Dear fellow members, Distinguished guests,

Good morning.

12 December 2020, I attended an offline workshop organized by Shanghai Linux User group in Mushroom Cloud Space. The workshop was exciting, and what was more exciting was the laptop I brought to the workshop.

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It was a Tongfang K42A. The young hackers in the workshop screamed “wah”: How thick is it - almost three 3 times of a slim modern laptop they have. It has an Intel Centrino CPU - some never heard it. The leather feel is good - why don’t we have it now?

It was a rather old laptop that I bought in 2013 for about 4000 Yuan.

How many of you have a laptop? How often do you buy a new one?

Being an office worker – I always reasoned that I needed a decent computer and that my employer needs to pay for that quality. I change to a new laptop about every 4 years which costed around 15,000 Yuan – roughly 4000 Yuan per year.

I have been using desktop computer at home. The Tongfang laptop is the first brand new personal laptop I bought for myself.

In 2017, my Tongfang laptop’s hard drive was broken. I decided not to buy a new laptop. Instead, I purchased online for 100 Yuan hard drive and 100 RAM which did everything that I wanted and needed. Including a new battery, a new keyboard and a simple hardware upgrade, I invested less than 500 Yuan.

I even bought another second hand laptop for 800 Yuan as a backup machine. So far these machines are running well for 4 years, which will cost me less than 400 Yuan per year. That’s more than 10 times less than the cost of my company laptops.

In this speech, I explain my motivation for not buying any more new laptops, and how you could do the same.

• Energy and material use of a laptop

Not buying new laptops saves a lot of money, but also a lot of resources and environmental destruction. According to the most recent life cycle analysis, it takes 3,010 to 4,340 mega joules of primary energy to make a laptop – this includes mining the materials, manufacturing the machine, and bringing it to market.

Each year, we purchase between 160 and 200 million laptops. Using the data above, this means that the production of laptops requires a yearly energy consumption of 480 to 868 petajoules, which corresponds to between one quarter and almost half of all solar PV energy produced worldwide in 2018 (2,023 petajoules). The making of a laptop also involves a high material consumption, which includes a wide variety of minerals that may be considered scarce due to different types of constraints: economic, social, geochemical, and geopolitical.

The production of microchips is a very energy- and material-intensive process, but that is not the only problem. The high resource use of laptops is also because they have a very short lifespan. Most of the 160-200 million laptops sold each year are replacement purchases. The average laptop is replaced every 3 years (in business) to five years (elsewhere). My 4 years per company laptop experience is not exceptional. However,

• Laptops don’t change

A 2015 research paper discovered that the embodied energy of laptops is static over time.

The scientists disassembled 11 laptops of similar size, made between 1999 and 2008, and weighed the different components. Also, they measured the silicon die area for all motherboards and 30 DRAM cards produced over roughly the same period (until 2011). They found that the mass and material composition of all key components – battery, motherboard, hard drive, memory – did not change significantly, even though manufacturing processes became more efficient in energy and material use.

The reason is simple: improvements in functionality balance the efficiency gains obtained in the manufacturing process. Battery mass, memory, and hard disk drive mass decreased per unit of functionality but showed roughly constant totals per year. The same dynamic explains why newer laptops don’t show lower operational electricity consumption compared to older laptops. New laptops may be more energy-efficient per computational power, but these gains are offset by more computational power.

• The challenge

All this means that there’s no environmental or financial benefit whatsoever to replacing an old laptop with a new one. On the contrary, the only thing consumers can do to improve their laptop’s ecological and economic sustainability is to use it for as long as possible. This is facilitated by the fact that laptops are now a mature technology and have more than sufficient computational power. One problem, though. Consumers who try to keep working on their old laptops are likely to end up frustrated. I shortly explain my frustrations below, and I’m pretty confident that they are not uncommon.

Let’s have a look at

• four new laptops I used from 2007 to 2018

** My first laptop: Compaq

In 2007, when I was working as a senior software developer, I got my first laptop, a Compaq evo. Little more than three years later, the charger started malfunctioning. When informed of the price for a new charger, I was so disgusted with Compaq’s sales practices – chargers are very cheap to produce, but Compaq sold them for a lot of money – that I refused to buy it. Instead, I applied for a new laptop from my employer, which is my second laptop.

** My second laptop: IBM ThinkPad T400

In 2010, the company changed my Compaq to an IBM ThinkPad T400, actually it was a Lenovo ThinkPad T400 because Lenove bought IBM’s PC business in 2005. The laptop was the actual standard for developers in the company. The laptop was good to use. More importantly, the entire machine was built to last, built to be reliable, and built to be repairable. Every component in the laptop could be screwed off and replaced.

This machine was changed to my third laptop in 2015 according to company IT policy, plus its battery was broken.

** My third laptop: Lenovo Thinkpad T430

My third new laptops was the company Lenovo Thinkpad T430. This was not cheap. However, the operating system Windows 7 gave me big headache - it crashed randomly with the famous blue screen. The service could not figure out what was the cause.

I changed my employer in 2018 and got my fourth laptop.

** My fourth laptop: Lenovo Thinkpad X1

My new employer used Lenovo Thinkpad X1 as standard machine for Research and Development department. This was a slim machine, but the new laptops were of inferior quality compared to older laptops, even if they carried a much higher price tag.

The operating system was Windows 10, and it also had blue screen once in a while.

Then

• I stopped buying new laptops since 2017

** How to make an old laptop run like it’s new

Not buying any more new laptops is not as simple as buying a used laptop. It’s advisable to upgrade the hardware, and it’s essential to downgrade the software. There are two things you need to do:

1. Use low energy software

My current laptops all run on GNU/Linux, to be brief we call it GNU, with several distros, specially designed to work on old computers. The use of a GNU operating system is not a mere suggestion. There’s no way you’re going to revive an old laptop if you stick to Microsoft Windows or Apple OS because the machine would freeze instantly. GNU does not have the flashy visuals of the newest Apple and Windows interfaces, but it has a familiar graphical interface and looks anything but obsolete. It takes very little space on the hard disk and demands even less computing power. The result is that an old laptop, despite its limited specifications, runs smoothly.

Having used Microsoft Windows for a long time as an employee, I find GNU operating systems to be remarkably better, even more so because they are free to download and install. Furthermore, GNU operating systems do not steal your personal data and do not try to lock you in, like the newest operating systems from both Microsoft and Apple do.

1. Replace the hard disk drive with a solid-state drive

In recent years, solid-state drives (SSD) have become available and affordable, and they are much faster than hard disk drives (HDD). Although you can revive an old laptop by merely switching to a light-weight operating system, if you also replace the hard disk drive with a solid-state drive, you’ll have a machine that is just as fast as a brand new laptop. Depending on the storage capacity you want, an SSD will cost you between 200 Yuan (256 GB) and 900 Yuan (1 TB).

Installment is pretty straightforward and well documented online. Solid-state drives run silently and are more resistant to physical shock, but they have a shorter life expectancy than hard disk drives. It seems that both from an environmental and financial viewpoint, an old laptop with SSD is a much better choice than buying a new laptop, even if the solid-state drive needs replacement now and then.

1. Spare laptops

Meanwhile, my strategy has evolved. I have bought a second hand laptop for a similar price, to use as spare laptops. Now I plan to keep working on these machines for as long as possible, having more than sufficient spare parts available. I had a spare laptop ready and started using that one whenever I needed or wanted to work outside.

I have all my data on a 256 GB SD-card, which I can plug into any of the Thinkpads that I own. I then make monthly backups of the SD-card, which I store on an external storage medium, as well as regular backups of the documents that I am working on, which I temporarily store on the drive of the laptop that I am working on. This has proven to be very reliable, at least for me: I have stopped losing work due to computer problems and insufficient backups.

The other advantage is that I can work on any laptop that I want and that I’m not dependent on a particular machine to access my work. You can get similar advantages when you keep all your data in the cloud, but the SD-card is the more sustainable option, and it works without internet access.

• The costs

Let’s make a complete cost calculation, including the investment in spare laptops and SD-card, and using today’s prices for both solid-state drives and SD-cards, which have become much cheaper since I have bought them:

ThinkPad T400: 500 Yuan
ThinkPad T400 spare laptop: 500 Yuan
2x replacement batteries: 100 Yuan
2x 256 GB solid-state drive: 400 Yuan
256 GB SD-card: 200 Yuan
Total: 1700 Yuan

Even if you buy all of this, you only spent 1700 Yuan. For that price, you may be able to buy the crappiest new laptop on the market, but it surely won’t get you two spare laptops. If you manage to keep working with this lot for ten years, your laptop costs would be 170 Yuan per year. You may have to replace a few solid-state drives and SD-cards, but it won’t make much difference.

** Don’t take it too far

Although I have used my Thinkpad T400 as an example, the same strategy works with other Thinkpad models and laptops from other brands (which I know nothing about). If you prefer not to buy on auction sites, you can walk to the nearest pawnshop and get a used laptop with a guarantee. The chances are that you don’t even need to buy anything, as many people have old laptops lying around.

Your choice of laptop also depends on what you want to do with it. If you use it mainly for writing, surfing the web, communication, and entertainment, you can do it as cheaply as I did. If you do graphical or audiovisual work, it’s more complicated, because in that case, you’re probably an heavy user. The same strategy could be applied, on a somewhat younger and more expensive laptop, but it would suggest switching from other operating system to a GNU operating system. When it comes to office applications, GNU is clearly better than its commercial alternatives.

** This is a hack, not a new economical model

Significantly, hardware and software changes drive the fast obsolescence of computers, but the latter has now become the most crucial factor. A computer of 15 years old has all the hardware you need, but it’s not compatible with the newest (commercial) software. This is true for operating systems and every type of software, from games to office applications to websites. Consequently, to make laptop use more sustainable, the software industry would need to start making every new version of its products lighter instead of heavier. The lighter the software, the longer our laptops will last, and we will need less energy to use and produce them.

This is why and how I stopped buying new laptops. If you need further advice, I can help.

Thank you.