@whitequark @hsivonen Some of these systems are quite hard to replace by efficient alternatives. I retired a 15 years old i386 fanless industrial pc with 2 eth, many serial and USB1 ports, screen, two SATA drives and a PCI port. It consumed ~15W.

To get the same DMIPS with less watt these days, you would probably need an ARM SBC, except most of those are missing the connectivity of a PC, have an out-of-tree kernel with no security updates and you are expected to design the case and the thermal management yourself, otherwise it will crash every week.

In the end, i replaced it with a modern PC with more DMIPS for the same wattage, hoping it will last ten years. Hardly a win for e-waste.