Estonian engineers turn 15-year-old $9 trash phones into pocket-sized data centers

Interesting Engineering ^ | June 25, 2025 | Kaif Shaikh

[Red Badger]

PING!..................

[9YearLurker]

“5.3 billion of them are simply discarded annually.”

That’s a lot of phones!

[nwrep]

High IQ, high trust culture. Unlike the immigrants we get.

[logi_cal869]

BFL

This is fascinating.

[Who is John Galt?]

[ShadowAce]

[Attention Surplus Disorder]

Bfl

[grey_whiskers]

Thanks, Red Badger.

Saving for later.

[Pilsner]

If 1.2 billion smartphones are manufactured each year, and 5.3 billion smartphones are discarded each year, the the number of smartphones in the world is declining by 4.1 billion per year.

That strikes me as unlikely.

[hoosierham]

People replace perfectly usable items simply for fashion .

[1Old Pro]

People replace perfectly usable items simply for fashion .

all the time.

[Bob434]

All of them Obama phones lol

[Bob434]

They mKe up the deficit in volume lol

[Attention Surplus Disorder]

So true. And by far the best looking women on the planet. A sweet little country.

[linMcHlp]

bttt

[SunkenCiv]

This is an example of a good kind of 'cluster'. :^)

• BlackBerry-style phone features a physical keyboard and dual screens [06/26/2025]
• 'This was peak technology': Gen Z is bringing back the BlackBerry [06/19/2025]

[Red Badger]

If these are cheap type phones, imagine what could be done with a handful of iPhones!.............

[SunkenCiv]

Cute, but powerful: meet NanoCluster, a tiny supercomputer
22:35
Jeff Geerling
941K subscribers
609,705 views
June 6, 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEtpaiODNs0

[snip] Sipeed sent a NanoCluster - up to 7 nodes in the palm of your hand! At least, that’s what the photos show. Does it run when you put in seven Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5s? And how are thermals, power, and performance? Sipeed did not pay for this video nor have any say in its content (or a chance to review it before it went live). But because they sent this early review sample to me for my testing, I put the ‘Includes Paid Sponsorship’ tag on the video. [/snip]

[SunkenCiv]

Yup. Then imagine how little computing power was available when Americans went to the Moon and returned to Earth.