the laptop substantially more fragile and annoying to use, and after a certain point I tried to remedy this with gorilla glue and it led to this ugly mess on the bottom left corner. The laptop still "worked" in the sense that still did computation, but it was crappier. Then the 7 key broke off the keyboard, I was unable to put it back on, so I just decided I didn't need the 7 key, since I didn't type 7 that often, and when I did I could still hit the little switch. Again, the laptop still "worked" in the sense that it still did computation, but it was crappier. A bunch of other stuff ended up happening (e.g. the LED for the backlight started to go out and become this flickery mess, the connector to the battery didn't always seem to make contact, etc).
Stuff like that starts to add up, and "experience" is substantially more difficult to quantify. I bought an expensive Macbook, and I never had any issues outside of the inevitable "moores law" depreciation.
I hope that keeps going. I used a macbook for work for almost 8 years, and they did OK, but I had one that decided not to take external power and the hard drive wasn't removable, thankfully I noticed it wasn't charging while it was near full so I could pull a backup to a spare work hand. And then there was the year where iTunes would have a 25% chance of spewing high volume digital noise at me instead of playing music. I guess that was a software problem because it went away with the next major OS X release, but no useful forum contents. I think there was something else bothersome too, but not sure anymore.
Either way, you'll pay about as much for a used ThinkPad in good condition with good specs as you would for a new HP Stream or other cheaptop.
Tangential, but a bit of a lifehack I figured out awhile ago is that corporations dump off old servers on eBay for basically nothing, and most servers allow you to install a regular desktop graphics card in there. Servers usually have a lot of CPUs and a lot of RAM, so 9 years ago when a broke me needed enough power to do cool stuff on the computer, I would go buy a used server on eBay, and it was good enough for video processing and editing and gaming and distributed computing experiments...as long as I remembered to turn it off when I wasn't using it. Whenever I would accidentally leave it on for a few days, I would end up increasing my power bill by ~$40, a lot of money when you don't have much.
Still, it's a trick I still use occasionally, even now that I make decent money. I semi-recently bought a 48 core, 128gb RAM server for around $400, which I use for any big computing experiments. Could I just spin up an AWS box with these specs? Probably, but I think there is value in being able to have the hardware locally.
Four cores and 12gb of RAM would make a pretty solid build server, with enough room left for a Minecraft and video streaming server to boot! Sounds like a pretty awesome find.
It's a little less visible for laptops than for, say, kitchen appliances, but even there my thinkpad x220 was bought and upgraded for €400 in 2015, and it did its job well untill half way this year.
> The environmental consequences of that system weren't lost on me, even given my very good track-record of re-homing my old computers with people who needed them.
He traded smoking for buying a new laptop every year. Now that it's been years, I guess he could quit and not buy a new laptop. But also people do more wasteful things. I do understand though, I drive laptops into the ground over many years but still 4-5 years per laptop
And they last for years and years, and I doubt the cost:performance:longevity ratios can be beat.
I worked with a guy who practiced this with all his personal hardware.
I replace my phone and laptop and iPad every year. I know people who replace their car and wardrobe and luggage every year, too.
In laptops and mobile devices in general, annual updates make a lot of sense as power efficiency is still regularly increasing. The M1 Air, is, for example, a fucking marvel. It's been out for way less than a year. I have an M1 Air, and will upgrade it again in less than a year when the Mx (where x > 1) Macbook Pro comes out.
> The environmental consequences of that system weren't lost on me, even given my very good track-record of re-homing my old computers with people who needed them.
They can just sell the laptop and someone else will use it. For example, I almost never buy new laptops, as perfect Linux support generally lags behind.
Not really that uncommon especially with a MacBook Pro where a new one is released...every year.
How much sense it makes, that's another story.
If you buy a $2000 Mac and use it for as long as reasonably, it's going to depreciate by several hundred dollars (let's say, roughly $300) a year. At a certain point it's worth nearly zero, and you must buy a new laptop. After 6-7 years your total outlay is $2000.
Alternatively, every year or two you can sell the old one for a few hundred dollars less than the new model, and buy the new model. You always have a new laptop. And your total outlay is still only about $2000. Plus you are covered by free AppleCare every time you buy the new one.
Plenty of people do this with mobile phones and automobiles and other things as well.
Please note that I am not advocating it. I was still using my 2015 laptop until very recently. But economically it is not necessarily insane.
(Assuming you are selling the old laptops, that is. It's not clear to me that the author is doing that. He says he's donating/rehoming them. Not sure if that includes selling)
Though, with Macs, it's trivial - their migration tool is peerless. (As one would certainly expect and demand: since they control the whole software/hardware stack)