You recently wrote about buying clothes that last. Is there a method to buying tech that lasts?

Tech has a tremendous footprint. One estimate by the Lawrence Berkeley Lab said it took 70 billion kilowatt-hours in 2014, or nearly 2 percent of the total electricity generation in the United States that year, just to run the internet.

And then, of course, there are the materials used to create tech. The lithium-ion batteries that are in so many things, like my smartwatch, my cellphone and your earbuds, typically contain cobalt, which was potentially mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo using forced child labor and in conditions that hurt both people’s health and the environment.

Many companies will say their phones are recyclable, but even when they are recycled (and that process can be incredibly environmentally polluting as well), the metal is generally too low a grade to go into a new phone. All of which, yes, points to a need for tech that lasts.

I don’t know if there’s a method as detailed as the one I laid out in my article on clothes. I can say I tend to hold on to electronics for years — I once had a laptop that lasted nine years. Toward the end, people teased me about it because it was, physically speaking, a brick. I got my workout carrying that thing around.

Part of the reason it lasted so long was that I bought a machine that was faster, had a larger hard drive and could expand its memory more than I needed. So as software and the internet evolved to require more memory and higher processor speeds, the computer could handle it.