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Comment by frollogaston | Hacker News Reader

I'm still not convinced that phone and laptop ewaste is a real problem. They're tiny. I've never actually thrown one away, they're just sitting around, taking less combined space than a nightstand drawer.

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that might be the case for individuals but not corporations and organizations that also have the most hardware. i know from personal experience that windows 11 hardware requirements e-wasted tens of thousands of mostly perfectly fine computer and that is just a single medium sized organization. counting that up to even just one country is an enormous amount of waste. not to mention all the wasted money better spend elsewhere even your taxes will inevitable be wasted on this.

But that's for tens of thousands of employees, who presumably don't have other jobs. And how long ago were those PCs produced?

yes but all those people also have devices at home. most of it around 5 years but that is hardly how long the hardware actually is usable especially if you use anything other than the bloated behemoth that windows has become.

reminder that you can get a 10 year old pc with an SSD and any linux disto that will perform as good or even better for most basic office work than modern windows 11 on modern hardware....

Like I said, the devices at home are tiny. Sum up everything if you want, home + work + idk a second job, it's very little.

if you think a single medium sized organization killing 5 digit amount of perfectly usable hardware (these are average sized ~3kg desktop pcs) simply because of software is very little there is no argument that could convince you. try counting that up in your head only for your city (the whole world runs windows!) to decide if that is still "very little".

The numbers are only meaningful per person. If you want to multiply by 10K, you have to multiply their other waste too for comparison. Also I said laptop+phone originally, not desktop, in part because not very many people have desktops.

your arbitrary way to count will not change the actual amount of e-waste but it might make you feel better. you should be hired for corpo green washing.

Sign me up, I'll just need a new Dell PowerEdge each year for Excel

Why didn’t the companies do the workaround for the hardware requirements?

Because they don't make money working around arbitrary limitations. It might save a bit, but don't make a lot.

because you not gonna do willy-nilly unsupported things on that scale or do you wanna be the one to explain why you are cutting corners to the CEO when there are issues?

This is another reason to run Linux instead of Windows. (Sadly, much easier said than done in large orgs.)

These perfectly good machines will likely be sold off eBay or similar, and / or go in bulk to poorer countries somewhere in Asia, where they are going to replace yet more ancient machines.

most of these will sadly go into the trash since donating them would cost more money than they are worth.

Can an organization that has “tens of thousands” of computers running Windows really be considered “medium sized”?

No. I think around 250 employees is in many locations considered large company. And above 500 or 1000 would certainly be such. So anyone with thousands such devices outside refresh cycle is certainly not medium sized.

google and similar corporations have well above 100 000 employees. calling 10 000 medium is perfectly accurate on that scale.

There are tremendous outliers here, although this feels like a good occasion to bring up the class size paradox: The vast majority of corps are small, but since so many people work for the extremely large ones, it may seem like they tend to be on the large side.

If you're asking how many people work in some large corp, I don't see a paradox. The corp size also doesn't matter here. There's 1 thrown away Win10 PC per employee whether it's a 100K employee company or 10 employees.

Corporations have a 2 to 3 year hardware refresh cycles, they throw away or donate PCs every cycle with or without Windows cut off.

That's not really true for laptops any more.

Its still holds for laptops. Corporations buy hardware with a 2 or 3 year warranty periods; once the period is over its more cost effective to replace than renew service warranty.

> I'm still not convinced that phone and laptop ewaste is a real problem.

I don't throw away phones or computers myself either, but a cursory Googling should be informative. From what I understand, it's a lot of "out of sight, out of mind" in wealthy countries.

Supposedly an average American throws away 1800lb per year, 46lb of which is ewaste, but that includes TVs and such. I can get upset about TV ewaste because those "smart" features are self-destructing otherwise good ones, and they're big. I had a new 70" Vizio TV get stuck in a permanent bootloop after 2.5 years.

It will be waste latest when you die

Yeah so when I die, there will be one small trash bag containing my entire life's phones and laptops. It could fit inside the coffin with me if it's such a problem. It's basically nothing compared to my general waste.

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