Everything has their purpose in life. I don't think the comparison of underperforming or not performing at all to not be "serving its purpose" anymore. Not everything needs to be utilized or seen as a "waste". This is no different than the likes of like electricity, buying crap we don't need and never using it, etc.
Ask HN: Do you feel bad when devices aren't utilized to the extreme?
61–70 of 132 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you feel bad when devices aren't utilized to the extreme?
#62Do you feel bad when devices aren't utilized to the extreme? No. My devices are rarely utilizing over 40% CPU and tend to last for a very long time. I know it isn't much but this helps keep some gear out of the landfill. I can always find a use for older hardware. This Linux PC I am writing this post on is coming up on 12 years old and is more than adequate for my purposes. I expect it to last at least another 10 yea…
> This Linux PC I am writing this post on is coming up on 12 years old and is more than adequate for my purposes
it is very very likely wasting a ton of watts doing what a secondhand stick PC such as https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B08G1CCWN5 can do in less than 10 watts, so no, it is very much not adequate from a global point of view
Re: Ask HN: Do you feel bad when devices aren't utilized to the extreme?
#63I don't feel bad because I enjoy using technology myself. I realized a long time ago that the bigger waste of energy is caring about how other people use their own devices. For people my age, I can safely say that the Apple Mac vs Windows PC ads where they showed Apple being "better" is a big reason people care more than they should.
After gifting technology to some family members, I realized that what matters most at the end of the day is they enjoy using technology stress free. You could get away with non M1 MacBook Pros for presentations, but if using an M1 makes you feel good then you should use it.
If you're worried about e-waste, then pass down old technology. My sibling got a phone a lot younger than her peers because I love technology and when I switched to a new model, I passed it down. She didn't care about the specs, like 99% of the population she doesn't think about compute power.
Compute power isn't a limited resource in the world. If someone has a need for compute power, they will probably find a way to use old technology on their own. That's not something you should feel bad or worry about. I don't.
Re: Ask HN: Do you feel bad when devices aren't utilized to the extreme?
#64People using older devices uses much more energy to do at rest and mundane tasks, that alone is useful for having a newer more powerful device because they are efficient in power draw too.
Re: Ask HN: Do you feel bad when devices aren't utilized to the extreme?
#65I have started contributing to fold at home when I sleep with my 3000x series GPU and i9. It's something. I use the heat for overnight winter.
A few years ago I would sometimes play a few hours of Halo on my PowerMac G5 in the evening to heat up my room. It's an inefficient computer, but when the alternative is a resistive heater element it didn't feel so wasteful.
Re: Ask HN: Do you feel bad when devices aren't utilized to the extreme?
#66That's how consumer devices are intended to be used. The manufacturers don't give people what they need to troubleshoot, reconfigure or upgrade them. Most people don't know how to maintain a computer, so this makes sense. If you want to get more lifetime out of your computers, you have to get good at them. Realistically, that means switching to Linux.
And since Linux doesn't support 386s, and will soon not support 486, you also have to get good at installing and using nonmainstream or very old versions.
Re: Ask HN: Do you feel bad when devices aren't utilized to the extreme?
#67I would turn it the other way around. So many underpowered devices are produced that sit in drawers, collect dust, and end up in the landfill. For instance Intel makes "atom" devices that if they don't die early because of design flaws, they die early because they aren't really useful. There was a time when Intel was interested in having you buy a new computer because it was the best computer you ever had, now they a…
Are you talking about the Atom line of Intel CPUs? If so, I don't really understand this comment. Atoms are used in all kind of applications where low(ish) power x86 is required. They even support ECC RAM making them great fit for NAS and embedded servers deployed in the field. They may not shine as a general purpose CPU but they are definitely not ewaste.
I'll be fair and say that atom devices make much better NAS units than the MIPS and other off-brand CPUS in the 2000-2010 period which frequently did not have the horsepower to do even lightweight file server tasks. I remember finding some of these things provisioned with so little RAM that accessing files at all through Samba would lead to a swapping crisis that would make it take 20 seconds to list a directory, 5 seconds to open a file, etc. Atom-based NAS improve on that.
Re: Ask HN: Do you feel bad when devices aren't utilized to the extreme?
#68No. It's a stupid piece of silicon designed, manufactured and produced to serve a human need. Why would I care how well-utilised or idle it is?
Re: Ask HN: Do you feel bad when devices aren't utilized to the extreme?
#69No, because always running at maximum capacity is an indication that something has no room for failure, or for growth. I have a M2 MacBook Air with the most amount of RAM and storage that Apple would sell me. I'm sure its CPU sits at about 5% utilization almost the entire day. This was intentional on my part. I bought a laptop with enough "extra" capacity that it will be able to handle increased inefficiencies, bloat…
I have a 2014 macbook air that I got the best specs for at the time (8gb!).
It still works great, battery life isn't great but I've had no issues in the 9 years I've had it.
Re: Ask HN: Do you feel bad when devices aren't utilized to the extreme?
#70It would only be considered 'wasted' if energy was free. But energy is not free, and thus choosing how to use compute resources is still important. e.g. I own a few high powered workstations for fluid dynamics computations. If energy was free, I would be just running 'what-if' solves all the time just for the hell of it. But because energy isn't free, they stay in sleep unless I need them for what is deemed 'necessar…
For most consumer electronics devices, the energy that goes into manufacturing them vastly exceeds the total energy used during their lifetimes. In that sense (ignoring differences in emissions from different energy sources), from an environmental perspective it’s better to have fewer products running at a higher duty cycle (may not be applicable to high-performance workstations).