Edit: Jesus Christ, people. If you buy a $150 Thinkpad made by slave labor instead of a $1,200 MacBook made by slave labor, you're still supporting a capitalist economy based on slave labor. We all do. We have no choice. The number of smug liberals in the comments saying "well I buy a cheap used laptop" or "well I buy coffee beans and make my own coffee" are completely missing the fucking point.
Don't tell yourself your consumption is moral. All of us make unethical choices every day because there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Accept your shame and guilt and let it drive you to do better.
Oh shit, I wonder if that means the person in the original picture could have gotten that Mac secondhand for less than $1,200
I don't know how fancy that one is but I've pulled at least five working MacBooks from corporate ewaste. All were out of their absurdly-short OS support but Linux Mint (and I'm assuming a bunch of other distros) run great on them. I've handed all of them off since reinstalling but I liked the hardware enough to use one as a writing computer until someone needed it.
Yup, my last 2 MBP laptops have been from a junk pile and came to me free/cheap from a buddy who was able to grab a bunch.
All in all, everything I do on a laptop is in a webui, a terminal or within a remote VM so I mostly dgaf about what it can natively run, but the hardware is great and it can load the nix (and brew) package managers, so I really haven't found much that I want it to do that it can't. Hell, even games I can just Steam Link to another machine and play if I want.
My last job was disposing of a 2021 model and I was dumb enough to ask if I could have it rather than just taking it and got told no ... Sold for scrap by the pound! I could have left a 10$ bill in it's place and theyd have gotten more profit, fucking ridiculous.
Ugh, corporate eWaste. I do tech work for a company, and outside of getting verbal approval from someone high enough up to take home two monitors when we acquired another company and we were doing an all hands on deck full replacement of their gear, there's never been a way for me to recycle waste gear for personal use that wouldn't put my employment at risk.
No process for letting employees recycle or reclaim gear. Chuck it in the dedicated bin, once a month a third party recycler comes around, takes it away. Supposedly they wipe or destroy the drives, but no word on what they do with the rest of it. Can't find a damn thing on where/how they resell it, and I've spoken with the person in charge of purchasing and depreciating our hardware. Seen way too much hardware tossed that could go to great use, just not as a desktop anymore.
Like, my own collection of old hardware doesn't have anything in it newer than a decade old, and it's all budget stuff acquired from family.
Meanwhile there's four year old business grade desktops being effectively thrown away that I'm seeing go for $300 used. Just let me build my home network without going broke dammit!