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I'm an e-waste consumer

Date:

In my previous article about my investments on Revolut in 2025 (plot twist: AMD's value just spiked and fell a bit afterwards, that's how those things go), I mentioned that I live a fairly Spartan lifestyle and get the things I need, rather than the ones I might want.

A part of this is finding the pieces of hardware that fit my needs without being exorbitantly expensive. For example, my main PC currently has these parts in it:

I've settled on the setup with incremental updates and replacing failing parts over the years, without spending bank on any single part. My previous CPUs (and the ones still running in my homelab servers, a pair of low TDP 200GE Athlons that draw up to just 35W) sometimes came off of AliExpress, whereas sometimes there was new old stock in some e-commerce stores in my country for good prices as well.

In a word, I try to get parts with good value and then to squeeze as much out of them as possible - tuning the CPU OC so it can punch a little bit above its weight class, picking up the new faster RAM sticks when the DDR4 prices are finally nice (in opposition to DDR5 prices right now), as well as experimenting with a dual GPU setup, which sadly didn't work out well, but let me settle on a setup that's either way hopefully good enough to last me until around 2030.

However, I've got an admission to make.

I am responsible for some e-waste

Things are way more shaky when it comes to peripherals. While getting a mainstream CPU or HDD/SSD will generally be a fairly consistent experience, when it comes to buying keyboards, mice, headsets and microphones, as well as webcams, it's like the wild west out there. There are decent quality products that you can get for cheap out there: and I don't mean

"Oh hey, spend 100 EUR on this Logitech keyboard."

cheap, instead I mean

"Spend <60 EUR for a keyboard that will last you for years"

cheap. A good tradeoff between the value the product brings and its actual cost, which is harder to do than you might imagine. Some of the things I've found out were good purchases in that regard include:

(note: there are no links to specific products over here, because I'm not really doing the whole affiliate thing, nor do I know how long specific listings would stay up for; in addition to almost nobody reviewing these products, at least not in English)

At the same time, there is one thing that I have never been able to nail down: computer mice.

The ones currently in my apartment look like this:

01-mice

Apologies about everything looking kinda dusty: I pulled some of those out from a drawer that's meant for parts to connect to a homelab server when I need to access it directly (if SSH is down), and one of those is going into the trash afterwards due to having recently died, which is why I swapped my main PC over to the green one. Oh and the plastic is the variety that shows fingerprints, but oh well.

But you'll notice a few things: all of them look very similar, despite some being from different manufacturers. In addition to that, I also have some backups of that exact same kind of mouse, as if they're not going to last that long. The truth is - they never do, that particular variety of mouse. I don't keep super exact track of these things, but I'd reckon that they don't usually last a whole year and I have to swap them out.

At the same time, they're pretty much dirt cheap, when compared to most other computer mice you can get:

02-esperanza

I will say that the prices from the different sellers vary, despite it being pretty close to being the same product (with some slight visual variation), so once I run low on them (yes, they're basically an expendable resource), I just have to order a few from whichever is the cheapest seller at the time:

03-gembird

Why on Earth would I do this, instead of just buying a reputable Logitech mouse and using that for years? The answer there is pretty simple - because in a way, that'd be overpaying. I've experimented with getting gradually more expensive mice and the quality isn't really there. Sometimes the weight is customizable and there's stuff like rapid fire buttons which I don't really ever use, and while I did enjoy the Canyon Hazard mouse I got for like 4x the cost of the cheapest of the mice varieties above, it still died within like a year.

It's not like I treat the mice super roughly or that they suddenly fail, but there definitely are breakdowns - in the case of the Canyon mouse the wheel would start misbehaving and I'd have to deal with the super annoying issue of websites scrolling up when I want to go down, whereas with the mice above the left mouse button which sees the most use eventually becomes inconsistent, sometimes not registering clicks, sometimes holding it down resulting in a random release and second click.

At the same time, when I buy one of those, I can be pretty sure that it's going to be a good experience while it lasts:

So now I just use these mice and once they start going bad, I throw them into the trash and grab a new one from the pile. And once the pile gets small enough, I order some more from whatever manufacturer is shipping the same whitelabel stuff from China. The current one is from Poland I think, in the future that will probably change, but I've been using more or less the same mouse design for about 6-8 years at this point and it hasn't really failed or annoyed me too much.

Why not just go to the source?

Now, is it stupid to do so? Honestly, I couldn't tell you. I'm sure that if I pay a bit more money to some middleman company in the EU and get the product from a local e-commerce store that has pretty fast delivery, there is some semblance of supporting the local economy while getting that bit of additional convenience instead of just waiting on AliExpress orders to ship and make their way into my country.

That said, if I don't need the mice on super short notice, I might as well do some sleuthing and find the mice on AliExpress as well, since that exact pattern seems to be available there as well, sometimes for a bit cheaper:

04-aliexpress-1

Obviously it's the internals of the mouse that I enjoy that just loosely seem to correspond to that one particular body type, but so far that claw look has been a good enough indicator that I'm looking at the real deal, like so:

05-aliexpress-2

However, the savings there wouldn't be that great compared to just grabbing more of the exact same ones that I already have tested in the past, so maybe I don't need to look for ways to save a few more Euros after all. I'm kind of curious about why I can't find the more "plain" variants on the Chinese sites though, maybe I'd need to look in the direction of Alibaba or something.

Summary

To be honest with you, this feels like being stuck in some local maximum of "good enough". Who knows, maybe if a friend was to let me use their super snazzy Logitech mouse I'd also splurge a bunch of money on it... and then if it fails or just gets worn out due to natural use, still feel super bummed out because at that point it's a bigger investment.

So on some level, it happens to be the case that I treat my computer mice as one would servers in the age of cloud native apps - if one doesn't work, get rid of it and replace it with a new one, vs the older approach of nurturing a single one and hoping that it's going to be okay. I know these mice will wear out and fail, but at that point I'll be ready for it.

And in the day to day, they're perfectly fine for my needs.

Update

Well, technically a fake update, because I decided to look around Alibaba before posting this, but I did found a listing that's pretty much the exact kind of mouse that I want. Obviously I don't care about customization for it and while this type of mouse isn't the most popular kind on the site, this isn't the only listing:

06-alibaba-listing.jpg

Excuse me while I go and make an Alibaba account, this might actually cover my needs for the next decade without breaking bank.

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