I wish it were easier to quantify the energy cost of building these newer more efficient devices, as opposed to repurposing existing hardware. When you add e-waste to the equation, it gets cloudier.
It would probably be better for the environment if we force software devs to optimize, so we could have all the modern goodies but using like 1/1000th of the energy to get there.
Back in the 80s and 90s, programmers would proudly shave off kB of code and use little hacks to pull every last bit out of limited resources. Now we run like 90 instances of a browser, requiring like 2 GB of RAM for a simple chat app :D
