I spend a lot of my free time messing around with old cars. Not often out of fun, but more to keep them on the road. They're relatively simple to fix, and as they work it reduces the need for me to replace them. If I take my old Corolla built in 1998, about every 6/7 years or 80,000 miles (which ever is first) it needs a new timing belt. The belt costs about £20, and it's a straightforward DIY job. From start to finish, changing the belt takes about 3 to 4 hours. If that belt breaks, it could result in a new engine*. The older a car gets, the more you rely on scrap yards to obtain an engine from, as an engine from the manufacturer is ridiculously expensive.
A brand new Ford Fiesta has what is called a wet belt. It's still a timing belt but it's submerged in oil. This method of design is used in Ford's Ecoboost engines which are used on a number of vehicles, and have been for a number of years now. Some of these cars are now coming up to the point where they need to be changed. Such an arrangement has been present in Ford cars for about 8/9 years now, and are often found in their low emissions vehicles. The job to change this belt is no longer a DIY job, it's stated to take 16 hours and requires special tools that the home mechanic just won't have (a torque magnifier for example). Such is the labour cost of this, these vehicles will either have the engine changed with a new one, or the vehicle will be scrapped. If the vehicle is scrapped (more than likely, given that a new engine would be many hundreds of pounds) then the consumer/owner will then purchase a new vehicle. A new vehicle which has to be built and shipped to the country where the user is.
Why am I talking about cars when we're on about the cloud? Well it's an example of the access the consumer has to repairing equipment they have, often equipment they rely on to work. New vehicles, much like new electronic devices, are provided to the consumer in ever more constricted ways to prevent the life of these objects from being extended. Sometimes by lack of parts, but more often than not what stops a consumer from using a device for longer is the complexity and cost of repair. I'm sure there will be a number of us here with memories of the big TV in the house going kaput, and being brought to a local chap who was able to fix it at a cost that didn't render the TV as scrap. Those people have practically vanished, as to them there is no money in it as the cost of repair outweighs the cost of replacement.
Even now, many of us will be in situations where the companies we work for have provided our colleagues with laptops that are landfill when a component breaks. RAM is often soldered on to boards now. TPM chips are known to go pop and render the OS itself useless. Instead of swapping a stick of RAM or chip with a new one, we're often forced to purchase a new motherboard. Even then, if the laptop is only 2 years old, cost of a new motherboard will often be more (or at least relatively equal) with the cost of a new laptop. So what happens? A new laptop is purchased as it doesn't make financial sense to fix the one we have. That isn't the company accountant setting the tone - it's manufacturers.
What's more is that there is an incessant need from cloud providers to sell themselves to us as problem solvers. Right now as I write this, I've seen an advert for an Alexa integrated coffee machine, with everyone going "Alexa make me a coffee". Except, Alexa doesn't put the cup in the machine. So you need to do that. And you still need to put the coffee pod in the machine. So all the Alexa integration has done to make the coffee making process easier is that it's taken away the need for the user to press a button. That's all it's done. Even with this, it wasn't even a week ago where Tesla drivers were locked out of their own vehicle from a network issue relating to Tesla's cloud operations. Instead of a physical key which rarely goes wrong, a cloud solution involving the internet and your phone is seen as better. Remember, of course, the internet and your phone are both liable to breakdown more often than a physical key.
In a very long way, what I'm saying is this: Cloud services, the incessant need for connectivity, the relative ease of companies to cut features using the cloud unless there is an equipment upgrade forced upon the consumer, the incessant need for equipment to rely on cloud services where there is no guarantee of 100% uptime or issue-free service, is creating landfill and driving the need for constant consumer equipment upgrades.
Let's cut the shit about the cloud being the saviour of the environment, with it's sheer presence meaning your laptop just isn't needed. The cloud is looking for problems to solve, and is often creating solutions for problems no one had. If you really, truly, cared about the environment - you would allow us to fix our equipment easily and at an acceptable cost. It's the one problem the world has that the cloud can't solve, and if it could, it would be the saviour of the environment.
*engines are, largely in Toyota's, non-interference. Meaning if the timing belt snaps on my Corolla it'll just stop working. But could then have a new belt fitted and the "timing" of the engine set back to what it should be. Not all manufacturers do this, like Ford, where their engines are interference. So when a belt breaks on those engines as I mentioned, catastrophic damage will occur often rendering the engine a glorified boat anchor