3 ms·

I agree; it sucks for the reason you say. "Moore's Law" is probably part of the reason we're okay with this: by the time RAM/CPU/mobo start failing, a laptop i

I agree; it sucks for the reason you say. "Moore's Law" is probably part of the reason we're okay with this: by the time RAM/CPU/mobo start failing, a laptop is 5 (or 6 or 7 or 10) years old and the laptop's a dinosaur anyway. Heck, by that point a lot of us are probably hoping our laptops fail so we have an excuse to get a new one. I wonder if we'll stop being okay with this eventually, now that desktop/laptop CPUs aren't getting faster at the rate they used to. My 2011 Macbook Pro is still plenty fast enough for me. It would be nice if it lasted a long time.

ddingus 11y ago
Is that actually true? We've hit a plateau on overall compute speed. There are incremental improvements, but the difference in performance over 5 years today is much less than it was 7-10 years ago. My 10 year old laptop is awesome, and it's a Thinkpad too. I have fixed it, replacing a fan, upgrading RAM, etc... all good, but it's performance isn't so hot. Buying new made a lot of sense. But, my current 4-5 year old, high end, laptop is still competetive in a way that didn't used to be true. I've a 2012 MBP, and it's still plenty fast. The newer machines are nice, but it's not like the 2012 is irrelevant, and that particular MBP is servicable. Just barely, but possible. I've done a number of things on it. The new machines now just aren't. So even the expert user service is off the table, and I find that hard to deal with personally, because I know I absolutely do plan on running the machine for 5+ years.
- Detrus 11y ago
  Apple is still selling the old model user upgradable MacBook Pro for $1100 http://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro http://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro the same price I bought one for in 2011. Except I bought refurbished and smaller HD. Some of the new machines Apple is selling for $1000 are actually slower at many tasks. But the market has spoken and Apple is selling hardware that suits most user's narrow tasks of email, browsing and video. It also streamlines manufacturing, as they're already focused on mobile where everything must be stuck together in one chip. But they're enabling 4K video editing on iPhones and iPad Pros with what I'm assuming is custom hardware. And that could be a very smart approach if it was applied to more tasks on Pro computers. Performance could actually move forward again.
  - ddingus 11y ago
    Indeed. Custom hardware can move us forward, and that's an interesting trend that may actually drive me to buy new machines sooner. One of my daily driver tasks is CAD. Mechanical CAD. Due to the age and massive human investment in geometry kernels, single thread performance really matters. It is difficult to apply multi core processing to CAD problems. It would be interesting to understand what special hardware could improve on this.

ddingus 11y ago

Is that actually true? We've hit a plateau on overall compute speed. There are incremental improvements, but the difference in performance over 5 years today is much less than it was 7-10 years ago. My 10 year old laptop is awesome, and it's a Thinkpad too. I have fixed it, replacing a fan, upgrading RAM, etc... all good, but it's performance isn't so hot. Buying new made a lot of sense. But, my current 4-5 year old, high end, laptop is still competetive in a way that didn't used to be true. I've a 2012 MBP, and it's still plenty fast. The newer machines are nice, but it's not like the 2012 is irrelevant, and that particular MBP is servicable. Just barely, but possible. I've done a number of things on it. The new machines now just aren't. So even the expert user service is off the table, and I find that hard to deal with personally, because I know I absolutely do plan on running the machine for 5+ years.

Detrus 11y ago
Apple is still selling the old model user upgradable MacBook Pro for $1100 http://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro http://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro the same price I bought one for in 2011. Except I bought refurbished and smaller HD. Some of the new machines Apple is selling for $1000 are actually slower at many tasks. But the market has spoken and Apple is selling hardware that suits most user's narrow tasks of email, browsing and video. It also streamlines manufacturing, as they're already focused on mobile where everything must be stuck together in one chip. But they're enabling 4K video editing on iPhones and iPad Pros with what I'm assuming is custom hardware. And that could be a very smart approach if it was applied to more tasks on Pro computers. Performance could actually move forward again.
- ddingus 11y ago
  Indeed. Custom hardware can move us forward, and that's an interesting trend that may actually drive me to buy new machines sooner. One of my daily driver tasks is CAD. Mechanical CAD. Due to the age and massive human investment in geometry kernels, single thread performance really matters. It is difficult to apply multi core processing to CAD problems. It would be interesting to understand what special hardware could improve on this.