Future circuit board material
evanh
Posts: 16,023
https://www.washington.edu/news/2024/04/26/recyclable-circuit-boards-vitrimer-pcb-e-waste/
Looks really neat. Dissolve the board, melt the solder - Rapidly separates components and all copper layers. Many components could be reused as new.
EDIT: I suppose components could be reused even now. No one much bothers though.
Comments
Neat idea. Though as usual, the sign has to be tapped: It's "reduce - reuse - recycle", in that order. The majority of e-waste I would think is caused by a) crappy engineering that causes premature failure b) crappy software that renders the device unusable. If those were solved, a large amount of electronics that end up getting binned would never have been manufactured in the first place and zero energy would have to be spent recycling them. The latter in particular is completely avoidable - phones and PCs from over 10 years ago would be perfectly fine to use now if not for bloat and arbitrary system requirements. Sometimes I wish writing bad software was punishable by medieval-style torture. At scale it really becomes a crime against humanity.
Too true.
More RAM is probably one of the prior big drivers of repeated new purchases. That might be slowing up somewhat now. 16 GB is pretty decent amount even for serious editing work. But then I'm not using Windoze bloat so maybe that's outgrowing even 16 GB.
I guess the GPU has been another driver for those playing games in particular. That creates a form of bloat in the size of the media and texture files.
HDDs filling up was also historically an issue. From all of the above. Not any longer, even SSD size is rarely of concern now.
As for me, I got a new 32 GB setup in 2017 and it's still sweet as. It's that same Ryzen 1700X we used for the XORO32 statistical testing before Chip locked it into the Prop2 instruction set. I keep telling myself the next upgrade is due but then check myself with the fact this thing is ticking along just fine. I have upgraded the GPU in the interim but a GPU wasn't part of the 2017 purchase so can be considered a late completion of the kit.
The latest one is pure FOMO from promoting of "AI" features. Not bloat, just gullibility. Time will tell if the sales pitch is effective.
Arguably, the big AI marketing ramp up could be exactly because these companies were previously struggling to find an angle to push for more sales of unneeded products.
Maybe AI will bring its own bloat too.
Wuerfel_21,
Companies do these things intentionally so that you keep coming back to them and they are not penalized for all the waste they generate.
I have a bunch of laptops that can not upgrade to Windows 11 because the processors are 'Too Old' and Windows 10 will stop updating in late 2025.
My Windows 8 laptop makes a great Linux Mint machine. Replaced hd with ssd and it does me proud.
Jim
Yeah, toss Windoze completely.
Of course, I know. It's really pointless, too. Like, these companies already have more money than they actually need. I think at some point people said "god is dead, we don't believe in made-up things like that" and then immediately started worshiping The Invisible Hand Of The Market instead. And to please The Hand, they sacrifice commodities to make The Line go up. That's my best guess as to why they do it.
If for some reason you really want, you can bypass the requirement checks (in both ways - new OS on old machine and old OS on new machine). The actual NT kernel and applications don't care. Last I heard the actual requirement is that you need the POPCNT instruction.