Digital obsolescence is accelerating, in a movement where hardware always runs behind software innovations.
This topic is particularly glaring in the video game industry, where PCs and consoles are successively shelved by games that are always more recent, more realistic and more demanding. So, when a game like Apex Legends is released in early 2019, more than half PC players cannot run it on their machine, and are thus excluded from the game, or forced to buy a new computer.
If it is glaring in the gaming world, this topic applies to the entire PC industry. 260 million computers are sold worldwide each year, including nearly 50 million gaming computers. Rapid obsolescence causes computers to need to be replaced often, which not only has a financial cost for users, but also an ecological cost for society.
It is this strong limitation that the founders of Shadow wanted to break when they created the company, at the end of 2015. Not only to meet the constraints of the players, many of whom are excluded from PC gaming because of the cost of hardware and the frequency of its renewal. But also to put an end to the overconsumption of electronic components, which are very largely underused, through their pooling in data centers.
Before cloud computing becomes the norm, Shadow wants to guide our community in this transition, by inviting it to adopt the right reflexes.
For the next few weeks, we allow people to drop off their outdated hardware at our office. We will take them all, from old keyboards to crappy squared monitors: everything will be recycled. And respawned!
Thanks to our partner LemonTri (the same partner that recycles Shadow’s trash every single day), we’ll have two big bins in our cafeteria for at least a month, dedicated to that type of waste.
Shadow is the first computer that is always up to date, and therefore never obsolete. The entire hardware part is managed by us here at Shadow, which maximizes its use, lifespan, and its recycling.
This is the heart of Shadow's promise: to make all of your devices consistently ultra-powerful. Concretely, Shadow is your dematerialized gaming PC, accessible through streaming on all your devices (PC, Mac, phone, tablet, etc.). With Shadow, the computer that was planned to be towed could turn into a powerful gaming PC!
Beyond its product, the company shows an alternative path to the automatic replacement of computers: many are thrown away while they are still working, and that they could, with Shadow or other programs, find a second life. In doing so, Shadow is the only computer supplier who invites us to "stop buying computers". The fight against digital obsolescence begins now!
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