[vanderZwan]

> after some time.

This is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this sentence.

What you're talking about is called the embodied energy of a product[0]. In the case of electronic hardware it is pretty staggeringly high if I'm not mistaken.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_energy

[speedgoose]

Yes it can be. Last time I did the maths for one of my use cases. It was a matter of a few years, when replacing a few old amd64 boxes by a single Mac mini.