My dad is restoring a 1969 MG Midget. The right turn signal stopped working. Using nothing more than a voltmeter, I found a disconnected wire and a short to the frame.
I replaced the entire length of wire that was failing with $3 worth of wire, solder, and heat shrink tubing.
The lesson here is repairability and simplicity.
We’re constantly lectured to be “environmentally aware” by companies that no longer ensure their products will last a lifetime. There is 0 reason a modern phone couldn’t be used for the rest of your life. My Brother printer is nearing 12 years and is still on the same damn print cartridge. My Neato robotics vacuum has had countless parts replaced and is about the same age.
If you truly want to be a good steward of the earth, stop demanding/consuming latest and greatest, endless product and UI refreshes, and instead demand 30+ years out of a product (with small repairs).
Even with replaceable batteries, there's still https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law
It would be nice if we had mobile and desktop OSes that didn't get increasingly bloated with time, slowed down, were abandoned by the vendors and were messy in plethora of other ways.
My Android phone doesn't get security updates by the manufacturer, just a few years after the release, which is horrible in the case of RCEs (like the WebP one). I can't install a newer version or a custom ROM because of a locked down bootloader (without exploits) and even then drivers are a big issue. Some of my older hardware wouldn't even be compatible with desktop OSes like Windows 11 because of the whole TPM debacle.
Other than that, digging up my old Android phone with Android 2.1 on it, or maybe my old E8400 CPU from 2008 would yield really bad experience in both cases. Could devices from over a decade ago be viable choices, if the software didn't get exponentially more wasteful? Perhaps, but that's not the reality that we live in, neither for desktop PCs, nor phones.