I’ve wondered this for a while now. I personally don’t upgrade until a machine fails or seems like it is about to fail, but aren’t there people who upgrade to a new laptop just to have the latest thing or because they want to run some non-free software with arbitrarily high hardware requirements? What happens to these still-working laptops that people replace? Not everyone is enough of a nerd to repurpose an old laptop as a file server or similar, so do people stuff them in a closet and forget about them, or do these machines become electronic waste? It seems like there must be a lot of these machines that could go to someone who could use one. Is there any sort of online or in-person place for donating laptops and other electronics? I know that recycling facilities exist in some places, and I know that there are secondhand stores, but what about somewhere to just give away machines that are no longer needed, or to sell them for only the cost of shipping? This seems important, but I’ve never seen such a thing. Does anyone here know of something like this?
(A bit of a ramble, but that’s how the words formed.)
I ran an XMPP chat server from an old laptop for about a year (switched to a VPS for reliability though).
My friend buys and restores old ThinkPads and sends them to the Ukrainian military (Army SOS program)
But I still have several laptops and smartphones laying around. A long time ago, I had an idea of running a pseudo-datacenter with low-spec devices like that, but I think that would be more of a responsibility and money sink. My coworker suggested using those devices for additional calculation power (for lambdas?) on cloud services during spikes. But I haven’t really looked into that.