As someone with a dual Opteron 6386SE sitting in a closet somewhere with 512GB of RAM… It was fun for a few weeks until I saw my energy bill. Was great in winter though as I didn’t need a heater on… Ever.

The pros of working in a tech company where they decommission shit and just ask who wants it

It’s all very arbitrary and depends on the definition of computer for the individual.

Ultimately it does, I think, come down to practicality. Can I still use this thing to get what I need to do done, and can I still do it securely?

The security part can be more or less important depending on computer, as well. If you’re a Mac person, your machine may be obsolete as soon as Apple decides to stop giving you security updates. If you’re a Linux person, you can probably maintain a secure system easily on 10-15 year old hardware.

oh boy… i ask myself this a lot. i frequent the puppylinux community and dudes are out there slanging 32bit computers with sub 1gb ram all the time… much like others have echo’d, the answer seems to be when the computer dies.

For me, inability to run a modern/secure OS. Yay Linux!

When it’s slow and when I open up recent programs it locks and shuts. I’ve changed two computers in 25 years for that reason. I think the first one was for GTA III. Fortunately, there are no more games that are worth changing a PC.

IMO a computer is obsolete when it can no longer run any desired programs. My laptop for example has outlived my much beefier desktop since the laptop is basically just used for web stuff while my desktop is used for gaming, development, and the like. Especially gaming has had a significant increase over the years and a gaming PC might be rendered obsolete much faster than something used for the web. My old gaming PC that was rendered obsolete I repurposed to be a server and it works well for its new purpose and will probably live for a couple of years still.

So there isn’t any concrete limit on which you can say a computer has become obsolete. It is more of a subjective assessment of whether the computer can fulfill its tasks to a satisfactory degree.

At the physical level: capacitors age and blow up, batteries stop charging.

At the efficiency level: when the work you want to do uses more energy on an older platform than on a newer platform.

At the convenience level: when the newer device is so convenient you never use the old device, telephone versus desktop as an example for most people.

After reliability level: if you’re constantly replacing things on a unit, where it becomes your part-time job.

The longest used devices tend to be embedded industrial devices. They have a job they keep doing that job and until they break they’re going to do that job forever. And that’s application specific computing.

Most home users are general computer users, so they have a mix of different requirements, support and use cases. I for one still use a 10-year-old laptop. And it’s totally fine.

In a very blunt answer in my specific case - the moment it can no longer serve as a DNS server. Which is a very low bar.

I’d say that, for me, a computer gets moved down the chain. From a daily driver, to something I use more sporadic, and then on to become a server of some kind hosting light weight stuff on my LAN. And then eventually it becomes a question of if it’s worth the electricity bill having such inefficient old hardware running 24/7.

There are a lot of good suggestions in the replies here, aren’t there?

I was going to say that I’ve been doing a lot of self-hosting and home automation recently, and it’s had me doing things like spending a lot of time finding out if I can run Linux on an old Apple TV, to make it yet another home server running containers. I went through a phase where I was considering disassembling old laptops to re-use their LCD panels as mounted control access points around the house.

However, the LCD thing never went anywhere, because I’m not handy with a soldering iron, but also because I’ve found that those laptops are usually newer than the ones people in my family tend to have (me being in software and having cycled through laptops frequently), and I’ve been re-installing friendlier Linuxes on them and giving them away to friends and family.

I wonder about the other devices, though. Many are certainly not low-power-use, and what’s the impact of me continuing to use them? Headless, most are certainly capable of running at least one containerized service, but a newer ARM or RISCV board will almost certainly sip less. What’s the environmental trade-off?

I have, though, only one tower. I built it in 1993, and have simply upgraded it with new MBs and components over time. It’s main feature turned out to be it’s usefulness as a RAID5 container, again upgraded with increasingly larger HD over the decades, until the point where I stated prodominantly using docked laptops. One move, I simply never set it up again. That one is a power-hungry monster, and I feel bad about having it powered on 24/7. But I still keep it because, sentiment.

Annecdotes aside, my answer to your question is: most computers can run Linux, and therefore, most computers could find a use in self-hosting. For me it’s become more a question if whether I have, or can find, a use for it. Often, a conversation with family results in finding a use; setting up a self-hosted media-server for mom, maybe. If not, it becomes e-waste, and I feel bad for a bit. But my devices have tended to be small form-factor, like Vera or AppleTV; it sounds like yours are larger, and maybe the form factor makes them less desirable to reuse.

When you no longer can find a use for it.

You should only get rid of computers when your home, your parents’ home, and your parents’ garage have all run out of space. My parents’ garage used to be an industrial building and is about as big as the house, so can fit many ancient computers.

13 year old kids on Twitter.

For me, it’s the hardware failure. If it’s damaged enough to be uncomfortable to use, it’s done. Similarly, if it can’t run a modern browser decently.

I just ditched a >10yo laptop that I used as a server. The display was off most of the time, and the battery offered some energy backup. Its last months I couldn’t even use the power button, had to take the mobo battery out and connect it without the battery in order to turn it on. Touchpad wasn’t working either. OS hard drive was failing but that was replaced. I’m sure the thing works fine but I can’t find the right flex cables to connect the power button and touchpad to the mobo. Guess it’s going to trash soon.

Power usage is a massive one for me. I go by £1/W/Year for consumption of always-on devices. (I think it’s more like £3/W/Year now!)

If the 20w new server can do the same work as the 100w server, and will cost me less over 2 years including the purchase price, then the old server is obsolete.