I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/12/how-and-why-i-stopped-buying-new-laptops/

by danradunchev • 3 years ago

374 530 3 years ago

solar.lowtechmagazine.com

Although capitalism could provide us with used laptops for decades to come, the strategy outlined above should be considered a hack, not an economical model. It’s a way to deal with or escape from an economic system that tries to force you and me to consume as much as possible. It’s an attempt to break that system, but it’s not a solution in itself. We need another economical model, in which we build all laptops like pre-2011 Thinkpads. As a consequence, laptop sales would go down, but that’s precisely what we need. Furthermore, with today’s computing efficiency, we could significantly reduce the operational and embodied energy use of a laptop if we reversed the trend towards ever higher functionality.

cyrillite• 3 years ago

Content aside for a second:

I have been trying to find your magazine again for so long. This scratches an itch. Thank goodness.

ip262• 3 years ago

laptop sales would go down, but that’s precisely what we need. Furthermore, with today’s computing efficiency...

Somehow these conversations never seem to talk about how we would not have current levels of compute if everybody kept their computers for one or two decades before buying another. Good or bad, right or wrong, the present state of affairs only happened with the present replacement cycle.

I'm not arguing we have to keep the present replacement cycle, but I think it needs addressing.

soulbadguy7• 3 years ago

Good or bad, right or wrong, the present state of affairs only happened with the present replacement cycle.

Hmmmm... I am not sure that those two things are as correlated (much less causally linked) as it might first appear.

We could have the same "average" pace of innovation, just delivered between longer intervals.

OldManRyan2• 3 years ago

Quick aside: This should have a (2020) tag.

The keyboard and mousepad on my Thinkpad have died twice. I've replaced it twice for 30 dollars each time. I would have had to buy a new laptop if I had something else. The conclusion about this being a hack and not a new economic model is why I'm hoping Framework seems success. Unfortunately I think my Thinkpad is on the way out for good and I plan to replace it with the Framework 16 when it is available, which I hope will last me just as long as my Thinkpad

draw_down• 3 years ago

If the keyboard or trackpad died on my laptop I would simply take it to be serviced. The company that made it has storefronts around the country where I can bring it in. They have an app that makes the scheduling easy.

In fact I just had the battery replaced after 5-6 years (I don’t quite remember). Works for me.

OldManRyan2• 3 years ago

That's great that whoever makes your device(assuming Apple) has stores where they can do repairs. Having a repairable device doesn't mean you have to repair it yourself, it just means you can.

ido7• 3 years ago

Nice. Now try to do the same as (some types of) programmer or 3d modeller or video editor. The newest MacBook with an M2 chip compiles and runs my projects drastically faster than the 2015 Dell XPS Skylake-i7 laptop I used to have and the GPU on the M2 is so ridiculously more powerful it's like going from 3dfx voodoo to a modern GPU.

rpcope12• 3 years ago

At that point, I guess I don't understand why you wouldn't just step up to a desktop workstation?

nvrmnd2• 3 years ago

A laptop can be easily transported for use in a variety of locations.

Casteil3• 3 years ago

Err, mobility? M1 / M2 Pro MBPs pack a serious punch... and they don't have to sacrifice battery life to do so - they smoke virtually all other laptops in terms of battery life.

ido7• 3 years ago

Honestly, the new MacBooks are faster than any desktop I ever had - I don't feel a need to sacrifice mobility for more than that.

ralfd• 3 years ago

My M1 Mac is the best laptop I ever owned.

But it is also a big step up, I expect my machine to stay viable quite some time and recommend my noob friends to buy used M1/M2 Macbooks (if available).

soulbadguy7• 3 years ago

Is it also (inflation / time adjusted) the most expensive ?

pessimizer4• 3 years ago

It would be silly if this article were trying to recommend a 15 year old computer for intense numerical processing, which is why nobody, including the author, made the attempt.

paulmd2• 3 years ago

yeah, but "author realizes they have no substantial computing needs because they only word-process" isn't a particularly interesting article. like boss you can hook a bluetooth keyboard up to your phone and go to town at that point, if you want, there's really no need for a laptop at all.

and since it's not applicable to the userbase here you're gonna get discussion on why it's not applicable.

meesles• 3 years ago

Did you read the article? The author is, well, an author. They don't program or 3d model. Computation sped wasn't even mentioned in the point they were making.

I guess I don't see the reason to read an article about a specific use-case/point of view, only to follow up and say, "yeah well it wouldn't work for this completely different thing you weren't talking about". It's not the 'gotcha' you think it is.

ido7• 3 years ago

I'm not trying to make a any gotchas. Yes, if all you need is MS Word and a web browser you can use a 10-15 years old laptop, I don't think this surprises anyone here (in fact its why most people these days use phones instead of PCs to do most of their internet browsing).

barbariangrunge2• 3 years ago

I’m an author, sometimes. My 2015 MacBook Air has slowed down so much, due to software bloat, it’s painful to use. You need to constantly buy new hardware to run peoples literally exponentially less efficient software

nicbou2• 3 years ago

I use my laptop (Macbook 12") to write too. It's fantastic for that... until you start playing YouTube Music in the background or try to use Google Maps. It's getting to a point where the delays on many tasks become noticeable and affect my workflow.

That's unfortunate because I love that little laptop.

lost_tourist5• 3 years ago

I don't think that anyone is implying that a few people need the newest hardware they can get, however if you're working on webpages, cloud apps, project management, most phone apps, etc you don't need a brand new laptop to get that done. And that's just for developers, your typical student or home user certainly doesn't need the latest and greatest. I recently bought an M2 32GB machine but that was to replace my 2015 macbook lol.

rozenmd3• 3 years ago

ThinkPads are absolutely magic. Here's one I built for travelling: https://maxrozen.com/replacing-my-macbook-m1-with-thinkpad-t...

luciusdomitius2• 3 years ago

They used to be. I am writing this from the above-mentioned T480. It is 3 years old, has both usb-c ports replaced, small crack on the backside of the screen and the keyboard zif is broken, so the tape cable is... well taped to the connector.

On the other hand my X200, T420, T450 are still in mint condition. To be completely fair, modern macs are also way off from well-built. Shiny yes, but sturdy is the last thing I'd call them.

BTW, in older ThinkPads, the drain-pipes under the keyboards actually worked - you could pour water on it just for kicks. Now it is there only for decoration.

simfree2• 3 years ago

It really is a shame that the USB C ports are not modular on newer ThinkPads, you basically have to send the laptop for board work to get them replaced once the USB C ports go.

cache_hit2• 3 years ago

They really are. For example, I have a P53s (basically a renamed T590) that will randomly clock the i7 CPU it came with down to 400MHz under active use for extended periods of time, and I can't run anything that actually uses the cores on the i7 for more than a minute without hitting the 95 degree PROCHOT. The dedicated GPU also will clock itself down to 100MHz and shift the termal throttling range from 75 degrees to 65 degrees randomly, on a system with a single fan cooling solution.

Just magical, and I can't wait to see Lenovo's next trick.

rozenmd3• 3 years ago

Have you changed your thermal paste?

npteljes• 3 years ago

I unsubscribed from Lenovo at their Superfish debacle. Intercepting HTTPS communication with their own certificate? Now ain't that somethin'.

And the next up was when they had a special place in the laptop for their bundled bullshit, so that they persist EVEN IF you reinstall Windows on the lappy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenovo#Security_and_privacy_in...

viraptor4• 3 years ago

What did the support say about it? Did you get a replacement / refund?

tannhaeuser• 3 years ago

Anecdata, but before going all-in on ThinkPads I thought I share my experience.

For the ThinkPad x13 2nd gen Ryzen I received for a customer project (with the customer not interested in getting it back after the project was completed) it's too early to say anything about reliability, but somehow the touchpad isn't centered properly and I always hit left click when I want right click - it's unbearable and surprisingly bad for a ThinkPad.

Before, I had an ThinkPad E495 Ryzen that worked ok but after two years the touchpad got stuck - the pointless (for me!) construction with touch point and extra mechanical buttons (only acting as barrier) certainly didn't help.

Before, I had my beloved Dell XPS 2016 which however had a swollen battery. Still, I consider it one of the best notebooks I had; gnome 2 and Unity also just got it right.

In the last four years I got five (!) ThinkPad and Dell Precision notebooks for customer projects having battery or memory problems OOTB (the x13 I mentioned above was a notebook that finally worked).

The notebook I used for the longest time (7 years) was a PowerBook G4 2003. I hope my current MacBook M1 will last me about as long, but at least 5 years. In terms of power management, display, and usability, a Mac notebook is in another league compared to Dells and ThinkPads with Linux, it's not even funny. Linux desktops have regressed to the point they have ceased to be usable for me. With the newer MacBooks, I think Apple listened to customers and nailed it; I'd just prefer lighter (non-alu) materials.

Venkatesh10• 3 years ago

Which websites or store in Europe and UK would you suggest to get refurbished laptops and mobiles?

rozenmd3• 3 years ago

ebay or backmarket - look for IT refurbished laptops rather than individuals selling their old laptop

RecycledEle2• 3 years ago

The last 3 laptops I bought were a pair of Lenovo e570 machines and a Lenovo e580.

Two went to college kids and I keep the third.

When I configure a laptop, I use less RAM than I would otherwise want (16 GB lately) and make up for it with a fast NVME boot drive as swap space. Intel NVME drives are fast and power efficient. That gives me a better mix of performance and battery life than would a laptop with more RAM.

isoos• 3 years ago

Wouldn't the increased swap load reduce the lifetime of the nvme drive?

RecycledEle2• 3 years ago

I'm not worried about service life when I buy Intel NVME drives.

rpcope12• 3 years ago

Most of the 160-200 million laptops sold each year are replacement purchases. The average laptop is replaced every 3 years (in business) to five years (elsewhere). 3 My 5.7 years per laptop experience is not exceptional.

This is one of the many aspects I don't like about how laptops are designed today. Even with OEM desktops like my Dell Precision T1700, it's still serviceable and fixable today without a whole lot of effort. For both my Dell and Supermicro workstations, they basically last 10+ years, and I've got a lot of options to keep them going; I wish I could say the same about laptops. I really wish I could get a new 2k screen for the old Dell Latitude E6530 I have -- it's built a lot more robustly than my newer latitude. I really would like to see our government mandate user serviceable parts (kind of like how the EU apparently mandated replaceable batteries, which is a huge win), as there's so many older designs that would continue to chug along with a few fixes, like IBM era Thinkpads or some the more robustly designed Latitudes. Lenovo has been going the wrong direction lately...I have sworn them off after having a two P1s and a P53, which were gently used and taken care of, die in under 2 years.

jwcooper• 3 years ago

This is what Framework set out to do (and is pulling it off so far...I'm typing this out on my 12th gen framework). They have an entire marketplace of replacement parts you can buy, including screens.

They've even got battery upgrades (increased capacity), better speakers, new screen type (matte) that you can retrofit into your existing Framework.

They support upgrading from their first gen laptop (admittedly they are a very young company, but their promise has held up thus far).

Hopefully more folks that are interested in upgradability and repairability are purchasing frameworks to show other companies that it's worth it to do (I'm unaffiliated with Framework, just a customer).

a1o• 3 years ago

I wish something like Framework could be more popular so it could be easily available on other countries. As is, the impact something like it is small. Hopefully this changes at some point.

akmittal• 3 years ago

I just upgraded RAM(4 -> 12 GB) and HDD to SSD of a 8 years old laptop and it became a lot more responsive. Laptops now a days are not upgradable and companies claim they are doing so to build lighter laptops but framework is proving all of them wrong

grudg32• 3 years ago

Yes, Frameworks are amazing on paper, and yet I still can't purchase one in New Zealand but I can easily purchase Apple hardware.

Lio• 3 years ago

What I really appreciate with Framework is that they have little kits that let you repurpose the old insides of your laptop when you upgrade the processor or SSD.

That's a nice touch that means you're not just throwing that stuff away.

Llamamoe• 3 years ago

How does it compare cost-wise to just buying normal used or even new laptops?

fuzztester• 3 years ago

For both my Dell and Supermicro workstations, they basically last 10+ years, and I've got a lot of options to keep them going; I wish I could say the same about laptops. I really wish I could get a new 2k screen for the old Dell Latitude E6530 I have -- it's built a lot more robustly than my newer latitude.

Agreed. When I was checking out new laptops to buy one, in shops, about a year ago, I was shocked to see the lower quality and sturdiness of the cases and keyboards. For no apparent gain except possible lightness.

I think laptop makers have started doing an auto industry in terms of built in or planned obsolescence.

Edit: just like mobile phone makers.

gtirloni3• 3 years ago

It's been like this for at least 2 decades now.

oneplane• 3 years ago

Some of the laptop issues are a chain of dependencies that en up with mechanical and power envelope. That doesn't mean it's impossible, but say you want to go from 720p to 2k, that also requires more power, a bit for the panel and a bit for the backlight. The mainboard might not have a TCON and eDP or LVDS transceiver to drive such a panel, and the GPU might not be able to handle it either. So now that new panel needs three more things:

  - Power supply
  - Display transmission
  - GPU

And those things in turn need more (or well, 'different') space, which in turn might not fit in the existing chassis. And if it does, you might still have the thermal envelope issue where the chassis can't support the right airflow in the right places, or the cooling solution might not.

None of those are impossible to solve, but they also aren't as simple as "just give me a different panel", because it's not really just about the single component, it almost never is.

We have had a lot of luck in the past with a single 'family' of computers (usually largely designed by compal, Foxconn etc.) having interchangeable parts, and the base models essentially being downgraded versions of the top-tier model, which means that as long as you stay within that family, you get to upgrade parts along the way.

Framework does an excellent job of keeping everything that still fits within the same envelope going. But if at any point the current eDP interface needs to be replaced to support higher bandwidth, that means that the possible combinations between panels, cables and mainboards is now a whole lot more complicated. Some panels might only work with some mainboards, which might mean you have to replace both at the same time, greatly reducing the usefulness of what remains. Currently we don't have a huge gap between previous generations and current generations, but I'm very curious what's going to happen when we do make another significant jump. Only time will tell.

6510• 3 years ago

I imagine by that time you've used their market place often enough. Their used parts shop might be more awesome than the laptops. I can only imagine what it will look like in a few decades. Should be awesome.

In contrast, I'm the 4th owner of a "free" asus laptop that broke shortly after it was purchased (by the first owner) They never bothered to return it. I have a pretty good idea what is wrong with it but there is about 4 cm of space when I open it. I need some long strong pliers to pull some distant plugs. In a repair video from someone who really knows what they are doing, he reaches deep inside, pulls the plug with great force then smashes the pliers against the pcb making the laptop jump on his desk. "this is normal" he said and proceeded to pull the rest the same way. I've been gathering the courage to do it for about a year now.

AnthonyMouse• 3 years ago

And those things in turn need more (or well, 'different') space

But this is the source of the problem. The lack of modularity and standardization.

The first generation mobile Core i7 from 2008 had a TDP up to 55W. The base TDP of the current generation is the same, Ryzen is even less. It shouldn't need a different cooling solution to dissipate the same amount of power. The same is true of mobile GPUs.

Don't layout the new board in a different configuration. Don't change the chassis. Just put the newer chips in it, in the same places they were before. Which means the newer boards and chips will be compatible with the older chassis.

say you want to go from 720p to 2k, that also requires more power

If the new screen uses 20W instead of 15W, that shouldn't really matter. Screens typically aren't actively cooled and are also hinged into their own section of the chassis, so if the newer screen needs different passive cooling, it can come with that and still slot into the same base chassis.

And if the new screen uses 20W instead of 15W, you should still have enough power unless the entire rest of the laptop is at max spec. If you have a battery and power supply that could support a 55W CPU and a 55W GPU, but you actually have a 25W CPU and a 30W GPU, the screen using an extra 5W should be irrelevant.

The mainboard might not have a TCON and eDP or LVDS transceiver to drive such a panel

On the other hand, it might, because 2k displays have been around for more than a decade. And if it doesn't, you should be able to upgrade the GPU to one that does, and plug the display directly into the new GPU, which in turn plugs into a standard slot using PCIe that doesn't require anything else to be changed.

shortrounddev2• 3 years ago

My T420 is still running strong 12 years later. I don't use it for much since I'm not on Linux anymore, but I occasionally open it up and play with it. I'm using a Dell Inspiron now and I'm hoping it lasts a while.

NikolaNovak2• 3 years ago

Yup. I have two working t420s (t420s is thinner than t420 and I think puts it in the realm of "acceptable" in modern standards. T420 I find is mostly a stationary laptop). They run upgraded ssd drives and ram.

I also recently stocked up on 3 used t480 as it's the last generation with easily removable battery as well as drive and memory. Those should last me a while! My primary daily driver is the 6 year old t25 - basically t470 but with good keyboard.

But I think... That's kinda the point. These laptops were upgradeable but modern ones are not. T490 and onward don't have external replaceable battery. A lot of modern thinkpads have soldered ram. And none of them have the elegance of ultrabay of yore.

wredue2• 3 years ago

My Inspiron made it 7 years before a chip in the battery that identifies the battery as dell authentic died. The battery itself was still 95% good (I mostly used it plugged in, and set the bios so)

Still, a laptop without a battery lost many convenience factors, like moving to another room without shutting down.

Now I bought a M2 max and am mostly pleased. Still can’t say I’m a huge fan of macOS, but it’s serviceable.

I try to get 10 years out of my devices. Fingers crossed.

prmph2• 3 years ago

I swore off those Chinese manufacturers (Lenovo, Asus, Acer, etc) many years ago for similar reasons and haven't looked back. I just don't buy any products from them, laptops included. Surprised people are still having to learn the hard way that their products are crap.

scq• 3 years ago

Asus and Acer are Taiwanese, not Chinese, and none of them actually manufacture their own laptops in house, that is outsourced to manufacturing partners.

Nearly all laptops on the market, regardless of brand, are manufactured by 6 Taiwanese companies: Quanta, Compal, Wistron, Inventec, Pegatron, and Foxconn.

And yes, that includes Framework, who use Compal as their manufacturing partner.

user_named• 3 years ago

Common American L.

wyldfire2• 3 years ago

I often buy a ~one generation old phone for this same reason. It's just so much better value to buy someone else's phone. The folks who keep buying the newest generation tech often seem to take really good care of their gear - perhaps because they plan to resell it later.

I haven't done this as much with laptops because I do tend to keep those for such a long time that I can reasonably amortize a bigger investment over ~5+ years.

Curated marketplaces like "swappa" are a good way to purchase used gear. But anywhere you've got an escrow/guarantee should suffice.

zokier4• 3 years ago

But the biggest reason (for me) to replace phone is to get security updates; buying used is counter-productive to that end

mattl• 3 years ago

Because the time to get updates is less on an older phone or that a used phone is less secure because someone could install malware on it?

wyldfire2• 3 years ago

Just replace it with another one generation old used phone when it stops getting updates. Still better value.

yardstick2• 3 years ago

I think that is more of an issue with the manufacturer.

Apple supports their phones for a very long time. They updated iOS 12 this year with security fixes, so that covers iPhone 6 and up.

https://www.macworld.com/article/675021/how-long-does-apple-...

dehrmann2• 3 years ago

Then buy Apple. The 6s is up to 8 years of updates.

Shekelphile3• 3 years ago

If you buy a two year old phone then there's plenty of support left for apple and samsung devices in that time. At least 3-4 years for apple, 2 for samsung.

lost_tourist5• 3 years ago

what are you talking about? I have an iphone 10 that that is several generations old at this point and it's still getting security updates and will for a couple more years.

gtirloni3• 3 years ago

I often replace phones because the battery starts holding less charge and I find it annoying to charge all the time.

I tried a battery replacement service once and didn't like the result on my sealed and hard to open by design phone.

Gigachad7• 3 years ago

Get the battery replaced at an official repair location rather than a middle of the food court business. Apple has a whole setup of gear that will get a perfect result pretty much every time. And they will just give you a new phone if they break it.

AussieWog93• 3 years ago

Went to comment this. A mid-range or high end product from a gen or two ago is often the same price as this year's budget option, and way, way better in every sense.

Scoundreller2• 3 years ago

And in a favourable position on the bathtub curve of reliability.

therealdrag0• 3 years ago

Right, which is why replacing a laptop after 3 years isn’t that bad, so long as the old one finds a home. Unfortunately it seems like windows machine are much less resealable/reusable after they’re no longer wanted..

pg5• 3 years ago

I buy back my decomissioned work laptop for $50, which means I get a fairly new ThinkPad that works pretty perfectly with Linux.

easeout2• 3 years ago

Furthermore, Linux operating systems do not steal your personal data and do not try to lock you in, like the newest operating systems from both Microsoft and Apple do.

Is recent macOS accused of stealing or shown to steal personal data? Platform lock-in is not news, but that would be. This is an earnest question; maybe I'm in a bubble and missed a big story.

sounds• 3 years ago

Note that the only data tracking Apple was caught doing was in iOS, not macOS, but there are many signs that Apple collects aggregated usage data in macOS (which probably cannot be later reduced to expose the behavior of any single customer).

2021 Jun 7:

   > "Anyone opting out of tracking right now is basically having the
   > same level of data collected as they were before. Apple hasn't
   > actually deterred the behavior that they have called out as being
   > so reprehensible, so they are kind of complicit in it happening,"
   > Seufert explained.

* https://www.macrumors.com/2021/06/07/apps-continuing-to-trac...

Apple did finally close this loophole in iOS 14.5, causing Facebook to lose what some analysts think was ~$10 Billion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identifier_for_Advertisers - however, by March 18, 2021, Mark Zuckerberg stated that it could actually encourage advertisers to use the explicit targetting and tracking happening on facebook, and he made it sound like a win-win.

2022 Nov 8:

   > The recent changes that Apple has made to App Store ads should
   > raise many #privacy concerns. It seems that the #AppStore app
   > on iOS 14.6 sends every tap you make in the app to Apple. This
   > data is sent in one request: (data usage & personalized ads are off)

* https://gizmodo.com/apple-iphone-analytics-tracking-even-whe...

* https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/14/apple-faces-new-lawsuit-ov...

easeout2• 3 years ago

Thanks for all the details. The App Store app bit is a very bad look. The rest seems on the up and up, or at least isn't the OS phoning home your personal data.

I'm inclined to think the quote only meant to claim that Windows and macOS try to lock you in, and that Linux doesn't steal your personal data. The sentence structure is ambiguous.

tristor• 3 years ago

I average 8 years and two batteries for a laptop since I switched to Macbooks, prior it was about 5 years and one battery.

MacBooks have a much better lifecycle.

madduci• 3 years ago

Aren't new models with soldered batteries as well? The lifecycle is a disaster, especially if you would like to change the drive or upgrade the ram, you simply can't

jlokier• 3 years ago

In some countries Apple provides a battery replacement service for the Macbooks at a fixed price, but you have to leave it with them for a little while like any other service.

I think the price is reasonable for the quality of the batteries. The Apple price was much lower than a local Apple reseller store quoted for battery replacement - they pretended not to know about Apple's own service, and when I showed them they said they couldn't match Apple's price as it was too low.

The inability to upgrade storage space is a big problem though. Apple storage is prohibitively expensive up front yet you know you might run out of space during the long life of the device. External drives work and are fast so that's the practical solution but it's not as convenient.

YZF• 3 years ago

Typing this from my `MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013)` ... Also have two working ThinkPads in use in my household that are older where I've had to replace the CPU fans, at some point they just crumble, but otherwise work OK-ish (but maybe getting to a point where I should really retire them).

mholm• 3 years ago

The Pre-touchbar Retina Macbook Pros were the perfect laptop for the era. They could run a bit hot (but what didn't, back then?). Excellent hardware quality, and can generally still run well today if you don't do anything demanding. I've got a 2013 13" that doesn't have a single issue other than age.

jimworm• 3 years ago

The touchbar feels to me like a time bomb that explodes when Apple thinks it's time for you to give another stack of cash to them.

InvaderFizz2• 3 years ago

The heat and constant fan noise was a real problem.

That's the entire reason we upgraded my wife from a 2015 15" MBP i7 to a 2020 MBA M1. The extra hours of battery was a nice bonus, the main gain was the lack of noise.

pengaru2• 3 years ago

Oh how I miss the form-factor+keyboard of my X40/X60. Seeing that tent of an X60s has me feeling very nostalgic. One of the few devices capable of doing that for me.

It's too bad they had so many flimsy plastic parts until the X220 era, which still tends to crack palmrests and bezels with use.

If someone packaged a modern SoC beneath an X40/X60 keyboard in a rugged light chassis with all the modern display/battery junk I'd be all over it.

mpenet• 3 years ago

Same. It really was the best screen size/ratio for me. I was basically carrying it everywhere.

pengaru2• 3 years ago

IBM used to make some genuinely great end-user stuff.

cempaka• 3 years ago

I'm still getting great mileage out of a T430 I bought in 2017, and I'm not particularly nice to my laptops. The one frustration I've had recently is that it can't drive my nice 38-inch monitor at its full resolution, so I've started eyeing a T470.

btgeekboy• 3 years ago

The T430 is a rugged laptop, but it’s getting pretty far up there in age. For example, I use mine in the shop to read PDFs, update the project’s Trello board, fetch software updates and drop them on SD cards, etc.

I used to think Trello kinda lagged. Great tool, but man it’s kinda slow. Then I opened it on a modern computer - it’s just the old hardware holding it back. Same with PDFs - these are graphical 11x17 pages, and it really does get bogged down easy. You’re gonna be amazed how much faster everything feels when you get to the newer machine.

lwdf• 3 years ago

Go for the T480, it has 4 cores and 8 threads compared to the T470 2 cores 4 threads. Big jump if you do anything like compiling.

dbg31415• 3 years ago

I mean... you can save a few bucks on a laptop. Sure.

But the real cost is the downtime.

If I have an employee that I value at $100,000 a year, working 1800 hours, that's $55 / hour.

Assuming their work doesn't impact anyone else, it would be silly for me to take that employee out of commission for any expense that costs less than $440 / day.

Way smarter for me to buy a new laptop, which is less likely to have any issues, and then sell the old ones to offset the costs.

And I'd also point out that most people in tech make more than $100,000.

Also I'd point out... the new Apple Silicon is really nice. Battery life is a lot longer. Heat is a lot less. Screens are fantastic. No stupid touch-screen function bar. Great keyboards. MagSafe power... like, honest to god if you haven't got one of the new Apple Silicon laptops you're really doing yourself a disservice. You should get one! (=

(Also... my opinion... every other laptop maker should just quit. Just close shop. They can't touch the new Apple machines. That's how much better the Apple Silicon laptops are. Everything else that's being made is just e-waste by comparison. Even the Intel MacBooks from 3-4 years ago are just dogwater in comparison.)

eatsyourtacos• 3 years ago

It's crazy that you think that actually makes sense in practice. Yeah you can put the numbers out there and it may "seem" correct but in reality that is ridiculous logic.

zokier4• 3 years ago

And that is just one factor in having pre-emptive laptop renewal cycle.

In general it makes IT happier to have more homogenous fleet, makes managing things easier, possible to have spare parts at hand etc etc.

It also removes the need of negotiations if someone "deserves"/needs new laptop or not, which might otherwise be discussion wasting the workers, IT depts, and possibly managers time.

pessimizer4• 3 years ago

Way smarter for me to buy a new laptop, which is less likely to have any issues

I don't think that's a safe assumption.

Karsteski• 3 years ago

Most people in tech definitely do not make over $100k US, what an American centric POV.

pmontra2• 3 years ago

HP ZBook 15 first gen here, 9.5 yo. I use it to develop with Django, Rails, Phoenix. Docker, psql, Mongo, mysql, whatever js frontend my customers choose. Debian 11. I upgraded it to a double SSD configuration, 32 GB RAM. I replaced worn out keyboards a few times, the battery once a few months ago. It works well and I hope that it keeps going for a while. It still sells second hand for about 600 Euros last time I checked, too much to buy two of them as mines of spare parts.

novaRom• 3 years ago

"Laptops don’t change" - this is most important reason if we're talking about Apple laptops. My 10 years old MacBook Pro is almost absolutely the same as MacBook Air of 2023. Performance, screen, OS, weight, battery, keyboard. And old laptops look even better; look how ugly are new M1/M2 Air cases in comparison with first versions of Airs.

lost_tourist5• 3 years ago

your 10 yo mabook pro is not nearly as fast as a macbook pro M2, not even close. Does your old Pro work as good for your -needs-, that is quite possible depending on what you're doing with it.

chaostheory• 3 years ago

This making sense depends on your career. It makes sense for writers, but not for everyone. Why? Because silicon is cheaper than carbon ie the hourly costs for most machines tends to be far cheaper than my salary. In my case it’s more expensive to buy something cheap and slow, than it is to buy something that allows me to maximize my throughput per hour.

pessimizer4• 3 years ago

I'd like to defend the T430 from a T430. Yes, it was a bad purchase when I made it (and when the author made it), but you can buy them for $100 a piece now on Ebay. Keyboards you can probably buy 20 for $50. Since they are from the dawn of Thinkpad's bullshit, they hardcoded the hardware choices you could make for upgrades into the firmware. Awful. But 1vyrain (https://1vyra.in/) came along and fixed all that.

A T430 doesn't even feel underpowered these days, and has a (horrible) webcam (that can be improved a bit by judicious software postprocessing.) With a dining room table, a router running OpenWRT, 4 T430s, and a 5-10 year-old gaming PC as a server to compile things on/serve things from/etc., you could start a little software company and your biggest expense would be the table.

simfree2• 3 years ago

The 35 watt processor in the T430 is just way too easy to get toasty.

The T440 or above with a 1080p screen upgrade and trackpad replacement is so much nicer to use since it cooks your legs less, has a nicer screen, is lighter, thinner and still able to take hard falls without issue.

pessimizer4• 3 years ago

The 35 watt processor in the T430 is just way too easy to get toasty.

Definitely true, but I don't use laptops on my lap very often. I also have a fear that

lighter, thinner

may mean harder to get into and repair/replace things.

-----

edit: let me let these people argue in favor of the T430...

https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/r88wag/my_almost_...

InvaderFizz2• 3 years ago

I really enjoyed my T460s from a job back in 2017. My main complaint was the rather anemic 2c/4t CPU.

I have a LG Gram 15 that is pretty decent, but very wobbly/flexy. It's saving grace is the lightweight of it.

My 16" MBP M1 Max is phenomenal, but very heavy, and I move it 5-10x daily.

I plan on replacing it with the ~2025 MBA 15". My wife's 13" M1 MBA is great, but the 13" is not nearly as comfortable for a single display as the 16".

wildzzz• 3 years ago

I have a T420 gathering dust in a drawer. It was my everyday laptop in college for a couple years but then I switched to buying used Thinkpad tablet PCs for taking notes. I eventually went back to it last year and upgraded a few parts but regretted how hot the thing got with such poor battery life. It was fine running in a docking station but wasn't great on the move which is annoying if I want to use it in bed or on the couch. I remembered how much I disliked the thing so I bought a used X280 and am overjoyed with the purchase.

NovaDudely3• 3 years ago

I am running a T420 and 99% of the time it is so cool the fan doesn't even kick in. But yeah when you start to push it - it can get toasty. Work load really determines a lot here.

redroyal6• 3 years ago

“Laptops don’t change”

Really? because a few years ago battery life was maybe 7 hours and now it’s 18. And with faster processors, thunderbolt 4 and USB C charging, wifi 6, better screens and lighter.

I keep hearing this argument for not buying a new laptop every year and it just doesn’t hold water. I say buy the latest MacBook, expense it, factor it in as a monthly cost. These are expendable and essential tools. They pay for themselves

And these framework laptops are pretty awful. They run hot and are poorly designed. The modular usb addons are a joke and exchangeable GPUs? heavy, power hungry, not for laptops. 3 hour battery life. The main product feature AFAICS is virtue signaling. These products are not open hardware either. Then, there’s this modularity argument. Like this is the last laptop you’ll ever own and forever will be replacing it piece by piece. Disassembling over and over. But that’s not realistic. You’ll have to upgrade to faster processors and the form factor of the mb will change regardless of what they say, and you’re counting on the company being around in a few years which is a poor bet. They can’t compete with Apple or even Lenovo

smoldesu• 3 years ago

3 hour battery life.

Maybe if "laptops don't change", sure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuw-YpbFkkM

redroyal6• 3 years ago

Using the modular GPU

gremlinunderway• 3 years ago

If you read the rest of the site, you would see that the argument against not buying a new laptop every year is to find ways to lower the insane amount of electronics waste we're generating any single year.

It's not just about lack of features, it's also just ridiculously wasteful even for an industry already known for it. At least my PC, I'm just swapping out parts for upgrades. I'm not dumping my entire PC tower in the garbage every few years.

We're so goddamn lucky that PCs haven't become these disposable machines like every other piece of tech out there. Video game consoles, phones and laptops are just the worst for this and while it's cheaper in the short term, the costs are there we just don't see them.

happymellon• 3 years ago

And this is another reason I avoid Nvidia whenever possible.

At least with laptops, I have perfectly serviceable Intel and AMD systems, but I have old laptops with Nvidia that are no longer supported and basically can't be used anymore for productive purposes.

Atotalnoob• 3 years ago

So if framework can let you reuse the "shell" for 2-3 upgrade cycles until they have to change the motherboard, that's a lot better than having to buy an entire new laptop.

It's not about keeping the same form factor forever, that's unrealistic. It's about reducing the amount of stuff you have to buy for each upgrade.

Opening and closing stuff is realistic, if it's easy.

I've opened and upgraded various components of my steam deck half a dozen times in the last 6 months.

It's reduce, reuse, recycle.

I don't own a framework.

coldtea• 3 years ago

It's not about keeping the same form factor forever, that's unrealistic.

It's not that unrealistic, if we constraint forever to like 10-15 years.

In a lot of laptops I'd rather they keep most of the ports (and just e.g. update USB2 to USB3, and add a few new ones) but keep the form factor the shape.

Often new keyboards (Apple is notorious, but holds for others) are worse than in the previous form factor.

And when they go and "make it thinner", beyond some point, I'd often rather they added more battery, or added a space for an extra use installable SSD, or put bigger speaker cones, or just leave the space inside for better thermal dissipation...

CraigJPerry• 3 years ago

> So if framework can let you reuse the "shell" for 2-3 upgrade cycles

I badly want the framework laptop idea to succeed - the idea of re-using your old laptop battery as a battery bank when you upgrade, that's just brilliant. The idea of taking your old motherboard and sticking it in a slim case that bolts to the vesa mount on the back of your monitor, beautiful.

However, it's far more expensive that just buying a MacBook. I bought the base model M1 Air for £999 at launch. I just sold it, what's this, 3 years later, with 90% battery life remaining for £600 plus shipping, after eBay & paypal's cut I'm £537. That's £462 for 3 years of having faster single core / interactive responsiveness than anything else at comparable price on the market.

How much more would I have had to pay over a similar time frame for a slower heavier framework with much much less battery life.

I considered the framework for this laptop cycle but instead I just traded up to a second hand 16" M1 Pro/16Gb/1Tb with 16 cycles count on the battery - i.e. brand new. Sure it's 25% slower than the equiv £2800 M2 Pro version but this cost me just £1500 delivered in pristine condition. I'm feeling very confident I'm going to come out ahead again in total cost of ownership.

neuralRiot• 3 years ago

Upgradeable hardware sounds great in theory but doesn’t work in real life, just like PCs you configure it once and it will be that HW until it is obsolete for your purpose.

2OEH8eoCRo02• 3 years ago

I'm a huge Framework fan but I worry that the upgradeability produces more e-waste rather than less. I already see Framework laptop owners tossing mainboards every generation. I think the e-waste angle is the weakest- I like the upgradeability because it saves me money. As a cheap bastard I almost see it as a challenge to use my devices for as long as possible.

pnpnp• 3 years ago

I love that they’re doing this. However, in my use-case I keep a laptop 5+ years now. At that point, it’s pretty worn out and usually warrants a total replacement.

All the individual components keep me happy for so darn long now. After 5+ years, there have usually been pretty big improvements in every area.

edflsafoiewq• 3 years ago

That is not what he means by "Laptops don't change". He means

A 2015 research paper discovered that the embodied energy of laptops is static over time.
Improvements in functionality balance the efficiency gains obtained in the manufacturing process. Battery mass, memory, and hard disk drive mass decreased per unit of functionality but showed roughly constant totals per year.
New laptops may be more energy-efficient per computational power, but these gains are offset by more computational power. Jevon’s paradox is nowhere as evident as it is in computing.

photonerd3• 3 years ago

So… you can do more, faster, for longer, then?

Sounds like a good argument for upgrading

dehrmann2• 3 years ago

I didn't find that point all that interesting. Once laptops got as small as is practical (full-size keyboard, just thick enough for a USB port), we continued cramming in as much tech and battery as it would fit and not get too hot. This shouldn't be a surprised.

Miraste• 3 years ago

2015 was the nadir of processor improvements. At that point, Intel had effectively used the same processor in every laptop since 2008. I would like to see this analysis post-Ryzen and Apple Silicon.

yieldcrv• 3 years ago

Every year is a lot

But I think the article is more about impulse control taken to an extreme because they lacked it in the past

ImPleadThe5th3• 3 years ago

Do you actually buy a new laptop every year? I feel that's a bit delusional. Year to year most upgrades are pretty minor.

An argument can be made maybe every 3 years if you're doing some incredibly resource intense stuff.

gghffguhvc2• 3 years ago

I do a lot of Android and iOS app compilation (Lots of flavors/schemes of apps). So lately the upgrades in cores has meant a faster upgrade cycle for my work dev machine than for the intel based MacBook Pro era. I’m sure Apple can’t keep up this pace of the last few years though.

Back in early 2000s we used distcc for distributed compilation of QT apps and reused old workstations in a server room. But with XCode and Android studio it isn’t pragmatic.

simplify• 3 years ago

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Edit out swipes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

elliotec• 3 years ago

Yikes. Don’t be like that.

kristopolous• 3 years ago

Year to year most upgrades are pretty minor.

Really this depends on the year. We're in a more chunked paradigm now when significant progress is happening more intermittently.

That doesn't mean buy new. Wait it out a year or two and buy used.

Some years matter. Most don't. You can exploit this.

cj2• 3 years ago

What’s delusional is highly paid engineers not investing money in essential tools to get their work done. A new laptop is 1-2% of the annual salary of many people here.

2h6• 3 years ago

I keep hearing this argument for not buying a new laptop every year and it just doesn’t hold water. I say buy the latest MacBook, expense it, factor it in as a monthly cost.

this is why Apple is a trillion dollar company. because people mindlessly buy any new thing they put out, regardless if it makes sense or not.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ydje1ivynIM

andrekandre6• 3 years ago

  > this is why Apple is a trillion dollar company. because people mindlessly buy any new thing they put out, regardless if it makes sense or not.

not to defend apple or anything but whats the complaint here?... that apple is really good at capitalism?

marcel_hecko• 3 years ago

"ThinkPad® X260 will go as long as you do with over 21 hours of continuous battery life". Thats a quote from Lenovo website from 2018. I can confirm this was in practice the case with extended battery pack.

lwkl• 3 years ago

Doing what kind of work? And with what kind of screen brightness?

I like Lenovo laptops but I never got that kind of battery life on them I got maybe half or sometimes only a third of what they advertised.

2OEH8eoCRo02• 3 years ago

You sound like you've fallen for some marketing. They want you to think that your laptop is "old" and you must upgrade. They want you to chase specs regardless of the benefit to your workflow because specs will improve forever.

I don't upgrade unless my computer can't do a thing that I need it to do.

kibwen3• 3 years ago

a few years ago battery life was maybe 7 hours and now it’s 18

At what point do battery improvements become completely unnecessary? Who's out here using their laptops for 18 hours continuously? It's like an electric car that can go 2,000 miles on a single charge; YAGNI. The vast majority of people would be perfectly well-served by a smaller, lighter, less expensive laptop that cuts down the battery to just 10 hours.

stetrain4• 3 years ago

18 hours advertised is usually running a locally stored video file on loop at medium to low screen brightness and some light web browsing.

My 18-hour laptop is more like 8-10 hours of real work usage, which is still fantastic compared to the 2-3 hours I would get at similar tasks 6-7 years ago.

Another big change is improvements to sleep and standby time. I can use half the battery, close the lid, and be reasonably confident that the other half will be ready and waiting the next time I need it.

EVs may actually be an apt comparison, where an EPA rating of 300 miles is more likely to give you 240 miles at highway speeds, or 150-200mi between charging stops since the optimal charge speeds fall off above a 70% charge.

rospaya• 3 years ago

At what point do battery improvements become completely unnecessary?

A week of heavy CPU/GPU use, on full brightness. We should strive for better. I want to go on a trip without carrying my charger.

cbzoiav• 3 years ago

Or even the older setups where you had a relatively small battery in the device and a bigger wedge shaped battery that could clip on the bottom.

Or there were a couple of devices with dual battery slots so you could hot swap.

Then on odd occasions when you need it just take the extra battery/ies.

datavirtue2• 3 years ago

You need an 18 hour battery to get a solid, reliable 10 hours of use.

lannisterstark3• 3 years ago

Who's out here using their laptops for 18 hours continuously?

"We should stop battery improvements because no one I know uses it" (to put it with a bit exaggeration) is certainly a novel take. Sometimes I put my laptop on the kitchen counter after doing stuff and not have to worry it'll be dead next afternoon when I need it for something.

You're forgetting one important take. Batteries degrade. In 3 years your "10 hour battery" will be more like 3 hours.

themadturk3• 3 years ago

When I first got my 2020 MacBook Air, could use it from getting up in the morning until going to bed at night...close to 18 hours on a weekend. Some of that was sleep time, but most was browsing, writing, watching video.

Now, almost three years later, I get noticeably shorter time, but I can still open my laptop at 7 in the morning, unplug it, and use it until mid evening without plugging it in. I've never had a laptop that lasted 18 hours, or even 12-14 hours as it does now.

When I got my MBA, my goal was to use it like an iPad...don't plug it in unless required to. I still don't have to worry much about it, even with battery wear.

RunSet2• 3 years ago

At what point do battery improvements become completely unnecessary?

I find when I can swap in a charged battery I care less about any given battery's life.

Similarly when the battery is soldered to the laptop I would rather it have a life longer than I am likely to ever use just in case.

chasil2• 3 years ago

It is well-known that planar transistors are more reliable than FINFET.

It is usually agreed that the end of planar transistors was the last process node of 28 nanometers. Everything below this (14, 10, 7, 5, 3, and 2 nanometers so far) is less reliable.

The fastest, lowest power, and most reliable CPU in a laptop will be on a 28nm process node. Everything beyond this sacrifices reliability for speed and lower power.

(And if you really care about lower power, then you are on ARM.)

tengbretson• 3 years ago

The failure rate of CPUs could go up 10x and it would still be a rounding error when quantifying what causes laptops to be decommissioned.

footlose_3815• 3 years ago

That sounds like batteries change

benj1113• 3 years ago

So you buy a new laptop every year?

What do you do with your old one? Throw it away? Or sell it? If you're selling it who do you think is buying it?

You do realise most people don't need the fastest processor, an 18 hour battery life, thunderbolt 4 or WiFi 6

And better screens and lighter weight are relative. If I upgrade my 10 year old laptop to a 5 year old laptop I'm still realising those gains. Next year a better screen will be out. Presumably we can agree that today's best screen is adequate, despite the knowledge that in the future it won't be the best screen, so if it's adequate today, why would it cease to be adequate in 1/3/5 years?

redroyal6• 3 years ago

Well in 5 years I expect most dev work will be done in VR collaboratively with remote teams, w multiple virtual screens and AI assistance. Another world. Laptops and cell phones will be gathering dust with the desktops. Things change fast. Remember the world without the iPhone? That was 16 years ago. So when you talk about using a 5 year old laptop to save a few dollars it just doesn’t make sense. You can listen to music on a CD player, sounds great, doesn’t make sense. Using a heavy hot i7 MBP w 6 hours battery life from 2017 also doesn’t make sense, to save what $1200 rather than buying a 15 inch MBA. Not today - this machine is your everything. Spend some money already

sheepscreek• 3 years ago

For OPs use-case which is mainly writing articles, reading and such - an older laptop will work fine. Especially when powered from A/C.

My MacBook Pro 2014 base model can still hold a candle to MacBook Air M1 for general use (even dev work to an extent), and that’s saying something. It’s slower, but doesn’t feel 9-years-old slow - if you know what I mean. It doesn’t drive me nuts to use it and I can be productive on it (my daily driver is a MacBook Pro M1 with 64GB RAM and I own a MacBook Air M1, so I speak from experience).

Also, we already do this for cars (used cars market is huge), so why not laptops. In fact, with cars - there are arguably stronger reasons to go with newer tech (safety, automatic cruise control) than with a newer laptop.

doubled112• 3 years ago

Always assumed it was because laptops start at $300 and cars start at $30,000.

Don’t call me out on the actual numbers, I am only really paying attention to the zeros.

tyg13• 3 years ago

The main product AFAICS is virtue signaling.

Friendly reminder that people do care about things you don't care about. Claims of virtue signaling say more about you than them, quite frankly. And really, you should care about the massive amount of e-waste generated every year.

quadrifoliate• 3 years ago

This.

I lose any hope for us as a species being able to reverse climate change if the top comment about an article that goes quite deep into meaningful ways to “reduce, reuse, recycle" is that this is virtue signaling, and that we should buy Macbooks every year instead because they are "expendable tools".

Guess what, their impact on the environment is very much noticeable. There is no way we are going to reverse or even meaningfully delay climate change with this kind of collective attitude.

tebruno99• 3 years ago

I like my framework and the 2 mini pc made from upgrading the internals. The slots are pass through thunderbolt 4 just like laptops with only USB’s ports. Not sure why they offended you. Get 4 usbc inserts and pretend they aren’t changeable if that’ll calm you down. Battery life does suck though I’ll give you that. It’s good overall at the cost though

ripply• 3 years ago

The framework laptops definitely run hot, I gave up on mine because it would overheat several times a day throttling down to 200Mhz. It sits in a box unused now and I consider it ewaste, I don't have the time or patience to bother with it anymore. I reached out to support maybe 6+ months ago but I haven't finished following their instructions because the laptop was just so bad and I wasted so much time dealing with it that I don't care anymore.

robocat• 3 years ago

I consider it ewaste

Leave it in a box in a cupboard and it is. Give it to somebody who will use it (at the next time you are hanging with geeks) and it isn’t e-waste. Offer it for free pickup next Framework thread - somebody wants it enough to not cost you more time than a drive format.

oliwarner• 3 years ago

They change, but my 2015 ThinkPad 13 still delivers on performance, battery, screen, etc.

I'm a grown up now. I've got better uses for £2k right now. I'll get a new laptop when I need one.

conceptme• 3 years ago

Just being able to replace the battery is a huge win.

agentultra2• 3 years ago

I had young kids. I took my laptop to conferences and events. Performances.

Things happen in these circumstances. Drinks spill. Laptops fall from heights. Cords get pulled.

You know what happens when a MBP encounters a liquid? It depends. But one thing almost every device will have in common in such an encounter: they cannot be repaired.

You have to replace the entire mainboard. And the cost is enough that you may as well buy a new one. The rest ends up in an unlicensed dump somewhere in the global south where a kid is going to get exposed to cancer causing chemicals when they drag it out and bring it to some back alley disassembly shop.

The cost for a laptop is pretty high. Building them to be bench repairable and upgradeable help extend their useful life. As the article points out the best we can do is use them for as long as possible.

kevinh456• 3 years ago

This is part of why Apple is pushing trade in when you buy a new device. They recycle it.

DyslexicAtheist• 3 years ago

> “Laptops don’t change”
because a few years ago battery life was maybe 7 hours and now it’s 18

seconded for linux as well. a few years ago battery life was maybe 4 hours, and now it's 1.

alxmdev• 3 years ago

I say buy the latest MacBook, expense it, factor it in as a monthly cost. These are expendable and essential tools. They pay for themselves

Yay, another top comment that steamrolls the posted article. I say don't buy the latest Macbook: instead repair, refurbish, and get true lifetime use out of these expensive devices. They're expensive to manufacture, expensive to buy, and expensive for our planet and people to just throw them away every year.

They're not expendable at all, here is just one example of the human sacrifice involved in their manufacturing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_Samsung

robbintt• 3 years ago

If you're trading it in then it's going to see more life, refurbished.

HWR_142• 3 years ago

buy the newest MacBook, expense it

Obviously if the cost (to you, because your company will pay for it) drops to zero, you should consume a new laptop every year. It costs nothing and if nothing else the battery is newer!

Of course, that logic applies to almost anything (take free stuff) even if it is objectively stupid. Your company will pay for your laptop but not part of your electric bill for your home office, just buy a new MacBook every two days with a fully charged battery!

nperez• 3 years ago

I feel like 2010-2020 was a stagnant time for hardware, which was most visible in the lack of huge leaps in gaming console quality. AI is changing that. Having tons of RAM and VRAM really does open up options that would simply be impossible before.

Running large AI models locally is a bit niche right now but I'm doubtful it will stay that way, so I say it's a good time to value bleeding edge machines

zokier4• 3 years ago

2010-2020 includes the launches of Intels Sandy Bridge (and to lesser degree Haswell) and AMD Zen (and with it Threadripper), many great products from nvidia (980, 1080, RTX, Titan). 2010s were also the decade of Apple Silicon, mostly on mobile though but culminating on M1 launch in 2020. In 2010 SSDs were just becoming a thing, but were still pretty anemic small sata ones with notoriously buggy firmwares, no comparison to modern-day nvme drives. And finally, after decades of stagnation, in 2010s we saw great improvements in displays, both getting hidpi, hdr, and larger gamuts.

Sure, it might pale in comparison to the absolute wild ride that were the 90s, but I would not call 2010s stagnant as a whole.

Tade02• 3 years ago

According to the most recent life cycle analysis, it takes 3,010 to 4,340 megajoules of primary energy to make a laptop

4340 MJ is around 135 litres of gasoline in terms of primary energy, or a little less than 36 US gallons.

Commuters blow through this much in 1-2 months, depending on distance.

My point is that if you're concerned about embedded energy, there's a lot of other, lower hanging fruit to pick.

mahogany2• 3 years ago

Energy usage isn’t the only thing to be concerned about. There are resources that have to be extracted, and non-recyclable waste piling up in huge quantities.

Seems like a fine fruit to pick if you consider broader environmental impact.

(Also, we can do multiple things at once. Burning an extra 36 gallons of oil if you don’t have to is still bad.)

Tade02• 3 years ago

I want to agree, but fossil fuels are generally non-recyclable and extracted on a much larger scale.

I mean, global production of cobalt - a highly controversial material - is around 200k tonnes.

By weight this is approximately 1.6% that of daily oil production - 90mln barrels a day.

zimspy• 3 years ago

I'm a software developer and an older laptop is not great for productivity. I have an old Dell Latitude from 2017 and I pumped as much life into it as I could. Bought more RAM, an SSD but despite all that, it's a pain to run the IDEs I need to use for work. I keep it as a backup and work on an M2 Max now.

Same goes with my S.O. who is a Chemist. Older computers are just not ideal for new software.

zokier4• 3 years ago

Age is not really the only aspect here; almost certainly top tier 2017 Latitude is more powerful machine than bottom tier brand-new Latitude today.

zabzonk• 3 years ago

my brother is fanatically opposed to buying anything new. when i wrecked my last new laptop, by spilling a gin & tonic into it, he got me a S/H HP Z15 workstation on ebay, and i must admit i have been pretty happy with it. i will think again before buying new.

bodge50002• 3 years ago

I can't say I stick to this 100%, but I actually like using underpowered laptops. Optimisation is an important step in the development process but its often rushed through even by those who consider it most important (myself included). However, if you NEED to optimise your code just to get the thing to work on your computer, a lot more attention is put into it. If I'm optimising for a lower spec machine than my users are likely to have, that gives me plenty of leg room.

For the record, I'm mostly talking about personal projects, which are game dev, where performance is more of a factor than something like a web app.

viraptor4• 3 years ago

You can easily underpower your better laptop on demand for a specific task. And also you can do it in more controlled ways: what happens if the process gets less memory, fewer cores, lower cpu speed, worse network, etc. Getting an underpowered laptop to do both development and testing is not the only, or even best way to do this.

kelnos8• 3 years ago

To expand on that, one of the main reasons I upgrade my laptop is to make development tasks better: faster compilation times, and less sluggishness when I need to work in bloated IDEs like IntelliJ.

Sure, that may put me a bit out of touch computing-power-wise from many of my users, but, as you point out, there are ways to compensate for that.

bodge50002• 3 years ago

You can, but you won't. Not regularly anyway, thats not the way you'll run your computer daily. Maybe for a while, but then you'll forget or want the extra power for something and get too used to it. Instead, you'll do it occasionally at specific times.

You've just recreated the problems I was talking about with an optimisation step but in a new environment.

botulidze• 3 years ago

I rely on laptops provided by corporations I work at, so here's the breakdown of the remaining electronics:

1) samsung s10 (2014) -> iphone 8 (2018) -> iphone 13 mini (2022) -> no replacement planned since Apple dropped mini lineup.

2) gaming pc: amd fx-8350 (2012) -> i7-6700k (2016) -> 7800x3d (2023) -> hopefully no replacement till 2027

3) tablet: nexus 7 (2012) -> galaxy tab s3 (2018) -> ipad pro 2021 (2022) -> unless battery completely dies earlier than in 4 years like it happened with nexus 7 (making it stationary device).

So overall, my update cycle is every 4 years on avg, with PC upgrades having longer cycles thanks to exceptional performance of the chosen platform at the time

I.e. I still have i7-6700k working at another location and delivering strong both for productivity and gaming use cases.

ac130kz3• 3 years ago

I got tired of laptops being: non-upgradable, poorly designed, overheating, having cheap components, cheap materials, so I'm switching to a backpackable mini-ITX build. For a journalist, even a first gen iPad should do the trick, but for quick compilation and development in general with all those heavy apps and daemons even a relatively fresh laptop CPU just doesn't keep up. The only two downsides are: no battery, space.

LoganDark• 3 years ago

There are also dedicated backpack PCs that are designed to run in the backpack, usually for virtual reality. I think those are super expensive though... (search "VR backpack")

Also they probably take up the whole backpack instead of being "backpackable". And they might be built like laptops (proprietary form factor, mobile/ultrabook CPU, etc.) depending on the model.

ac130kz3• 3 years ago

Nah, they are based on laptop components and cost twice as much.

fbhabbed• 3 years ago

the only two downsides are: no battery, space

And not being able to use it on the couch, on the toilet, outdoors in your backyard, on a plane, on a train and so on.

paulmd2• 3 years ago

on the toilet

sure you can, there's even a little shelf to hold the keyboard while you poop

ac130kz3• 3 years ago

It's not that big of a problem compared to a performance oriented laptop, which is most probably on the cord 95% of the time anyways.

SoftTalker• 3 years ago

I used a 12" Apple PowerBook G4 for years, long after Apple switched to Intel and came out with Macbook Air and Macbook Pro lines. I loved that laptop. Long after Apple stopped providing updates to the OS or browser I used TenFourFox to run a reasonably up-to-date FireFox on it. I finally gave it up, the battery life had degraded a lot and while that could have been replaced I was growing increasingly nervous about using such an out-of-date OS on an internet-connected laptop. I still miss it.

YmiYugy• 3 years ago

I used to think that as long as all you needed to do was some web browsing that older or underspeced machines were fine. But in the last few years websites have become insanely resource intensive. Even using something as seemingly simple as Gmail is a frustrating experience on older laptops (speaking as someone who just upgraded from a 2017 dual core MacBook Pro). I also have a hard time believing that the same hardware could handle that task much better if it used some lightweight linux distro. The browser engines are the same after all. You could swap Gmail for a lightweight email client, but I find that this approach of choosing software compatible with a capabilities of these low powered machines runs into some limitations sooner or later, e.g. when someone decides to sends you a Microsoft Office file, asks you to collaborate on a Google doc, insists on doing a meeting via Google Meet or Zoom. I may also want some of the other amenities modern laptops have to offer, like bright screens, long lasting batteries, the possibility of using a modern IDE or IDE like editor instead of having to learn VIM.

mahogany2• 3 years ago

Huh, I have a Thinkpad t450s from 2015 which I’m sure has less power than a 2017 MBP, and I use it for email and streaming YouTube just fine. It runs Linux and I use an adblocker, so maybe that’s a difference? Or maybe I don’t mind the decreased performance as much.

I don’t do my programming on it, so I can’t speak to that.

DeathArrow5• 3 years ago

Even using something as seemingly simple as Gmail is a frustrating experience on older laptops

I don't think Gmail is simple. It runs a lot of Javascript in background.

kryptoncalm• 3 years ago

I have the same problem on my 2015 Macbook Pro, I can do all usual work I want, but website are getting slower and slower burdened by heaps of JavaScript, autoplaying video and what not. Sometimes I even have input lag when typing in a search bar(!). The Ikea website is a good example of bloated website.

Adblock only helps a bit, and most websites don't work without javascript.

RunSet2• 3 years ago

The browser engines are the same after all.

I find Firefox and derivatives are overwhelmingly preferred to Chromium and derivatives on older hardware.

Chrome has a history of disrespecting users' machines to make itself seem more performant.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/07/why-google-took-year...

albertopv• 3 years ago

I have a still working 2010 Acer 4810TG upgraded with a SSD and 8GB RAM, I use it to play very old games and a little of Internet browsing, for that it still works.

hackan• 3 years ago

I have a Thinkpad T460p myself, and its battery lasts as long, or longer, than most new laptops I've seen! I was just searching for a new one for a friend, and noted that most new laptops are absolute garbage, total crap. Most have the same specs as mine, almost a decade later, WTF (yeah, "new gens", whatever) It's really sad, we are dropping all quality for mere quantity and consumerism...

szundi• 3 years ago

My version: Intel did not do shit for 10 years. That’s it.

mattlondon• 3 years ago

I recently did the same - needed a laptop, but balked at the costs for an "occasional use" device. Even a non-shite Chromebook (so decent ram and non-awful CPU) was £500+.

I got a used ThinkPad X1 from 2017 for £200 from ebay and it has been superb so far. It is modern enough for me - USB-c charging, Wifi-5, win11, 3ghz quad-core i5 etc.

I feel like it is very much luck of the draw for what the condition is like when you buy used, but for the ThinkPad X1 I got it appears to have held up very well.

Highly recommended. Will do the same again when I need another.

Avshalom• 3 years ago

>Even a non-shite Chromebook

I don't have a shit chromebook exactly but I have a shit big-box retail HP laptop that was ~$200 new that I bought on clearance in 2016 (so in the box but not recent), wiped the windows install and put CentOS7 on it.

It got me through most of a CS minor and a geology (focus geophysics) major.

It still works pretty well for an "occasional use" device, didn't handle Office365 very well but I think that was as much firefox as it was the hardware.

rollcat• 3 years ago

I agree with TFA. Probably the best value for the buck is a 3 year old high-end Thinkpad (T or X series); you can often find one for €250-350, as many businesses will be replacing whatever is at the end of their 3 year cycle.

I've been getting a new one roughly every 3-5 years and they definitely stay good enough for another 5. My latest score is a T495 (replacing an 11 (!) year old X230); it has 4 cores (8 threads), 24GB of memory, two NVMe drives, 4-5 hours of battery (~270 cycles), full HD 400 nits screen, and a GPU that actually handles some games. It's definitely less powerful than my M1 Mac mini, but it's good enough to the point that I'm not missing the extra horsepower all that much, even when doing "Actual Work" (it can get tad hot tho).

Also, developing software on less powerful hardware has another, indirect benefit: your software tends to suck less, because you have less cycles to waste.

jcpst• 3 years ago

I have not directly bought a computer in 13 years. I’ve been a programmer for 10.

My daughter uses the one I was issued at coding bootcamp in 2013. My home recording studio uses a 2010 mac mini. My wife uses an out-of-warranty one from my work, as do I for my home dev machine. My son uses a really old cheap laptop that was laying around.

I installed SSDs and maxed out the RAM on all of them.

Maybe people are attracted to the latest shiny thing, or give up early on a computer that would go to scrap without a little TLC.

mgraczyk• 3 years ago

I just bought a new Macbook Pro and have been using it for ~1 week.

Even compared to my previous 2019 Macbook Pro, it's a huge step up in build quality and speed.

If you spend any time waiting for code to compile, web pages to load, or dependencies install, I'd say buy the fastest laptop you can find. I'd guess this new machine has already saved me around 20 minutes of waiting. At that rate it will pay for itself in around 6 months. If you're just using the laptop to write and browse the web, maybe it's ok to try to save some money.

Even ignoring economics, I spend like 12 hours a day staring at this thing. It's really important to me psychologically that the screen be high quality so I don't loose my mind.

hoherd• 3 years ago

The high quality screen is so important. Every time I go looking for cheap laptops, it's the screen that steers me towards higher prices.

soulbadguy7• 3 years ago

+1 on the importance a high-quality screen. I never quite understand why PC manufacturer skimp on what is agruabably the most important interface with the device. And when they do, they of course jump into spec chasing with resolution and frame rate taking the focus instead of contrast, color reproduction and PWM (for people sensitive to it ).

What's the delta in BOM cost for a high quality display ? Maybe someone with industry knowledge can comment.

giantrobot• 3 years ago

What's the delta in BOM cost for a high quality display ? Maybe someone with industry knowledge can comment.

Higher quality screens are more expensive than shitty ones. It's not just the cost of the panel itself but more pixels take more power. That means more expensive driver circuitry and likely a larger battery to be able to offer a marketable battery life.

That higher power may not work in your current design's thermal envelope. A different panel may also need a redesign of the display shell, bezel, and even hinge(s). Each component might not have a significant increase in cost on the BOM but all of them together add up as does any redesigns to support the extra power usage.

Gigachad7• 3 years ago

Because the screen is pretty close to the most expensive part and isn't one that shows up well on spec sheets other than resolution. Windows laptop consumers almost all go by price per spec sheet item so those shitty screens boost the value way up.

eimrine• 3 years ago

I use a Core2Duo laptop on a regular basis and all my tasks are met except of poor battery life. More cores does not give me such a boost as migration from a single-core Pentium 4. I still use Windows 7 on half of my machines as the best OS in my life ever but I am migrating on GNU/Systemd/Linux on all new laptops because Windows 7 is as much vendor's presence as I tolerate.

a-dub• 3 years ago

it would be pretty cool if someone released a 10 or 15 year chromebook.

me551ah• 3 years ago

Rather than buying an old laptop which was high end at its time, it’s better to buy a cheap laptop which is new. The processor will be more efficient and powerful, it’s going to have multiple newer ports and you don’t need to run an obscure version of Linux which won’t run tools that people in your industry use. Running Linux as your daily driver is hard as it is, running an obscure version of Linux on an old laptop as your primary machine will drive you crazy. You would end up losing productivity fixing all the bugs and random issues.

bitwize• 3 years ago

I knew a guy who would buy a laptop, use it for like 3 months, then flip it on eBay and buy another. He said this is how you get good value for money -- flip it before it loses much of its resale value and buy new with the proceeds.

I'm not sure why people would do this. I use computer equipment to the point of exhaustion. I still have laptops from the 90s that work fine; while they will never be a main they are fun to play with. My main laptop currently is a ThinkPad from 2014 -- it does just about all that I need it to do without a hitch or stutter.

My main PC is a Ryzen desktop I bought in 2018. It's probably due for some upgrades, but I cannot afford them currently.

dangus4• 3 years ago

These days you’d have to keep extensive tax records to do that scheme because eBay is going to report earnings over $600 to the IRS.

And you’ll get eaten alive by eBay fees.

DeathArrow5• 3 years ago

You can use Facebook marketplace, Craigslist or another site.

gregw2• 3 years ago

The original article makes a good point but neither it nor the comments here mention my main concern with used computers-- They don't have the same clean/new-system "security" properties as a new computer.

Who knows what malware/security rootkit was installed on some consumer machine that persisted in some corner of it and didn't get detected/wiped? It's kinda a crapshoot in my view.

aj7• 3 years ago

The same reasoning applies to cars even more.

Crywastaken2• 3 years ago

Apple is a business first and formost. Software closing to replace the same part with different id is trash. more money to them

looking back what mac have is it closer to Linux than win (I know subsystem Linux exist) - Linux is but Programs is key for market You can't import ios apps to win It's monolith

Unix system and then modules for desktop etc (hmm it wouldn't work how I imagine) /

Animation is a problem Graphics 4k Before you click then need to be spectrum of color time to react to do a function it's weird you didn't speed this too much features bare bones isn't great either Hmm

user_78322• 3 years ago

Somewhat meta, but having seen the breath-takingly shitty hinges on many HP laptops including mine, followed by all the inevitable hardware issues with nearly every laptop at home (choose between buggy/unreliable/disabled x touchpad/left speaker/audio jack/webcam/Bluetooth/WiFi/screen/hinge/chassis shell/keys) made me realise that the only “true” solution is to spin your own laptop or similar.

Frameworks may be good starting points for most, I prefer smaller devices and hope to build a cyberdeck with a 4”*4” SBC as soon as I have the necessary resources.

I am done with troubleshooting glitchy hardware/software. (Modern) HP can go burn in an eternal hell. (Oh, and Lenovo and Asus are at the gates as well.)

soulbadguy7• 3 years ago

At the high-end windows laptop are usually a coin flip. If you want any guaranty you need to basically sign on for a PhD level of research and review watching to make sure you don't get a turd.

At the low-end/middle end... God damn it's rough... The average quality from poor screen to poor keyboard, bad termal you name it ... just plain sucks.

mumblemumble• 3 years ago

I'm more or less in that boat. I did by my laptop, a 2013 MacBook Pro, new, but 10 years later it's still fine for my purposes. For productivity purposes, the only real concessions to its age are that I did have to get the battery replaced about a year ago, and I do some light adblocking (no autoplaying videos or heavy scripting or anything like that, but I still let static ads through) to keep webpages usable.

For light gaming I recently bought a refurbished 2019 desktop for $250. I mostly only play older games (because I'm cheap), so that was more about Apple dropping support for 32-bit apps than it is about the MacBook not being powerful enough, though I am admittedly happy about having a computer that can play KSP without everything turned down to the lowest quality level. Overall, happy there, too - it's hard for me to imagine that a new computer would provide enough utility to justify the added cost. The latest generation of this computer retails for four times as much money as I paid for the used one, but the specs are very, very similar.

DeathArrow5• 3 years ago

On my development machine I run at the same time: at least two instances of Visual Studio each containing a big microservice based app, an instance of Visual Studio Code containing a large front-end, Docker Desktop, Postgres, Redis, MongoDB, management apps for databases, at least three Windows Terminal tabs, dozens of tabs in browser, dozens of tabs in Notepad++, Teams, Outlook and some other random stuff.

I need beefy laptops and I usually change them after two years.

SimonPStevens• 3 years ago

I last bought a laptop (in fact any PC at all) in 2015.

It was pretty beefy for the time. A desktop 4790K CPU, 32gb RAM and a GTX 980M. It was a long time ago, but I think I paid around £1500 for it.

Shout out to https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/ for a great long lasting machine that is very open for maintenance, long before Framework was around. I will absolutely buy from them again next time. Removable battery, replaceable hard drive, ram, cpu, graphics card. Easily open-able case (screws, but I've had it open). They sold me a replacement keyboard for something like £30 when I smashed a few keys by dropping my camera on it.

My inner tech geek is keen to buy something new, but this one is still going strong, and I can't justify spending money when this one works so well. It still plays all the latest games. It's only had two problems over the years. 1) Obviously, the original battery doesn't last very long now. 2) The CPU started overheating after about 5 years when pushed, so I popped the cover open, took the heatsink off and reapplied fresh thermal paste. Has worked perfectly since.

I mean honestly, the single threaded CPU performance only seems to be about 50% behind modern chips. I don't really see many machines even today with 32gb ram.

Things it struggles with these days that I suppose would require a new machine if it bothered you: - 4k gaming. - VR games are a bit too choppy unless you turn the settings right down. (HL:Alyx is playable at pretty much lowest settings) - Probably going to struggle with any generative AI stuff given the older GPU, but I've not tried it.

I code on it, but I don't do high intensive stuff like video editing, 3d work, rendering, etc, so perhaps it would struggle with that kind of stuff.

activiation• 3 years ago

I always buy my phones used, from swappa.com... saved hundreds of $ for phones that are in mint condition

kunalgupta• 3 years ago

I never buy new computers more than once every 5 years because it takes like 3 days to get local versions of openssl and node or whatever to run correctly enough to run an app and it's the hours of my life I most abhor. It's just lost time on earth.

That being said it obviously pays off in productivity at least every 5 years. Maybe 3 is net positive? At this point i think we are climate doomed without acceleration so productivity is environmentalism

kelsolaar• 3 years ago

This is facilitated by the fact that laptops are now a mature technology and have more than sufficient computational power.

Depends what you do with them, if you program, edit movies, do 3D rendering or play games, there will never be enough power.

lost_tourist5• 3 years ago

depends on what you're programming tho. For web work just about any old laptop will work. AI, number crunching, 3d? yeah you need the best you can afford.

DeathArrow5• 3 years ago

I can use old laptops because I can't run what I need, but at least I won't buying new cars as old cars seem to have a better bang for the buck.

I like my actual car because is quite reliable and if something breaks, it's easy to fix. Also, being Diesel it's also cheap to run.

My next car will also be an old Diesel. Probably I should buy more cars at some point because they'll forbid new cars with internal combustion engines and it's good to have backups.

dangus4• 3 years ago

Ugh, diesels need to go, they’re an air quality nightmare.

I agree with you that new cars are a bad value, they’re a rapidly depreciating asset, but that has little to do with the drivetrain.

The truth is that if you give any shit about the environment or people breathing the air around you, EVs or at least a gasoline hybrid are the verified lesser evil. They’re just so much more efficient on energy consumption during operation that it easily negates their production impact.

But the best thing to do is reduce car trips and car dependency entirely, because cars themselves are not sustainable and waste all our hard-earned money on inefficient infrastructure.

downrightmike• 3 years ago

One really good reason to buy new gear: Discovery of new UEFI rootkit exposes an ugly truth: The attacks are invisible to us Turns out they're not all that rare. We just don't know how to find them. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/07/resea...

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK2• 3 years ago

Well, I'm retired, so I don't do much emails or zoom anymore. I do serious stuff now, like Cyberpunk, MFS and Hogwarts. So I need serious hardware, updated often. And I'm constantly on the move too, so serious hardware needs to fit into my backpack. Sorry, snowflake millennial applebooks not up for the task.

dangus4• 3 years ago

Believe it or not, Apple laptops are now quite capable of gaming, and Apple’s recent release of a game development porting toolkit shows that they’re getting serious about the space:

https://youtu.be/bIPl71ZeOYk

40fps in Cyberpunk 2077 on a Mac laptop including a translation layer.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK2• 3 years ago

1080p, no ray tracing ... long way to go.

teekert• 3 years ago

Nice read. I do the same, but with 3-6 year old laptops. I recently bought an HP ProBook 440 for 450€, you can still buy it new for 1050. The “used” one was brand new, there are people that buy such stock from companies and when they say “No signs of usage” they mean it, I so far got 2 spotless machines.

simonblack4• 3 years ago

I really like the idea of using an SD card for the home directory, because that's the thing that changes constantly, and it's a pain trying to synchronise the home directory over several machines. With one instance, that's backed up regularly, it makes life fairly simple. Now I just have to work out the mechanics of implementing it smoothly.

I have an archive disk/directory that holds all the 'write once, keep forever' stuff like photos, music, ebooks, etc. That can be rsync'd periodically and that won't take much time because the archive grows fairly slowly over time, and rsync will only need to transfer those relatively few additions.

I'm also somebody who prefers the feel of my old Lenovo ThinkPad T410 from back in 2010 to my much later P53. Perhaps I should resurrect it with the upgrading of its 2TB hard drive to a 2 or 4 TB SSD. I must look into that.

jacknews4• 3 years ago

A portable home dir works if you have the same os and software on all the laptops.

When I bought a macbook the first time (ostensibly to develop for iphone), I hated the UI, so ran linux in a virtualbox as my main os.

I think that would work really well from an external drive - but an sdcard is way too slow, it should be on a usb c nvme.

simonblack4• 3 years ago

but an sdcard is way too slow, it should be on a usb c nvme.

Hmm, yes, that would probably be better and faster. And not only that, it could be possible to include a grub boot partition as well. I wonder if that would easily be doable, or would be just another can of worms.

jacknews4• 3 years ago

"I calculated that my keyboard had 90 keys and that replacing them all just once would cost me 1,350 euros."

This is a problem in the godawful 2016- macbooks, but with thinkpads, you can replace the entire keyboard, and do it yourself, for $30.

HydianSnake1• 3 years ago

Between 2000 and 2017, I consumed three laptops

This is the story I really want to hear wtf

dang• 3 years ago

How and why I stopped buying new laptops - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32674830 - Sept 2022 (111 comments)

How and why I stopped buying new laptops - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26188282 - Feb 2021 (100 comments)

How and why I stopped buying new laptops - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25486191 - Dec 2020 (279 comments)

nathants• 3 years ago

ram, disk, and cpu cache all continue to improve. if you live on your computer and can afford to it is absolutely worth to continuously upgrade.

donate your old machines to charity! many people can’t afford computers.

eBombzor• 3 years ago

Laptops don’t change
New laptops may be more energy-efficient per computational power, but these gains are offset by more computational power

Guess this was written before the M1 :)

I also felt the Zen 2 Laptop chips marked a huge step forward on the Win/Linux side at that time: generationally more power efficient than the best laptop chips from Intel, same core/thread count as the desktop equivalents, and cheap enough to be in a lot of budget laptops.

Dalewyn3• 3 years ago

I'll also point out that quoted argument doesn't even make any sense.

The vast majority of people are not going to run their computers at full tilt all day every day all year long. Most of the time is spent in idle cycles or very low usage, so efficiency gains matter a lot.

If you are the few people who run their computers full tilt, it still doesn't make sense because you will finish your task sooner meaning you will spend less energy and time overall completing the same task as before.

turdprincess• 3 years ago

Anecdotal, but my M1 MacBook Pro doesn’t have amazing battery life. The other day I went to a coffee shop with 60% charge and only made it about 2.5 hours doing iOS development.

sb8244• 3 years ago

Same here. My MacBook air easily could go 6+ hours and it feels like the pro goes 2-3. Same workload.

JCharante• 3 years ago

I’ve gone 4 work days without charging my M1 MBP

kylec2• 3 years ago

Do you have a 13" MacBook Pro with M1 or a 14+" MacBook Pro with M1 Pro/Max? If the latter, it has decent battery life, but it's nowhere near as efficient as the regular M1 MacBook Pro. If it's the former, I guess I'm surprised, I own one (I'm writing this comment on one) and I've loved how the battery seems to just last forever on mine.

antigirl2• 3 years ago

My M1 max [14inch] was suffering with really bad battery life. Turned out it was sync plugin for VSCode.

zakki• 3 years ago

OP claims still holds I guess. There are secondhand M1 in the market.

thefz• 3 years ago

Guess this was written before the M1 :)

Depends on what you do, my girlfriend uses her M1 heavily for video calls and the battery lasts the same as any other average laptop.

edfletcher_t137• 3 years ago

There is one, galaxy-sized, deal-breaking issue with any used laptop: you can never clean them thoroughly enough. I'll leave it at that.

patchtopic• 3 years ago

I work for a non profit org.

We sometimes purchase reconditioned laptops as they are good value for some use cases.

We have a lot of WfH users so need to courier laptops to some staff.

We recently had an insurance claim denied for a damaged reconditioned laptop as TNT/Fedex used a "no second hand goods" clause in their insurance to wriggle out paying up.

This has not stopped me purchasing reconditioned laptops, but something to be aware of and taken into account.

In fact just buying another reconditioned laptop was not a large expense and damaged laptops in transit are relatively rare.

poisonborz• 3 years ago

Good to know, but in practice this just means more and cheaper second hand devices to be available to the public.

kelnos8• 3 years ago

You sorta hint at this in your post, but I assume that eating the cost of the rare damaged-in-transit laptop is still cheaper than paying full price for all-new hardware.

And while I certainly understand that environmental impact might not be the chief concern for a company (even a non-profit), continuing to give secondhand hardware a new life is certainly way better for the environment.

Regardless, it seems bonkers to me that a courier can get away with such a clause. You're paying them to ship something safely from point A to point B; it should be completely irrelevant what that thing is when it comes to paying you out for their mistakes.

crazygringo2• 3 years ago

If you look at it from the courier's side it makes more sense though.

It's obvious if an item was new and you can safely assume it was the delivery company that damaged it.

Whereas for secondhand items there's no way of knowing the original shipping condition. And it would open up massive amounts of fraud where people would buy a cheap broken item on eBay (sold for parts), ship it to a nearby friend with full insurance, and then claim the shipper broke it.

Insurance should still cover the case of an item lost in shipping however, regardless of new/secondhand, since there's no opportunity for fraud there.

causality0• 3 years ago

My laptop runs on Linux Lite, one of several open-source operating systems specially designed to work on old computers.

That use to be a better tip than it is now. These days the thing that bogs the old computer down isn't a heavy OS, but all the heavy sites you visit with that OS. There's only so much you can do to get your old Bay Trail to play 4K Youtube.

LeFantome• 3 years ago

For a lot if what I do, the CPU on an older laptop is just fine. So, I too use really old laptops.

That said, I am upgrading laptops that sold with 2 - 4 GB of RAM to 16 GB, or at least 8 GB. Often I am replacing on old HDD ( maybe as slow as 5400 RPM ) with a faster SSD. That SSD also juices the battery life. So, what I am using is a lot nicer than what the original owner had to deal with.

Many laptops today will not age as well as, in ten years, that soldered on 8 GB is really going to be a bummer.

I use Linux a fair bit which makes a difference. Linux is fantastic on older hardware and the software itself is totally up to date. I use old Mac laptops a fair bit. The version of MacOS they support would be unusable as would the applications that would still run on it. The same is becoming true of Windows.

Dalewyn3• 3 years ago

Linux is fantastic on older hardware

I've been having a hard time getting Linux to work on older hardware ever since the majority of distros dropped 32-bit builds.

Then again, "older" for me means stuff from the Pentium through the Pentium 4 era. Seeing as "older" today means Sandy Bridge and the like, the moral of this little tale is I am a fucking old man angry at the kids on my lawn.

colechristensen• 3 years ago

I think you have graduated to retro computing enthusiast.

ant6n2• 3 years ago

But there must be some with 32bit support?

jakogut• 3 years ago

The x86-64 architecture was introduced in 1999, with the first processor introduced in 2003. Comparatively, the 8088, introduced in 1979, was barely older at the time than the 64-bit Opteron is now.

It might be time to let i386 go.

mike_hock4• 3 years ago

I won't take any distro seriously that doesn't support at least i686, amd64, arm and arm64.

Compiling for four architectures can't be too much to ask. Shit software that can't be written portably enough to run on more than amd64 must be kicked off the repo. We need this pressure on developers if we're to maintain a modicum of code quality.

Joeri• 3 years ago

That soldered ram is indeed a killer, and the transition can be quite sudden. We have a 2014 macbook air with 4gb of soldered ram, and my kid was fine using it for office and browsing, until at one point he suddenly wasn’t. The ram footprint of that software together with macOS updates passed some threshold where it just became too slow, so now he’s using one of my other old laptops, a windows machine with an even slower cpu, but with 8 gb ram, and that one is still ok, for now.

Apple’s talk about sustainability is just talk as long as they bake in poison pills like soldered ram and soldered storage. Those machines are unupgradable and unrepairable.

The thin and light market is almost entirely soldered ram now, so now I just price in the 16 gb upgrade as the base config price when looking at those.

brailsafe7• 3 years ago

Honestly I feel bad for most people who ended up with a 4gb macbook, and Apple should feel some shame for continuing to sell them for so long, not terribly unlike the Vista debacle. 4gb was an awful choice already in 2014, and since 16gb was (I think) the max and still kinda mid, that was the obvious choice; 8GB would have still been fine for an average user. I have no idea if 64gb is the obvious choice now, but the upgrade is so obscenely expensive that I'll be holding onto my intel thing for a while longer. Not as long as I can, but until the cost to value ratio becomes more compelling, or something like a cellular modem comes around.

TazeTSchnitzel• 3 years ago

Unfortunately soldered RAM consumes less energy and space.

sundvor2• 3 years ago

Yeah I'm so glad I paid top dollar for the 8GB version of the OG X1 Carbon back in 2012 - and got the i7 with the biggest NVME, a 256gb.

I also have a newer Nano for work, but prefer the keyboard of the old. If I had picked the 4GB model then, it would have been pretty useless today.

Today I wouldn't buy a personal laptop with less than 32GB of memory. The X1 Nano was hard locked at 16GB, and I guess I didn't quite anticipate how much I'd be using Docker. :(

loup-vaillant• 3 years ago

The real scandal though, is that you need more than 4GB of ram to do some office and browsing. I mean, you update the software and it just becomes worse?

NovaDudely3• 3 years ago

Compute power has never been an issue for me, but I generally try to max out the RAM as much as my budget allows. This is why I still have a 2010 Macbook that is more than fine. Started with 4GB and was barely usable for heavier even when it came out, but dropping 16GB into and it has been smooth sailing for over a decade now.

That said my daily runner is now T420 from (2011-ish) that came with 6GB of RAM that is in near mint condition I bought for $100. I swapped the HDD for an SSD and just threw Linux Mint on here - I disable the swap file so that it doesn't hammer the drive. So when it is 6GB of RAM - that is all it can work with but it has never been an issue.

But the original HDD was running Windows 7 and oh my gosh the bloat they had installed! This poor thing was in pain with that junk on board! It is amazing how many times I have had an old laptop come up, unusable because of how the OS treats the system and the users just keep dumping more on it that is reasonable. But swap the disk drive and OS and you would never recognize some of these things.

I once came across some netbook Toshiba Presario (?) - 1.4Ghz Core Duo with 3GB of RAM running Windows Vista. The poor thing! But do the old one two on it and it was a brilliant little machine for plucking away on, could easily get 6-7 hours on battery as well.

yokoprime• 3 years ago

My main issue with especially lenovos from 2010-2015 is that the lcd panels are poor quality (dim, loads of bleed etc) everything else is really good

AnonymousPlanet• 3 years ago

I have a T420s that really struggles with video e.g. Youtube. Watching any h.245 via VLC or mplayer is impossible. Also the battery is in a bad state and I haven't been able to find a good replacement that isn't equally poor or worse right from the start. It actually has two batteries, one being in what used to be the cd tray. Still, usage time is 3 hours tops.

It had been my daily driver for years, running Linux, but I had to replace it with something newer.

How is your T420 doing with all this? Did you update the CPU? Does it still have the stock battery?

Delk6• 3 years ago

I swapped the HDD for an SSD and just threw Linux Mint on here - I disable the swap file so that it doesn't hammer the drive.

If that's for the longevity of the drive, I don't think that's really even necessary on a personal device, based on my limited experience. Unless you're aiming for a lifespan measured in decades or would expect to be swapping heavily if you had swap.

I have a basic consumer-grade Samsung 850 EVO SSD that I've been using daily in my laptop since ~2015 or 2016 or so. I've had zero problems with write performance so far, and the SSD reports a wear leveling count of ~140 which seems to indicate the (average?) number of writes per block so far. That value normalizes to a SMART value of 93 out of 100. While SMART may not be much of a reliable indicator of anything, if the number of blocks written is anywhere near realistic, that value seems to make approximate sense if TLC NAND lifetime expectancy is rated at ~1000 writes per block.

Samsung also seems to have a warranty of up to 5 years or 150 TB written for this SSD (depends on drive capacity). The drive reports a total of 23.7 TB written so far.

I haven't been doing a lot of data-heavy work on the device but I haven't really been particularly careful with the SSD either. I've got a swap that's seen some actual use (8 GB RAM), and I also hibernate semi-regularly. I've been trying to keep at least ~15 percent of the capacity free to help with wear leveling but that's about the only conserving I've been doing.

Of course it might be that my drive is just waiting to suddenly start failing writes but I'm not really expecting that.

And your disabling swap might be for some other reason, of course.

But if this is par for the course for consumer-grade SSDs in general, I wouldn't really be worried about the effects of swapping on life spans unless there's some particularly heavy hammering planned.

foo42• 3 years ago

I have a t420 in my drawer I've been considering doing this with. Years ago before it was old I used to dual boot it with mint and the power management wasn't great. How's your experience been? mind you that was with original spinning drive. what spec SSD did you install? sorry for all the questions.

cm2187• 3 years ago

The only thing that has aged, other than HDD that can be replaced, is video cards, which you can't upgrade. 4k monitors have become common and you will need something fairly recent to drive that. 4k videos also, my laptop struggles with certain 4k hevc iphone videos.

pmontra2• 3 years ago

Actually my ZBook has an upgradable graphic card but I can upgrade it to a better model of the same age, so it's basically useless for compatibility with newer drivers. Nvidia and Noveau are going to end supporting cards from 2014 sooner or later.

vanloi999• 3 years ago

yet another example of Lindy effect. I've been using Thinkpad T40s since 2019.

RomanPushkin• 3 years ago

I bought Lenovo 11e chromebook for $24 with free delivery on ebay. Disassembled the unit and unscrewed write protection screw, installed new BIOS and GalliumOS. Works pretty OK'ish. I use it to watch videos: youtube and video services I need (movies online) work well. Battery is pretty good as well.

There is no magic though. You get what you pay for - I can't do modern JavaScript development on it.

oneTbrain23• 3 years ago

You can get i5 T430-T480 or X220 to X280 for around 200usd (exclude tax and shipping) depending on spec configuration. For journalism, you don't need fancy laptop more expensive than 200usd.

decide1000• 3 years ago

I have an older laptop which runs Debian 12 with xfce rather slow. Browsing the web with Firefox goes fairly slow. Clicking a button can take a second before something happens. I changed the OS for GhostBSD (=FreeBSD) and now have a major improvement in speed. Buttons and links in Firefox feel snappy again.

I was not aware that FreeBSD would be this much resource-friendly.

RuggedPineapple2• 3 years ago

I've actually gone even farther. The last 4 laptops I've bought have all been 50 dollar used Chromebooks. Pull out the write-protect screw, flash new firmware and install linux. If it's got enough eMMC space Windows 10 LTSC runs too (depending on model) but I find xubuntu or Fedora XFCE plays nicer with 16 gigs of space.

I have a beefier desktop for serious things, but in terms of everyday machines they work fantastically.

theodric2• 3 years ago

Interesting. Any models you'd care to recommend? I'm looking for a cheap, functional Linux laptop to replace my ThinkPad, and this option sounds promising.

RuggedPineapple2• 3 years ago

For the aftermarket firmware that allows non-ChromeOS OSs, theres a compatibility list at https://mrchromebox.tech/#devices that will show you if full UEFI firmware is available, and the write-protect method you need to disable.

I usually browse around Mercari looking for a system with specs that are acceptable, then check the list to see if its supported. I haven't paid more then around 50 bucks for any of them.

ksec• 3 years ago

I am still on my MacBook Pro 2015 because of the Keyboard and Trackpad.

So in about 2 years time this will be 10 years of usage. I dont intend to replace it any time soon. For browsing it is fast enough. And if you look at the Louis Rossman Channels it seems newer MBP just aren't built the same.

It may be worth looking at it again I 2025. How little ( or big ) the past 10 years of Laptop has changed.

flagged24• 3 years ago

I decided to buy a Mini-STX (AsRock X300 64GB RAM/Ryzen 5700G) and wait for a good laptop to become a available. It's still portable, much better performance/price ratio and you can buy a good (portable) high brightness matte display of your own choice. It may not be portable as in battery portable, but it's small enough to go in suitcase.

windex• 3 years ago

I am hoarding older thinkpads at this point. The soldered RAM ones I am not touching. The older ones are cheap to upgrade and pretty snappy. I havent bought a new laptop since 2009.

pjmlp3• 3 years ago

Same here, among my personal computers, the most recent one is 5 years old.

Even for 3D programming, if the Web is the main target, the 3D standards are made for 2009 hardware (WebGL 2.0), or 2015 (WebGPU), so having the latest GPU model doesn't make any difference.

As much as I like to program graphic related stuff, I am not a one person AAA studio, nor going to create the next AI startup, so the NVidia MX150 is mostly on vacations.

Dealing with Docker and friends, is something I leave for work, so again, nothing that really impacts my private computing needs.

code51• 3 years ago

I would still be able to use 2013 Macbook Pro if I could have someone around who understand that GPU related issue would be solved by "holding u8900 chip down with rubber material"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lumJ0cN5oyY

https://www.reddit.com/r/macbookpro/comments/ek0pmi/comment/...

However, Apple declares your device "vintage" and repair shops avoid it like the plague. Because they only know who to replace the entire board. That's when you device to buy another laptop.

t0bia_s• 3 years ago

I still use 13y old ThinkPad x201 with Fedora. Of course with SSD and upgraded RAM to 8GB. I cannot imagine more kid-proof laptop. It's indestructible construction, yet compact and not heavy. Perfect for home with kids. No wonders that it is commonly used in space stations!

rldjbpin• 3 years ago

i think this widely varies between people and what they need their laptop for.

personally my previous laptop (7+ years old; the replacement is over 3) was ample for basic tasks even today, but it did not meet my personal needs (gaming, deep learning on cuda).

but there is something liberating in getting a very cheap but well-built old laptop if you can get away with using it like a thin client. personally, going forward it makes sense to instead invest in a repairable laptop like framework. while the old thinkpads can only be repaired around the core hardware, this way you should be able to get much more mileage.

slim• 3 years ago

I have an old toshiba laptop from 2008. I use it every day to learn m. my kids use it as an emulator of old games. it still has up to date software thanks to guix

Vaslo• 3 years ago

For what it’s worth - I bought one of the “controversial” Alienware laptops in 2015. It won’t play the latest games but it still runs beautifully to everything I need including coding and Excel work.

While a few of these brands are a bit pricey, I’ve bought family members other brands like Dell and Acer laptops, and they’ve got a few good years out at most before they become clunky and close, even with a fresh operating system reinstall.

thewileyone• 3 years ago

I'm the family IT guru so I always give this advice when buying a new laptop or desktop: Set a budget on how much you're willing to spend and don't try to save from that amount.

Buy the best you can for the amount you can afford and you won't feel bad about it. If you could only afford something really cheap and it dies in 2-3 years, you won't feel too bad about it and if you can afford something else, rinse and repeat. If not, try to get it fixed.

fennecfoxy2• 3 years ago

I should be illegal to sell laptops where the dissipative power of the cooling system is less than the thermal power of the CPU/etc.

Also should be illegal to lock me out of fan control, like Dell does. As always, never buy Dell, people. Teach 'em a lesson for advertising "space age cooling" that slowly cooks the laptop because their default fan profile was apparently designed by a pretty face in a Versace suit.

I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

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