Even though pleased with my purchase, I was almost in tears during the journey home......!
I can sympathize. There are few things in life I vehemently despise as much as flippant technological waste that the damn vendors and manufacturers have lobbied, marketed, and brainwashed to instill into society like a cancer, to promote hyper-consumerism and their bottom lines. Apple is extremely guilty of this, and is even one of the first pioneers of this mentality.
If you put more than ten seconds of thought into it (which the average consumer doesn't), you can realize that an insane amount of work, design, prototyping, coordination, brainstorming, and testing goes into a single computer or phone. Any one of them, even a 1999 Compaq to a Nokia N82. Think about it, does any one of us know how to build an entire logic board with all its complexities and intricacies from scratch? How about a RAM chip, or a graphics card, let alone a processor? What about an SoC?
Because only after several years of use, and because the end user is usually computer-illiterate, and because they are newly aesthetically biased toward that new and shiny tower, phone, AIO, etc. they throw the "old" one away and make up excuses to justify it like "it's too slow", or "the OS was too old", or the worst one, "it's obsolete"... And then manufacturers like Intel quietly slip garbage like the Management Engine into their chips, and everybody is still too busy with their superficialities to care.
It's always unbelievably wasteful, and non-appreciative of just how far our knowledge and capability has advanced as a species, especially at its rapid pace in the technological world. As long as there's a decent marketing campaign, and a certain amount of purposefully applied stigma and misinformation, you can bet people will follow along. Meanwhile, recycling centers have the gall to claim ownership on abandoned and left-behind devices and machines, deliberately securing their unnecessary demise.
It makes me glad phenomenons like the single board computer are around now. They encourage an interest in the populace into what goes on behind the scenes, in hardware and software, so that there might be
just a little more value and appreciation for what people are lucky enough to possess, and even pass down and repurpose...