I was going to disagree with you, but a back of the envelope calculation shows that the energy of computer production is probably equivalent to that of a few hundred hours of use, and so if you can save 10% on energy you are probably environmentally justified in switching to a new device. This is very counterintuitive to me.
To first order the upper bound for carbon cost of production/recycling is going to be a multiple of the energy required to melt the components. Call that multiple four: production of raw materials + reshaping in factory + recycling of materials at EOL + energy cost for assembly. So a rough upper limit of the energy to switch a computers would be four times the energy to heat the computer's mass in water (4 J/gC) up to the melting point of silica (1900 C), and a rough lower bound would be the same using the heat capcity and melting point of iron (10x lower heat capacity, 1500 C), and neglecting assembly. For 1 kg of material, that gives a range of 1.8 and 32 MJ. Now you can compare to the energy used. For myself, I'm on a 2 kg laptop that draws up to 250W, but conservatively 50W. That adds up to 32 MJ/kg in 400 h. If I can reduce the energy use by 5W with a new model, that will pay itself back in 2 years of workday computation. Crazy.
Caveat: there will be additional non-CO2 environmental costs. Most components are not recycled, and resource extraction is also environmentally damaging.
Your comment inspired me to search harder, and I found what I believe to be credible evidence that some of the MRLS missiles targeted at Kharkiv contained cluster munitions. I would retract my above comment.
While Russia is committing war crimes, they have not used cluster bombs. AFAIK this claim is based on a report that they were deploying cluster bombs against a civilian mall in Kharkiv. The video shows rapid explosions falling on the mall, but not as rapidly as one would expect to see if cluster bombs were used. Most likely it was Grad (MRLS) missiles. Still likely to be a war crime, but not cluster bombs.
OP was describing very high-spec hardware which locks up and becomes unresponsive under their normal workload, potentially losing work or wasting their time. That seems like a much more significant issue than inconsistent font display or the feel of the input device.
Your experience must differ, but if I spent $2000+ on a device only to find that was locking up (due to poor memory management in a standard component!) under my standard workload, I would be livid. I would probably return it, and then tell the next 10 people I meet about my poor experience.
That said, I have run across a Windows 7 bug where the font manager would repeatedly fail and leave its cache/log on disk, only to restart and repeat until the hard disk was just about full. Complaints about the poor state of software engineering as a discipline go back to the beginning.
The initial technical goal is "more mass to orbit". Due to the rocket equation, the amount of fuel needed is ~20x the amount of payload to low earth orbit. Any fuel needed to get from low earth orbit to higher orbits needs to get to low orbit first, and so counts as mass. So the more mass and the greater a distance one wants to fly, the larger the required rocket. This rocket is very large.
People and the necessary life support for people are quite massive compared to robots. Once one can get lots of mass to orbit, one can think about things like sending people past low earth orbit (around the moon, to the moon, or to Mars). So far, NASA has committed to sending people to the Moon, but no farther. Elon Musk says that the goal is Mars, but any craft which could be used to start a Mars colony also has the ability to start a much larger moon colony, or perhaps to land on the moon and take off again without leaving (expensive) parts of the rocket behind.
There is some applied science research, such as around methods for reentry, but the final goal is establishing human colonies.
To first order the upper bound for carbon cost of production/recycling is going to be a multiple of the energy required to melt the components. Call that multiple four: production of raw materials + reshaping in factory + recycling of materials at EOL + energy cost for assembly. So a rough upper limit of the energy to switch a computers would be four times the energy to heat the computer's mass in water (4 J/gC) up to the melting point of silica (1900 C), and a rough lower bound would be the same using the heat capcity and melting point of iron (10x lower heat capacity, 1500 C), and neglecting assembly. For 1 kg of material, that gives a range of 1.8 and 32 MJ. Now you can compare to the energy used. For myself, I'm on a 2 kg laptop that draws up to 250W, but conservatively 50W. That adds up to 32 MJ/kg in 400 h. If I can reduce the energy use by 5W with a new model, that will pay itself back in 2 years of workday computation. Crazy.
Caveat: there will be additional non-CO2 environmental costs. Most components are not recycled, and resource extraction is also environmentally damaging.