Power consumption is somewhat irrelevant if you live in a place where there is hydro or solar power - eWaste recycling is a huge environmental problem [1], and manufacturing has its own environmental footprint [2].
Buying used hardware is great, but really we should also be probably optimizing for performance-per-watt even with older hardware.
IMO the real issue is that most people just don't need more grunt than a 5-year-old machine is giving them at this point. What they really need is a solid state disk in the old hardware, and for Office and Chromium you'd never notice a difference. I still use a SATA SSD daily and while I've had NVMe in my work-supplied machines, for 99% of my workload it's just not even necessary.
Buying used hardware is great, but really we should also be probably optimizing for performance-per-watt even with older hardware.
IMO the real issue is that most people just don't need more grunt than a 5-year-old machine is giving them at this point. What they really need is a solid state disk in the old hardware, and for Office and Chromium you'd never notice a difference. I still use a SATA SSD daily and while I've had NVMe in my work-supplied machines, for 99% of my workload it's just not even necessary.
[1] https://eridirect.com/blog/2015/06/how-does-e-waste-affect-t...
[2] http://www.electronicstakeback.com/toxics-in-electronics/whe...