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If you carefully read the fine article, you will notice that the author states: "There are really only two reasons why people might have a computer that’s more
by elipsey 11y ago
If you carefully read the fine article, you will notice that the author states:
"There are really only two reasons why people might have a computer that’s more than five years old:
1. They can’t afford an upgrade.
2. They don’t need an upgrade."
and then proceeds to examine and _dismiss_ #1 as a plausible motive for these comments.
What he is complaining about is disposable hardware. I am also bothered by this trend, and I'm concerned that it may become more difficult over time to avoid it. I'm typing this on a T430 with a removable hard drive, two SSD's, new RAM, new keyboard, new screen, new fan, and new OS. Try that with MacBook.
If _certain_ tech companies have their way it will be impossible to do anything useful with a machine that hasn't got a crypto-locked boot loader and soldered on hardware. It's debatable whether planned obsolescence is a motivating goal for this.
(It is arguable that semi manufactures are mostly competing with their own older hardware, and they aren't competing as well as they used to; phones still improve like PC's in the 90's, but that's not sustainable in the long run.)
In any case, planned obsolescence is at least a side effect of building non-upgradeable hardware, and that means you'll be compelled to throw away your hardware more often, whether you can afford to or not. For Apple, this means that 5 year old hardware _has_ to pathetic, and they obviously wouldn't admit that anyone else's is less pathetic than theirs.
- ok_craig 11y agoNot sure we read the same article. The author did not dismiss #1 as a plausible motive. He dismissed it as the likely motive, to give Apple the benefit of the doubt, from fear about what it would mean about them otherwise.
- elipsey 11y ago"Door number two. What Schiller probably meant to suggest was that Apple’s targeting old PC users who simply haven’t felt compelled to update yet but could afford to." He said the second thing is what "What Schiller probably meant". Maybe this shouldn't reasonably be construed as a "dismissal". This interpretation is more generous towards Apple than supposing they mean to overtly mock the poor, and I supposed the author meant that this would be beneath them. Apparently that's debatable :)
- jkot 11y agoI also have 6 years old laptop for similar reasons. My primary machine is desktop workstation and older machine allows me to swap hard-drive easily while traveling. I can also take harddrive with me, and leave cheap shell at hotel room. Plus keyboard is unbeatable :-) But I am upgrading to skylake based laptop. It finally has 16GB RAM in ultraportable with good linux support. Old laoptop will be still usable sometimes.