The juicy new range of near‑warp-speed MacBooks announced last month may well have your clicking finger hovering over the “buy” button during the holiday period – the more so since we have all spent the best part of a year completely dependent on our computers for work, socialising and entertainment.
But what to do with your old computer? You could keep it as a backup machine, but there’s only about a one per cent chance you’ll ever need it. Trying to sell it is to invite a world of pain – fraudulent claims from buyers that it arrived damaged, attempts by dodgy people to extract the remains of data, and more gruesomeness. Nobody needs that.
So how about donating your old computers to an Edinburgh-based charity that does them up and gives them new life building digital literacy in villages in Africa? The Turing Trust even has a touch of technology stardust about it – it’s run by the great-nephew of Alan Turing, the founder of modern computing.