31 ms·

Why I use old hardware

436 points by ddevault 8y ago

grover_hartmann 8y ago
This is one of the things I enjoy about using Linux a lot, drivers are never removed from the upstream Linux kernel, so you can use your hardware until it literally breaks.
eloy 8y ago
Nice to see I'm not the only one still using an X200, it's still a pretty decent machine with an SSD, 4GiB RAM and coreboot. I fully agree with Drew.
AdmiralAsshat 8y ago
> This laptop is a great piece of hardware. 100% of the hardware is supported by the upstream Linux kernel, including the usual offenders like WiFi and Bluetooth. Niche operating systems like 9front and Minix work great, too. Even coreboot works! If it's a Thinkpad X200 like he says, it could even support Libreboot: https://libreboot.org/docs/hardware/x200.html https://libreboot.org/docs/hardware/x200.html
- eloy 8y ago
  Yes, but you can also use Coreboot without blobs on this particular machine, so it doesn't really matter. Libreboot is just a Coreboot fork which is only compatible with machines that are usable without blobs. And they deliver the firmware as a blob, for more easy installation, Coreboot is basically a git repo.
paride5745 8y ago
While I love those old Thinkpads (and I have one), my main issue with these posts is that nobody talks about battery life. If I work on a laptop, I don't want to have to look for a power socket around, I need something to work on battery for at least half day.
- eloy 8y ago
  I use a 9-cell battery on my X200, and it holds for around 4~5 hours. So for me it's perfectly fine.
- tpadtway 8y ago
  x220 with ips screen, 9 cell battery. Lasts 9 hours if you just ssh. You can get it for $300-$400.
  - eloy 8y ago
    Yes, but that machine is quite a whole lot newer than an old X200. It's from 2012, X200 is from 2008.
    - epanchin 8y ago
      Leveno sells new original batteries for old thinkpads. I have a x230 with a new battery and it lasts >8 hours.
      - setquk 8y ago
        You can also get NOS batteries on eBay for virtually nothing. Recently got a 68+ for my T440 for £39 delivered. Be careful though as anything over 4 years old can be DOA as the batteries slowly discharge and the BMS in the battery itself disconnects them permanently for safety. This applies to ones Lenovo sell as well. I found this out when I bought the above but the seller sent another one out FOC. I dismantled the dead one, pulled the 18650s out and charged them up standalone and they were fine. Free cells!
        miluge 8y ago
        The big problem with NOS battery is that sometimes its a gamble! I bought one off eBay for my x230 and I had to change it. But the seller was cool enough to change it ( getting 4-5 hours ) and a smaller one which gets me around 2 hours more.
tombert 8y ago
I remember getting in an argument a few years ago during a budgeting meeting at a job, where the prospect of upgrading our two-year-old Macbook Pros came up. This company was a startup that wasn't doing particularly well with money, and I said that you don't need a super-fast laptop to program...especially since this job was Node.js based and none of the work we were doing was processing-heavy. This started somewhat of an argument with my peers who claimed they needed a top-of-the-line Macbook to do everything because you can't program on anything slower. Management ended up caving and buying the new laptops. I stand by my point on this though; as a proof of concept, I "lived" on an ODroid XU4 for a month awhile ago, doing all my programming and everything on there. I was happy to get my big laptop back when I was done with this experiment, but I never felt like weaker hardware impaired my programming ability.
- WrtCdEvrydy 8y ago
  It's a staple of 'developers' to have fancy Macbooks while essentially just needing a shitton of RAM these days. Programmers don't need bleeding edge, just a lot of RAM.
  - bluesroo 8y ago
    Don't forget the SSD.
    - gautamdivgi 8y ago
      The ssd is actually needed. My employer encrypts the drives. It’s too slow without the ssd
      - ethelward 8y ago
        What encryption are you using? LUKS on HDD is imperceptible for me.
  - est31 8y ago
    The funniest thing about this is probably that RAM prices have went up in the last 2-3 years. I built my current computer in 2016 and if I had to buy the same RAM that it has today, I'd have to pay more. So for the same money, "newer" means in fact worse. Noting that prices have went down from their peak increase since, but it's still more than the lowest historic price.
koolba 8y ago
Many years back I had a peer who insisted on sub par hardware for all his non-prod environments. He’d also insist that his team meet any production performance goals on said sub-par hardware. End result was things would fly when they finally got to production.
- gcb0 8y ago
  I call this the Demostenes' performance hack.
- flyingpenguin 8y ago
  Great if your dev environment requires you to run your debugging/testing on production like systems, horrible if you have access to super useful debugging systems that sadly run far slower the production. If you tell me I need to use a slow computer to develop so its fast in production, but I develop using a interpreter driven debugger on a compiled language... well f you.
systematical 8y ago
This makes me question my desire to replace my 4 year i7 laptop with ssd and 16gb memory. To be fair. The performance is fine. But it's a 17" screen with an full HDD as well. It weighs a lot and traveling is a bitch. I guess I could get an older used slim and light system for just travel....?
chaoticmass 8y ago
My trusty T400 died about three years ago, and I occasionally need a laptop to work remotely doing web development and server maintenance. I also had a X41 tablet which wasn't really being used outside of being another old ThinkPad in my collection. I started using the 1.6Ghz single core X41, running Linux and Windows 7 dual boot, to work remotely and really had no issues doing what I needed to do. I did need to have a bit of patience at times, but it worked. This September I did finally get a new laptop, a Lenovo X1 Tablet, but I still like to fire up the 13 year old thing and use it to test my own websites, just to make sure they are still usable on slow systems.
drannex 8y ago
Have you upgrades the specs on the x200 at all, say to an IPS display or are you still using the standard? I personally use an x220 for very similar reasons (upgraded to the Surface Pro 3, hated it, and went back).
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bhauer 8y ago
While my hardware isn't that old or that low-powered, I strongly agree with the sentiment that software developers are notorious for under-appreciating the importance of performance. One of our luminaries once opined about optimization in such a way that some of us incorrectly think performance optimization is something we should de-prioritize. Knuth's commentary has value, but he is not a deity and his advice left us with an ambiguous notion that you must know when to optimize and, for many pieces of software, optimization ends up never happening or happening far too late, yielding a bad user experience. His advice should be framed not as when to optimize, but how: profile, focus on low-hanging fruit that yields the maximum performance benefits first, and only as needed dig into the lesser bottlenecks. Despite this confusion about when and how to focus on performance, many of us instinctively know software is, in the large, too slow. Microsoft Office, a slew of web sites and web apps, music players, most Electron apps, etc. As developers, we sometimes get clever and use animation to hide slowness (or, pathologically to mistakenly add slowness). As the OP mentions, some of these apps end up with "good enough" performance on high-end hardware, but that "good enough" isn't in fact good enough.
clircle 8y ago
The X200 is an exception I think. I can get along with an X200 because of the incredible build quality, keyboard, upgradeability, etc. But any other laptop from 2008? probably not.
astazangasta 8y ago
KDE development in particular seems to have zero figs available for users with hardware limitations. It seems to me all sorts of apps are constantly building indexes and scanning my system, which might be fine on a fancy modern desktop, but not on the curmudgeonly junk I always end up using.
- deleted 8y ago
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- Symbiote 8y ago
  That's my one gripe about KDE. I'd like an easy way to disable these indices, since as far as I know I've never used any of them.
frou_dh 8y ago
I like my X200s too, but Lenovo were so miserly with the TFT panels they specced. Absolute bottom of the barrel stuff in terms of colour and viewing angles. Something that's cool about the X200 design is that they didn't bother putting a token trackpad on it. It's got the TrackPoint and that's it!
- _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
  At least the X200 (so I presume the X200s as well) you can put a good AFFS screen [LCD HV121WX4-120] in.
amiga-workbench 8y ago
I don't plan on giving up my ThinkPad X201t any time soon, its probably slower than an X200 as the ULV CPU throttles a bit but I've got 8gig of RAM, a solid state disk, a real keyboard, a 16:10 VA display and no trackpad. If I fancy more graphics performance I've always got the option of an express card PCIe dock. I find that this setup gives me a good yardstick for the kind of hardware an average end user might have and it pushes me to make better choices when writing software.
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shaftway 8y ago
My mine take-away from this article is something that I've always thought was key: When you're developing for other people, use the same hardware as them. I was at a fairly large financial firm in ~2004 that was rolling out a system to a large number of users. These users had impulse control issues, and were not allowed to use mice or keyboards (they would be torn off and thrown across the room). So the screens they used were touch screens. Inventory was shocked when I asked for one of the touchscreens to use as my second monitor. When launch time came around my parts of the UI were the only ones usable. Everyone else had built tiny tap targets that were easy to hit with a mouse, but impossible to fat-finger.
- zozbot123 8y ago
  > ... rolling out a system to a large number of users. These users had impulse control issues, and were not allowed to use mice or keyboards (they would be torn off and thrown across the room). Trading desk, I assume?
  - SomeHacker44 8y ago
    Trading desks have amazing keyboards!
  - shaftway 8y ago
    On the floor at an open-outcry exchange.
flitzofolov 8y ago
I think the answer to this question has to do with his previously featured blog post: "I'm going to work full-time on free software" :)
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
  Haha no doubt!
docker_up 8y ago
My current desktop I bought with my own money is from 2012. I selected my components based on low wattage, not based on highest specs, because the computer previous to that, a Xeon server, used 200 watts idle and it cost me at least $50/month in electricity. I've been using this computer since then, with absolutely no reason to upgrade. The only thing I would need more horsepower for these days is ripping/transcoding video faster or editing video faster. I ran into issues playing 4K video and thought I was processor-limited, but it turns out it was my codec was also from 2012 and when I upgraded that, everything was fine. Even at work, I'm still on a 2015 Macbook Pro because I refuse to upgrade based on those fucking Touchbars.
drosan 8y ago
> can compile the Linux kernel from scratch in 20 minutes so large projects compile time is very big, that's actually kinda bad for software developers. > it can play 1080p video in real-time yep until he tries to watch 1080p60fps on youtube, or gets videofiles encoded with 10bit x264 with large amount of reframes (that happens more often than you think btw)
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
  Well, how often do you recompile the whole project from scratch? Incremental builds are a thing.
  - craftyguy 8y ago
    And ccache!
    - drosan 8y ago
      It is too buggy and has too many false hits to be used in large projects.
  - drosan 8y ago
    Happens quite often with large c++ projects and some quirky includes. Change 1 header, recompile whole thing. For comparison, rebuilding linux kernel with make defconfig takes about 3-4 minutes tops on my laptop, rebuilding one of the work projects - at least 15.
    - Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
      I don't think this points to a problem with the workflow, but rather to a problem with the codebase. If your codebase is so big and complicated and interlinked that it requires frequently recompiling large swaths of it - it may be poorly designed.
- deleted 8y ago
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TheJoYo 8y ago
My current employer gave me an HP with a TN panel. That's made it quite frustrating when viewing code. Average memory and average cpu are find especially when ssh into a build server. IPS displays have really changed how I use laptops and switching back to TN shows it.
fb03 8y ago
We need to fight software bloat. Old computers and hardware are awesome for several reasons, specially if you really enjoy tinkering with computers! - Linux/Un*x compatibility is usually pretty good. and those OSes are good for tinkering and producing new stuff. You can reuse your old boxes for staging servers and test beds. - Old hardware forces you to learn more about how the hardware works and how to optimize your toolset. No, you don't need that insane number of daemons that run automatically if you install a vanilla distribution like Ubuntu. It is a nice stance against this ongoing trend of consumerism and disposable hardware. We are wasting and rebuilding and tearing apart all our hardware each 2-3 years just for the sake of having that new instruction corrected in microcode or for having a conversational piece. it's bollocks. We now have some insanely fast consumer processors which gives us the power to run and simulate real time graphics, audio synthesis, AR, etc.... but following the same trend, software is becoming more and more inefficient. Some software solutions now require several hundred megs of binaries and local web servers and dlls and whatnot to solve the simplest of use cases. We have text editors and music players that now need a full Node.js server instance and a separate build of Chromium running just for doing shit that we used to get by with a tenth of ram and processing power. Thank god we still have some survivors like foobar2000, notepad++ and etc. The effect of that inefficiency on us is that we get to do the same things we did 10 or 20 years ago (study, read, code, listen to music?), only using way more cycles for nothing. Besides very few people running insanely complex simulations (which when scaled, are gonna be run on clusters or AWS anyway), most power users don't need that multicpu rig with 128 gigs of ram. I have 2 old laptops now and one of those is a pretty usable 2010 Macbook with 3gigs of ram. It ran Mac OS X dog slow but now with Xubuntu, it's still pretty usable. And when XFCE starts becoming too bloaty, this box is gonna allow me to study tiling window managers and more lightweight customizable distros like Arch. The net effect is me studying more, which is always a win.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  It's really shocking how much Linux Desktop has let itself go over the years. I remember when you could recommend someone install Linux on an old laptop to get it responsive again, but nowadays that advice isn't true anymore. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kvT40umKL8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kvT40umKL8
Tade0 8y ago
I have a "consumer grade" personal laptop from 2013, I use a company issued MacBook Pro and just recently was still using a HP EliteBook 840 G2 issued by my former workplace. Checked the first two over the same TypeScript project and the MBP takes 10s, while my laptop twice as much. It does indeed feel kinda slower overall, but it never occurred to me that it was by that much. I mean - it's still fine for my after-hours stuff. Meanwhile the HP, even though in the middle in terms of age here was a pain to work with, because the fans on its i5-5200U would spin furiously on any hint of actual work being required from it. Performance was equally bad. I guess the takeout here is that while hardware doesn't matter that much, it has to be good hardware to begin with.
- ericabiz 8y ago
  Do both of your non-MacBook laptops have old spindle hard drives? I find that is much of the difference between “slower” and “faster” computers. SSDs have come down in price significantly, so it’s worth the upgrade if you use the computers on a regular basis.
  - Tade0 8y ago
    All of those mentioned have had SSDs from the get go, but with the exception of the MBP connected via SATA III, so they never reached their full potential in this regard. My first ever laptop(2010) is still running and has a magnetic hard drive. I can't believe I went through half of college on this thing.
yingw787 8y ago
I try and get the best computer money can buy, because the quality of life is better on better hardware, I can always configure software-based restrictions if I need to create performant software (network throttling, cgroups, etc.), and because there's things you can do with new hardware you can't reasonably do with old (like training ml models). It keeps your options open.
jdblair 8y ago
TLDR: Old Thinkpads are powerful and rugged, but the screens are terrible. A wistful story: I used a Thinkpad X201 (2010 model) as my primary laptop for 6 years. I called it "lappy" (yes, a homestar runner reference). That thing took at serious beating. I worked on solar power system monitoring and control, and this involved a lot of field-work to debug problems. Lappy was exposed to a lot of dirt, dust, moisture, heat, cold, grease, and spilled coffee. Yet, after I upgraded the HD to a SSD it was the fastest build machine on our little software team. It did require repairs, but Thinkpads are designed for repairability. The most fragile part is the power connector, which will break if the laptop falls and lands on the connector while attached to the power cord. This repair requires taking EVERY part out, but I followed the instructions and was able to replace the connector. After taking a break from Lappy for a few years and working on a Macbook with a retina screen, I have to say the biggest deficiency of the Thinkpad was the screen. When I read about using an 11 year old Thinkpad as a primary machine, this is the first thing I think of. After using a modern laptop display I can't go back to that washed out, fuzzy display on the X201. 2 years ago I took it on a "last mission" when I was building an installation at Burning Man, which is probably the most hostile field environment I've worked in. It had started to shut down randomly, but it kept running reliably enough for my week-long dusty hack-a-thon. [edited to fix some typos]
bscphil 8y ago
Likewise, I use a now 8 year old Dell XPS laptop. With any reasonably high quality hardware, maintenance is not hard to do. I upgraded the screen and RAM a few years ago, and that has precluded me from needing anything newer. I've changed the thermal paste and blew the dust out of it. The only things I have consistently had to replace are the charger and batteries. Both are <= $30 on Ebay. I think replacing a laptop that's 4 years or less old is pretty wasteful, especially with how little the performance demands have changed in that time. We should treat computers more like we treat cars: knowing they can't last forever, but still a long term investment that requires some maintenance. Just like with a car, if you can't perform the maintenance yourself, take it to someone who can.
bytebuster 8y ago
My opinion: The article implies the hardware is fine, it's your workflow that's too heavy. I want a machine that fits my workflow, not the inverse. Even though the article implies that there isn't much difference, the difference in productivity can be HUGE. Specially for workflows that depend on crappy^H^H^H^H^H^Hdemanding applications. From the perspective of a company: The cost of laptops relative to salaries is minimal - Salaries are usually close to six figures/y, a very good laptop is $2~3k, and can last multiple years. The productivity increase will most probably cover the investment (not only in terms of direct return, but business value: could be time to market, fulfilling a tight deadline, etc). From the perspective of a freelancer: You are selling your time. A laptop that costs $2~3k will free some time (time saved) and be used for years. Time saved = FREE MONEY. The only reason I see to don't upgrade a laptop/desktop used to work is if it's performance it's already close enough of a new one. BONUS REASON: newer versions have keyboards that self-destruct.
infiniteseeker 8y ago
How is sway for a daily driver?
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
  Naturally I have a severe bias when answering this question, but I think it's quite good. If you give it a shot, be sure to build the latest version from master or one of the recent betas - don't use 0.15.2. https://repology.org/metapackage/sway/versions https://repology.org/metapackage/sway/versions
axiometry 8y ago
Bigger, better monitors are important accessories for the productive developer. Integrated graphics can't power those monitors. Most laptops sport only integrated graphics. Therefore most laptops are insufficient for the productive developer nowadays. There are a few scenarios where the developer's hardware should certainly be better than the user's, and screen space is one of them. Old hardware is not an excuse to stick to 1080p. Every developer should have moved to the much more spacious 1440p or 4K by now.
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
  As a reasonably productive developer who has used both 4K and 1080p displays regularly, 4K has done very little for my productivity. It just looks good.
  - kerbalspacepro 8y ago
    If you're going to be staring at a screen for 8 hours a day, you should expect it to look good.
    - Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
      Okay, but it doesn't make me more productive.
calimac 8y ago
I love the perspective of the author. Beautifully tuned pragmatism and humility.
nwah1 8y ago
Energy efficiency gains mean that usually a new computer can pay for itself after a certain number of years or months, in terms of electricity savings. And fast hardware is key for performance in certain careers, such as software engineering. Even for a working class casual user, it would make a lot of sense to upgrade an old power hogging computer to a new netbook. It would be better in every way, and still likely save money in the long run. Not to mention time.
nkingsy 8y ago
My former boss (front end web) had a similar rationale for forcing the team to use old MacBook airs. I think it’s reasonable if you have cloud everything. We did not. We had to deploy directly from our machines, which basically made the laptop unusable for 12 minutes on every deploy. Also, sketch + slack + chrome + dev env basically meant swap was the normal state of affairs (random 10 second hangs all day every day). But at least I could talk to other people and decrease their productivity while I was waiting to be able to work. On the plus side I was very motivated to optimize our build system.
leni536 8y ago
> In reality, this high-end hardware isn’t really necessary for most applications outside of video encoding, machine learning, and a few other domains. Like browsing the modern web.
- syntheticnature 8y ago
  Yes, this is what drove me to abandon the netbook I'd been using for years -- everything was fast enough except any sort of web browsing.
  - ddevault 8y ago
    It's better if you disable JavaScript by default and gradually change your habits to avoid websites which work poorly.
    - tonyedgecombe 8y ago
      You end up cutting out a huge part of the internet then.
      - ddevault 8y ago
        Yep, and nothing of value is lost.
meuk 8y ago
> In reality, this high-end hardware isn’t really necessary for most applications outside of video encoding, machine learning, and a few other domains. This should say "really isn't" instead of "isn't really". In practice, most Microsoft software will still run slow even on high-end hardware. I have a high-end gaming laptop that cost 1500 dollars, and my download folder still takes 10+ seconds to load. Even at work, I regularly find myself waiting because Visual Studio hangs (and this is on a Xeon Phi with 12 gigs of RAM). Meanwhile, XFCE runs happily snappily on my $200 Thinkpad that is more than a decade old. Newer systems just seem to focus on improving throughput instead of improving latency. I am so fed up with unresponsive systems!
- winrid 8y ago
  Do you have an SSD?
  - zerohp 8y ago
    I have the same problem with Windows 10 on my XPS 13 and it has an SSD. File browsing in certain folders makes the machine nearly unusable. Also, windows updates fill the drive and require periodic manual cleanup. My other Windows machine doesn't have this problem.
    - winrid 8y ago
      Interesting. I have an X1 extreme and even it feels slow at times w/ Windows 10 however my much older Win10 desktop is much more responsive. I am not sure why laptops suck in this regard. Maybe drivers.
johnklos 8y ago
Imagine how much better off the whole planet would be if we recycled computers for use by other people, kept and repaired computers, and didn't accept the idea that rendering a web page should take half a gigabyte.
- zanny 8y ago
  I have a shelf of old parts including a Pentium 4 ATX board with working CPU and some DDR2 I found. I have a dozen or so hard drives that still pass all their SMART readings (even if most have old age and wear level warnings). I have a few 10+ year old monitors that look like spoiled eggs with how inaccurate their colors are but aren't broken. I keep it all around as a "if someones board etc dies, at least it works" kind of thing. I have some old GPUs too that still work including some 8800s, an X1800, and a GT 520. If they broke, it wouldn't be worth my time to fix them, but they are still working hardware, even if they aren't the latest tech.
  - cr0sh 8y ago
    I once saved my bacon with an "old" (I don't really consider it old) 8 MB S3 PCI video card I had lying around. I had bought an AMD chipset motherboard that assumed (in the BIOS) that you were going to use a CPU with onboard video (ie - an AMD "APU"). I was setting things up, and my CPU was an AMD without onboard video, because I figured the motherboard, like all the others I'd ever set up, would switch automagically to the PCIe video slot, which had my old NVidia GPU in it. Nope. POST beeped that I didn't have any video output. So - I could either buy another CPU - or another mobo. Neither was an option. But I thought - maybe I could plug in a PCI video card and it would recognize that...? Dug through my various boxes-o-junk and found one. Dropped it in, and it worked - long enough for me to switch the BIOS video option over, after which I could use my GPU. I was kinda shocked at the BIOS, though - it was my first time using something "modern" - and it was a pretty GUI with a mouse and everything (then I started learning about UEFI which the mobo supported - a lot of things had changed since my last system, which was a Core2Duo board).
- waiseristy 8y ago
  I wonder at which point the power efficiency of these old machines outweighs the environmental impact of tossing them and buying a modern machine.
sureaboutthis 8y ago
I used to inherit computers for free from friends and relatives who were "upgrading" their Windows systems and turn them into servers or workstations at my company. I hadn't bought hardware in many years as I was getting off the ground. Nowadays, I guess most people have laptops or use mobile cause I haven't gotten one of those in quite a while.
exitcode00 8y ago
Guess what? Electron is everywhere and everything. Electron is taking over - its raining hamburgers.... RUN Seriously though, I guarantee it would nuke old hardware into orbit. Its unfortunately not feasible IMHO due to modern software glut. More power to Drew, but many people are forced into using Skype, Slack, Discord :/
zachruss92 8y ago
This is a _really_ good point the author makes. I definitely am guilty of getting into the trap of wanting to get new hardware when, realistically, I could do all of my work on a 10-year-old machine. This concepts also applies to website performance. I test my projects on physical iOS and Android devices, but they're both relatively new. I should start taking into account lower-end devices, especially on the Android side as JS is notoriously much slower.
ilovecaching 8y ago
I'm fine with slower hardware, and agree in principle with what the article is saying, but not poor displays. The reason I pick a MacBook over a Thinkpad is because the screen quality is cash money compared to the 1080p on the stock T series. I just can't do 1080p anymore. Also, you could solve this problem by just using a VM. If it really bothers you to have so much RAM and CPU, just spin up a 1401 in VirtualBox and use that for all your dev needs.
- rpeden 8y ago
  I agree with you on display quality. I picked up a ThinkPad x220 for not much money, but I swapped an IPS panel into it because the TN panel it came with was really, really awful. I don't even hate all TN panels - the one one my old MacBook Air was quite decent. When you start getting up toward MBP prices, you can find ThinkPads with decent displays. Even some of the older W series came equipped with a 3k matte IPS, which I found quite nice. I prefer the W series keyboards over the new MBP keyboards as well, but I found the trackpad on my W540 to be ridiculously awful. It's not exactly cheap to buy one of these machines on eBay, but they aren't crazily expensive either.
bkcreate 8y ago
What are some features that you would look for in a laptop so that you could still be using it in 10 years if you bought it new today?
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
  - User upgradable/servicable parts, notably the battery & HDD - All hardware supported by open source drivers in the upstream Linux kernel - Durable frame - Standard ports which have already been shown to stand the test of time (USB, 2.5mm headphone jack, and HDMI) - x86_64 or RISC-V architecture
- UncleSlacky 8y ago
  At least a 1080p IPS screen and a decent keyboard (no chiclets) with plenty of travel (I don't care how thick it makes the laptop).
unwabuisi 8y ago
There is a similar line of thinking for audio engineers who do a final mix/master of music before it is sent off to radio, streaming platforms, etc. After spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on expensive sound systems and professional speakers, engineers realized the average users listen to their music through inexpensive mediums. A cheap pair of headphones, a small bluetooth speaker, or even laptop speakers. They rarely listen to their music through mediums where the full audio spectrum is present, so in order for an engineer to get a mix that translates well across all mediums, they do their final mixes and tweaks on devices like a pair of apple earpods, or a more famous example, the Yamaha NS-10 [0]. The line of reasoning being: if you can get it to sound good on a basic speaker, it will sound great on high end systems, which is a win-win! [0] - https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/yamaha-ns10-story https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/yamaha-ns10-story
- zrobotics 8y ago
  This is also done in the toy industry--a sound effect may sound fine through good studio monitors, but will be screech and unpleasant when played through a 10 cent speaker with the crappies amplifier money can buy, so it is important to listen on the actual hardware.
- spindle 8y ago
  Just to clarify, they do the final mix and mastering of each piece on a variety of speakers. But right - the closer they get to the finished product the less they care how it sounds through expensive equipment.
ris 8y ago
This is so close to my experience it's eerie, down to the X-series thinkpad and KDE. I downright dread each major OS upgrade and the KDE that comes with it - they only ever get slower and more unreliable. I will almost certainly make the jump for the next debian release. I don't know if goes without saying, but the single thing that makes "old" hardware bearable these days is an ssd. Without that the pain can be unbearable.
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dkersten 8y ago
> I showed him how it could cold boot to a productive sway desktop in <30 seconds I'm currently using a new cheapo HP laptop, it cost €600 (substantially lower than the 2k+ Macbook Pro's I've been using prior). I run Manjaro Linux with i3 as the window manager. I'm blown away at how fast it boots. From power on to login prompt in about 3 seconds (bootloader is setup to just boot right away) and from login screen to usable i3 desktop in about a second. I've never had anything boot so fast before. Not that boot speed is meaningful for actual usage performance, but anyway.
agumonkey 8y ago
I use similar class laptops. My only issue is they get hot when compiling too much or HD video (or even non HD actually). Maybe it's a thermal paste issue but anyway, that's my main issue with them, if they could run at full speed without reaching 90degC they'd be near perfect.
interfixus 8y ago
Over the last thirty years, I have bought exactly one brand new device - an Asus Eee, which I still have around somewhere, but which, ironically, I never really used. Everything elese has been other people's lay-offs, including my beloved Thinkpad T440p on which I'm typing this. I am forever baffled by the quality and newness of hardware everybody simply wants to get rid of. Believe me, I ship lean and speedy code.
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Max-20 8y ago
I have the same problem at the moment, I am working with a 4.5 year old MacBook Pro and asking myself when replacing is actually increasing my productivity rather than just a luxury to have a shiny new laptop.
alexeiz 8y ago
I doubt it's possible watch Youtube in a browser on Linux on a 10 year old system. That's the only factor that forced me to upgrade my old PC: I just couldn't watch the damn youtube videos. Everything else worked perfectly fine. Windows 7 32bit upgraded to Windows 10, latest Ubuntu Linux with Gnome desktop. And thanks to an SSD it cold booted quickly enough as well.
- SomeHacker44 8y ago
  Now I am definitely switching to an old computer. I can’t wait to get streaming video and Youtube out of my professional life. :) (I find video and talking to be in general an amazingly “low bandwidth” way to ingest information, even watching/listening at 1.5-2x speed.) I do listen to podcasts/NPR while doing the dishes or other mindless housework though.
- Narishma 8y ago
  What I do on my netbook is use VLC to play Youtube videos since it supports hardware video decoding.
hyperman1 8y ago
I've got an interesting comparison here: I have a 2nd hand x220 thinkpad, 10 years old. This machine serves me very well today on linux and KDE. I did give it an SSD and 16g ram. Otoh, most of the time it is forced on the lowest CPU speed to get some extra battery. My previous employer gave us recent laptops. But it has a virus scannerbogging it down to unusable slowness. It has tons and tons of agents for licensing, network security, proxies,etc... It has draconian group policies eating away speed. It has SCCM scanning the whole hard drive on a regular base, which of course awakens tje virus scanner just for some bonus slowdown. I dreaded developing on that beast, and coworkers tended to copy code to their personal laptop, just to get some work done. Now on paper, that work machine was a lot better than my thinkpad. In reality however...
- jandrese 8y ago
  However your ancient Thinkpad is now a hole in your network security... Most virus scanners are security theater IMHO, so you're probably not much different than those other laptops. At the very least full disk scans are pretty unnecessary after the first if you're running in the default active protection mode. Anything the active protection misses your full disk scan is unlikely to find.
  - hyperman1 8y ago
    why would it be? It runs a fully patched Debian with ports closed, etc... There is no difference software wise with a laptop from today.
purplezooey 8y ago
I use an X2xx too and agree it's awesome if you just run i3 or something. The major downside, which is not mentioned, is the 1366x768 max resolution. Ugh.
3xblah 8y ago
Regarding the 11-yr-old laptop I would be interested to know not only the compile time but also the storage required, e.g. size of src tree plus any tmp space required, etc. I like to compile kernels using memory-backed filesystem without any persistent storage mounted. This helps with speed. For example, with BSD, I only need about 200 MB RAM to produce a more-than-adequate kernel (about 17 MB). One of the benefits of doing "development" on old hardware IMO is that the programs I write on the old machines is guaranteed to be very fast on the new machines. I can move these programs back and forth between machines without worrying about performance. If I only used new machines to write programs, e.g., small, relatively simple ones, then I could not be sure that they would run well on the older machines.
swsieber 8y ago
I'd add "working on a monolith java app, along with running Node, IntelliJ and occasionally a VM with Gitlab in it" to the list of domains that require enthusiast grade specs. Oh, and slack.
jeremy7600 8y ago
Just built a NAS from an Asus m3a78-MC, Phenom 2 x4 920, 8gb of ddr2800 and an old case. my Desktop pc is only one gen newer on the motherboard from Gigabyte (990FX-UD3) and 2 gens newer on Processor (8350) with a 560ti, and 16gb of DDR3. the NAS cost $75 for all the parts listed in the last month ($17 cpu, $38 mobo, $20 memory). The desktop was probably $400 for the parts when they were new ($135 mobo, $230 CPU, $50 memory). Right now going just a few years back gets you gobs of processing power for very little. But of course its all relative, in another 10 years these DDR2 based systems might seem quite slow.
earthnail 8y ago
I co-founded Sonalytic and served as CTO until we got acquired. We developed AI for music information retrieval. Clearly an area where every developer needs the newest hardware. Or do they? The entire time I worked from a 2010 Macbook Pro. For really resource hungry stuff, we had a few dedicated servers with 64 cores, 512Gb of RAM and Nvidia GPUs. I.e., nothing you’d ever get in a laptop. Because my Macbook wasn’t particularly fast, we ended up avoiding all kinds of bloat. We kept things simple, which actually helped us move really fast, and used the resources on the big machines for scientific computing. Worked out well for us :-).
kemiller2002 8y ago
Here's my reason for never wanting to use old hardware. Admittedly, I don't need the latest and greatest, but I want something that is reasonable. Several years ago I was optimizing a DB query that was a real hog in the development environment. Two days later, and after trying everything I can do, I essentially gave up and checked in the meager optimizations I squeezed out of it. The query gets moved to QA, and runs completely fine. Why? Because the company had a mindset that developers should program on slower hardware to "make it more efficient" and none of them thought through that the run time optimizers might actually perform differently when given enough memory and processor power to run effectively. Older hardware within certain performance metrics are fine, but it's often a waste of everyone's time to do it to try and save a dollar here or there.
erikschoster 8y ago
I've been using an x201 for programming and music production (and everything else) since 2014 and don't see myself making a change anytime soon. (Though I recently picked up an IBM server from around the same era for less than the cost of a new cellphone, and now I have what feels like a supercomputer to do offline audio renders and such that are possible on the x201 but take a long time...) I do enjoy the peace of mind that if I drop my laptop in a lake, the cost of replacement is somewhere in the $100 range and dropping every year. But I agree with the author of this article that it's also a nice way to (without really having to think about it) keep the software I write reigned in and usable for people who don't have the latest multi-thousand-dollar hardware.
- wilsonnb3 8y ago
  Unless you’re doing music production in a non-standard way, you would benefit greatly from a better computer. DAWs and plugins eat a lot of ram and processing power.
TrolTure 8y ago
I've been developing in go/node/python on a headless 1cpu 512mb 20gb vultr instance. Tmux, vim, w3m and weechat. I use mosh and firefox from a laptop/desktop/phone/tablet and never had any issues. It does prevent me from writing rust though.
cr0sh 8y ago
Here I was hoping for actual "old hardware"...sigh. I'm in the process of refurbishing, possibly with some custom upgrades (ESP8266 wifi-serial dongle would be interesting), of a TRS-80 Model 100. Days of runtime from a handful of AA batteries. True, I won't be able to do anything modern with it - but that's kinda the point.
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
  You might appreciate one of my older blog posts: https://drewdevault.com/2016/03/22/Integrating-a-VT220-into-my-life.html https://drewdevault.com/2016/03/22/Integrating-a-VT220-into-...
rafiki6 8y ago
I wonder...do the makers of MacOS use old macs? Do the makers of Windows use old ibm pc clones? You can learn to empathize with your user by testing on a range of hardware that would simulate their environment. Your own development hardware doesn't need to be handicapped for this to happen. This is all very context specific. If I am developer working on a web app, and my shop uses several heavy but feature rich IDEs, chances are I need pretty decent hardware. If I'm programming nintendo gaming cartridges, I'd probably be ok with simpler hardware.
paavoova 8y ago
and it can play 1080p video in real-time I'm skeptical of this claim given my X220 (Sandy Bridge) has trouble decoding 1080p with any medium/high quality playback options. Enabling debanding algorithms, for example, which is default in mpv, causes dropped frames with high-bitrate 1080p x264 both software and hardware decoding, and dropped frames in general decoding 1080p HEVC (software only, iGPU doesn't support HEVC).
admax88q 8y ago
Imagine how much smaller/faster Chromium would be (or any of Google's big web apps) if the primary developers didn't get to use supercomputers to build and test on every day.
mixmastamyk 8y ago
In the old days it made a lot of sense to have the fastest computer available and multiple monitors. It was a huge boon to productivity and short-sighted to ignore. However, computers these days are fast enough, have SSDs, and enough memory for 95%† of tasks, for at least a decade. For everything else there are beefy servers and the cloud. As the poster says, there are advantages to old hardware. Like useable laptop keyboards with key travel. A second monitor would probably be a better investment if you don't have one already. I recommend portrait orientation to avoid scrolling.
romeisendcoming 8y ago
For my laptop(s) I tend to go with the best I can afford for multi-purpose development (because everything I do is HPC oriented or virtualized with a need for SMP vms) but I still have a Dell e6400 latitude that provides directory, dns and monitoring services for the in-house testbed. When it dies I have a celeron road warrior from WalMart ready to take it's place. Fit purpose to function to hardware.

436 points by ddevault 8y ago

This is one of the things I enjoy about using Linux a lot, drivers are never removed from the upstream Linux kernel, so you can use your hardware until it literally breaks.

eloy 8y ago

Nice to see I'm not the only one still using an X200, it's still a pretty decent machine with an SSD, 4GiB RAM and coreboot. I fully agree with Drew.

AdmiralAsshat 8y ago

> This laptop is a great piece of hardware. 100% of the hardware is supported by the upstream Linux kernel, including the usual offenders like WiFi and Bluetooth. Niche operating systems like 9front and Minix work great, too. Even coreboot works! If it's a Thinkpad X200 like he says, it could even support Libreboot: https://libreboot.org/docs/hardware/x200.html https://libreboot.org/docs/hardware/x200.html

eloy 8y ago
Yes, but you can also use Coreboot without blobs on this particular machine, so it doesn't really matter. Libreboot is just a Coreboot fork which is only compatible with machines that are usable without blobs. And they deliver the firmware as a blob, for more easy installation, Coreboot is basically a git repo.

paride5745 8y ago

While I love those old Thinkpads (and I have one), my main issue with these posts is that nobody talks about battery life. If I work on a laptop, I don't want to have to look for a power socket around, I need something to work on battery for at least half day.

eloy 8y ago
I use a 9-cell battery on my X200, and it holds for around 4~5 hours. So for me it's perfectly fine.
tpadtway 8y ago
x220 with ips screen, 9 cell battery. Lasts 9 hours if you just ssh. You can get it for $300-$400.
- eloy 8y ago
  Yes, but that machine is quite a whole lot newer than an old X200. It's from 2012, X200 is from 2008.
  - epanchin 8y ago
    Leveno sells new original batteries for old thinkpads. I have a x230 with a new battery and it lasts >8 hours.
    - setquk 8y ago
      You can also get NOS batteries on eBay for virtually nothing. Recently got a 68+ for my T440 for £39 delivered. Be careful though as anything over 4 years old can be DOA as the batteries slowly discharge and the BMS in the battery itself disconnects them permanently for safety. This applies to ones Lenovo sell as well. I found this out when I bought the above but the seller sent another one out FOC. I dismantled the dead one, pulled the 18650s out and charged them up standalone and they were fine. Free cells!
      - miluge 8y ago
        The big problem with NOS battery is that sometimes its a gamble! I bought one off eBay for my x230 and I had to change it. But the seller was cool enough to change it ( getting 4-5 hours ) and a smaller one which gets me around 2 hours more.

tombert 8y ago

I remember getting in an argument a few years ago during a budgeting meeting at a job, where the prospect of upgrading our two-year-old Macbook Pros came up. This company was a startup that wasn't doing particularly well with money, and I said that you don't need a super-fast laptop to program...especially since this job was Node.js based and none of the work we were doing was processing-heavy. This started somewhat of an argument with my peers who claimed they needed a top-of-the-line Macbook to do everything because you can't program on anything slower. Management ended up caving and buying the new laptops. I stand by my point on this though; as a proof of concept, I "lived" on an ODroid XU4 for a month awhile ago, doing all my programming and everything on there. I was happy to get my big laptop back when I was done with this experiment, but I never felt like weaker hardware impaired my programming ability.

WrtCdEvrydy 8y ago
It's a staple of 'developers' to have fancy Macbooks while essentially just needing a shitton of RAM these days. Programmers don't need bleeding edge, just a lot of RAM.
- bluesroo 8y ago
  Don't forget the SSD.
  - gautamdivgi 8y ago
    The ssd is actually needed. My employer encrypts the drives. It’s too slow without the ssd
    - ethelward 8y ago
      What encryption are you using? LUKS on HDD is imperceptible for me.
- est31 8y ago
  The funniest thing about this is probably that RAM prices have went up in the last 2-3 years. I built my current computer in 2016 and if I had to buy the same RAM that it has today, I'd have to pay more. So for the same money, "newer" means in fact worse. Noting that prices have went down from their peak increase since, but it's still more than the lowest historic price.

koolba 8y ago

Many years back I had a peer who insisted on sub par hardware for all his non-prod environments. He’d also insist that his team meet any production performance goals on said sub-par hardware. End result was things would fly when they finally got to production.

gcb0 8y ago
I call this the Demostenes' performance hack.
flyingpenguin 8y ago
Great if your dev environment requires you to run your debugging/testing on production like systems, horrible if you have access to super useful debugging systems that sadly run far slower the production. If you tell me I need to use a slow computer to develop so its fast in production, but I develop using a interpreter driven debugger on a compiled language... well f you.

systematical 8y ago

This makes me question my desire to replace my 4 year i7 laptop with ssd and 16gb memory. To be fair. The performance is fine. But it's a 17" screen with an full HDD as well. It weighs a lot and traveling is a bitch. I guess I could get an older used slim and light system for just travel....?

chaoticmass 8y ago

My trusty T400 died about three years ago, and I occasionally need a laptop to work remotely doing web development and server maintenance. I also had a X41 tablet which wasn't really being used outside of being another old ThinkPad in my collection. I started using the 1.6Ghz single core X41, running Linux and Windows 7 dual boot, to work remotely and really had no issues doing what I needed to do. I did need to have a bit of patience at times, but it worked. This September I did finally get a new laptop, a Lenovo X1 Tablet, but I still like to fire up the 13 year old thing and use it to test my own websites, just to make sure they are still usable on slow systems.

drannex 8y ago

Have you upgrades the specs on the x200 at all, say to an IPS display or are you still using the standard? I personally use an x220 for very similar reasons (upgraded to the Surface Pro 3, hated it, and went back).

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bhauer 8y ago

While my hardware isn't that old or that low-powered, I strongly agree with the sentiment that software developers are notorious for under-appreciating the importance of performance. One of our luminaries once opined about optimization in such a way that some of us incorrectly think performance optimization is something we should de-prioritize. Knuth's commentary has value, but he is not a deity and his advice left us with an ambiguous notion that you must know when to optimize and, for many pieces of software, optimization ends up never happening or happening far too late, yielding a bad user experience. His advice should be framed not as when to optimize, but how: profile, focus on low-hanging fruit that yields the maximum performance benefits first, and only as needed dig into the lesser bottlenecks. Despite this confusion about when and how to focus on performance, many of us instinctively know software is, in the large, too slow. Microsoft Office, a slew of web sites and web apps, music players, most Electron apps, etc. As developers, we sometimes get clever and use animation to hide slowness (or, pathologically to mistakenly add slowness). As the OP mentions, some of these apps end up with "good enough" performance on high-end hardware, but that "good enough" isn't in fact good enough.

clircle 8y ago

The X200 is an exception I think. I can get along with an X200 because of the incredible build quality, keyboard, upgradeability, etc. But any other laptop from 2008? probably not.

astazangasta 8y ago

KDE development in particular seems to have zero figs available for users with hardware limitations. It seems to me all sorts of apps are constantly building indexes and scanning my system, which might be fine on a fancy modern desktop, but not on the curmudgeonly junk I always end up using.

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Symbiote 8y ago
That's my one gripe about KDE. I'd like an easy way to disable these indices, since as far as I know I've never used any of them.

frou_dh 8y ago

I like my X200s too, but Lenovo were so miserly with the TFT panels they specced. Absolute bottom of the barrel stuff in terms of colour and viewing angles. Something that's cool about the X200 design is that they didn't bother putting a token trackpad on it. It's got the TrackPoint and that's it!

_emacsomancer_ 8y ago
At least the X200 (so I presume the X200s as well) you can put a good AFFS screen [LCD HV121WX4-120] in.

amiga-workbench 8y ago

I don't plan on giving up my ThinkPad X201t any time soon, its probably slower than an X200 as the ULV CPU throttles a bit but I've got 8gig of RAM, a solid state disk, a real keyboard, a 16:10 VA display and no trackpad. If I fancy more graphics performance I've always got the option of an express card PCIe dock. I find that this setup gives me a good yardstick for the kind of hardware an average end user might have and it pushes me to make better choices when writing software.

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shaftway 8y ago

My mine take-away from this article is something that I've always thought was key: When you're developing for other people, use the same hardware as them. I was at a fairly large financial firm in ~2004 that was rolling out a system to a large number of users. These users had impulse control issues, and were not allowed to use mice or keyboards (they would be torn off and thrown across the room). So the screens they used were touch screens. Inventory was shocked when I asked for one of the touchscreens to use as my second monitor. When launch time came around my parts of the UI were the only ones usable. Everyone else had built tiny tap targets that were easy to hit with a mouse, but impossible to fat-finger.

zozbot123 8y ago
> ... rolling out a system to a large number of users. These users had impulse control issues, and were not allowed to use mice or keyboards (they would be torn off and thrown across the room). Trading desk, I assume?
- SomeHacker44 8y ago
  Trading desks have amazing keyboards!
- shaftway 8y ago
  On the floor at an open-outcry exchange.

flitzofolov 8y ago

I think the answer to this question has to do with his previously featured blog post: "I'm going to work full-time on free software" :)

Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
Haha no doubt!

docker_up 8y ago

My current desktop I bought with my own money is from 2012. I selected my components based on low wattage, not based on highest specs, because the computer previous to that, a Xeon server, used 200 watts idle and it cost me at least $50/month in electricity. I've been using this computer since then, with absolutely no reason to upgrade. The only thing I would need more horsepower for these days is ripping/transcoding video faster or editing video faster. I ran into issues playing 4K video and thought I was processor-limited, but it turns out it was my codec was also from 2012 and when I upgraded that, everything was fine. Even at work, I'm still on a 2015 Macbook Pro because I refuse to upgrade based on those fucking Touchbars.

drosan 8y ago

> can compile the Linux kernel from scratch in 20 minutes so large projects compile time is very big, that's actually kinda bad for software developers. > it can play 1080p video in real-time yep until he tries to watch 1080p60fps on youtube, or gets videofiles encoded with 10bit x264 with large amount of reframes (that happens more often than you think btw)

Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
Well, how often do you recompile the whole project from scratch? Incremental builds are a thing.
- craftyguy 8y ago
  And ccache!
  - drosan 8y ago
    It is too buggy and has too many false hits to be used in large projects.
- drosan 8y ago
  Happens quite often with large c++ projects and some quirky includes. Change 1 header, recompile whole thing. For comparison, rebuilding linux kernel with make defconfig takes about 3-4 minutes tops on my laptop, rebuilding one of the work projects - at least 15.
  - Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
    I don't think this points to a problem with the workflow, but rather to a problem with the codebase. If your codebase is so big and complicated and interlinked that it requires frequently recompiling large swaths of it - it may be poorly designed.
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TheJoYo 8y ago

My current employer gave me an HP with a TN panel. That's made it quite frustrating when viewing code. Average memory and average cpu are find especially when ssh into a build server. IPS displays have really changed how I use laptops and switching back to TN shows it.

fb03 8y ago

We need to fight software bloat. Old computers and hardware are awesome for several reasons, specially if you really enjoy tinkering with computers! - Linux/Un*x compatibility is usually pretty good. and those OSes are good for tinkering and producing new stuff. You can reuse your old boxes for staging servers and test beds. - Old hardware forces you to learn more about how the hardware works and how to optimize your toolset. No, you don't need that insane number of daemons that run automatically if you install a vanilla distribution like Ubuntu. It is a nice stance against this ongoing trend of consumerism and disposable hardware. We are wasting and rebuilding and tearing apart all our hardware each 2-3 years just for the sake of having that new instruction corrected in microcode or for having a conversational piece. it's bollocks. We now have some insanely fast consumer processors which gives us the power to run and simulate real time graphics, audio synthesis, AR, etc.... but following the same trend, software is becoming more and more inefficient. Some software solutions now require several hundred megs of binaries and local web servers and dlls and whatnot to solve the simplest of use cases. We have text editors and music players that now need a full Node.js server instance and a separate build of Chromium running just for doing shit that we used to get by with a tenth of ram and processing power. Thank god we still have some survivors like foobar2000, notepad++ and etc. The effect of that inefficiency on us is that we get to do the same things we did 10 or 20 years ago (study, read, code, listen to music?), only using way more cycles for nothing. Besides very few people running insanely complex simulations (which when scaled, are gonna be run on clusters or AWS anyway), most power users don't need that multicpu rig with 128 gigs of ram. I have 2 old laptops now and one of those is a pretty usable 2010 Macbook with 3gigs of ram. It ran Mac OS X dog slow but now with Xubuntu, it's still pretty usable. And when XFCE starts becoming too bloaty, this box is gonna allow me to study tiling window managers and more lightweight customizable distros like Arch. The net effect is me studying more, which is always a win.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
It's really shocking how much Linux Desktop has let itself go over the years. I remember when you could recommend someone install Linux on an old laptop to get it responsive again, but nowadays that advice isn't true anymore. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kvT40umKL8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kvT40umKL8

Tade0 8y ago

I have a "consumer grade" personal laptop from 2013, I use a company issued MacBook Pro and just recently was still using a HP EliteBook 840 G2 issued by my former workplace. Checked the first two over the same TypeScript project and the MBP takes 10s, while my laptop twice as much. It does indeed feel kinda slower overall, but it never occurred to me that it was by that much. I mean - it's still fine for my after-hours stuff. Meanwhile the HP, even though in the middle in terms of age here was a pain to work with, because the fans on its i5-5200U would spin furiously on any hint of actual work being required from it. Performance was equally bad. I guess the takeout here is that while hardware doesn't matter that much, it has to be good hardware to begin with.

ericabiz 8y ago
Do both of your non-MacBook laptops have old spindle hard drives? I find that is much of the difference between “slower” and “faster” computers. SSDs have come down in price significantly, so it’s worth the upgrade if you use the computers on a regular basis.
- Tade0 8y ago
  All of those mentioned have had SSDs from the get go, but with the exception of the MBP connected via SATA III, so they never reached their full potential in this regard. My first ever laptop(2010) is still running and has a magnetic hard drive. I can't believe I went through half of college on this thing.

yingw787 8y ago

I try and get the best computer money can buy, because the quality of life is better on better hardware, I can always configure software-based restrictions if I need to create performant software (network throttling, cgroups, etc.), and because there's things you can do with new hardware you can't reasonably do with old (like training ml models). It keeps your options open.

jdblair 8y ago

TLDR: Old Thinkpads are powerful and rugged, but the screens are terrible. A wistful story: I used a Thinkpad X201 (2010 model) as my primary laptop for 6 years. I called it "lappy" (yes, a homestar runner reference). That thing took at serious beating. I worked on solar power system monitoring and control, and this involved a lot of field-work to debug problems. Lappy was exposed to a lot of dirt, dust, moisture, heat, cold, grease, and spilled coffee. Yet, after I upgraded the HD to a SSD it was the fastest build machine on our little software team. It did require repairs, but Thinkpads are designed for repairability. The most fragile part is the power connector, which will break if the laptop falls and lands on the connector while attached to the power cord. This repair requires taking EVERY part out, but I followed the instructions and was able to replace the connector. After taking a break from Lappy for a few years and working on a Macbook with a retina screen, I have to say the biggest deficiency of the Thinkpad was the screen. When I read about using an 11 year old Thinkpad as a primary machine, this is the first thing I think of. After using a modern laptop display I can't go back to that washed out, fuzzy display on the X201. 2 years ago I took it on a "last mission" when I was building an installation at Burning Man, which is probably the most hostile field environment I've worked in. It had started to shut down randomly, but it kept running reliably enough for my week-long dusty hack-a-thon. [edited to fix some typos]

bscphil 8y ago

Likewise, I use a now 8 year old Dell XPS laptop. With any reasonably high quality hardware, maintenance is not hard to do. I upgraded the screen and RAM a few years ago, and that has precluded me from needing anything newer. I've changed the thermal paste and blew the dust out of it. The only things I have consistently had to replace are the charger and batteries. Both are <= $30 on Ebay. I think replacing a laptop that's 4 years or less old is pretty wasteful, especially with how little the performance demands have changed in that time. We should treat computers more like we treat cars: knowing they can't last forever, but still a long term investment that requires some maintenance. Just like with a car, if you can't perform the maintenance yourself, take it to someone who can.

bytebuster 8y ago

My opinion: The article implies the hardware is fine, it's your workflow that's too heavy. I want a machine that fits my workflow, not the inverse. Even though the article implies that there isn't much difference, the difference in productivity can be HUGE. Specially for workflows that depend on crappy^H^H^H^H^H^Hdemanding applications. From the perspective of a company: The cost of laptops relative to salaries is minimal - Salaries are usually close to six figures/y, a very good laptop is $2~3k, and can last multiple years. The productivity increase will most probably cover the investment (not only in terms of direct return, but business value: could be time to market, fulfilling a tight deadline, etc). From the perspective of a freelancer: You are selling your time. A laptop that costs $2~3k will free some time (time saved) and be used for years. Time saved = FREE MONEY. The only reason I see to don't upgrade a laptop/desktop used to work is if it's performance it's already close enough of a new one. BONUS REASON: newer versions have keyboards that self-destruct.

infiniteseeker 8y ago

How is sway for a daily driver?

Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
Naturally I have a severe bias when answering this question, but I think it's quite good. If you give it a shot, be sure to build the latest version from master or one of the recent betas - don't use 0.15.2. https://repology.org/metapackage/sway/versions https://repology.org/metapackage/sway/versions

axiometry 8y ago

Bigger, better monitors are important accessories for the productive developer. Integrated graphics can't power those monitors. Most laptops sport only integrated graphics. Therefore most laptops are insufficient for the productive developer nowadays. There are a few scenarios where the developer's hardware should certainly be better than the user's, and screen space is one of them. Old hardware is not an excuse to stick to 1080p. Every developer should have moved to the much more spacious 1440p or 4K by now.

Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
As a reasonably productive developer who has used both 4K and 1080p displays regularly, 4K has done very little for my productivity. It just looks good.
- kerbalspacepro 8y ago
  If you're going to be staring at a screen for 8 hours a day, you should expect it to look good.
  - Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
    Okay, but it doesn't make me more productive.

calimac 8y ago

I love the perspective of the author. Beautifully tuned pragmatism and humility.

nwah1 8y ago

Energy efficiency gains mean that usually a new computer can pay for itself after a certain number of years or months, in terms of electricity savings. And fast hardware is key for performance in certain careers, such as software engineering. Even for a working class casual user, it would make a lot of sense to upgrade an old power hogging computer to a new netbook. It would be better in every way, and still likely save money in the long run. Not to mention time.

nkingsy 8y ago

My former boss (front end web) had a similar rationale for forcing the team to use old MacBook airs. I think it’s reasonable if you have cloud everything. We did not. We had to deploy directly from our machines, which basically made the laptop unusable for 12 minutes on every deploy. Also, sketch + slack + chrome + dev env basically meant swap was the normal state of affairs (random 10 second hangs all day every day). But at least I could talk to other people and decrease their productivity while I was waiting to be able to work. On the plus side I was very motivated to optimize our build system.

leni536 8y ago

> In reality, this high-end hardware isn’t really necessary for most applications outside of video encoding, machine learning, and a few other domains. Like browsing the modern web.

syntheticnature 8y ago
Yes, this is what drove me to abandon the netbook I'd been using for years -- everything was fast enough except any sort of web browsing.
- ddevault 8y ago
  It's better if you disable JavaScript by default and gradually change your habits to avoid websites which work poorly.
  - tonyedgecombe 8y ago
    You end up cutting out a huge part of the internet then.
    - ddevault 8y ago
      Yep, and nothing of value is lost.

meuk 8y ago

> In reality, this high-end hardware isn’t really necessary for most applications outside of video encoding, machine learning, and a few other domains. This should say "really isn't" instead of "isn't really". In practice, most Microsoft software will still run slow even on high-end hardware. I have a high-end gaming laptop that cost 1500 dollars, and my download folder still takes 10+ seconds to load. Even at work, I regularly find myself waiting because Visual Studio hangs (and this is on a Xeon Phi with 12 gigs of RAM). Meanwhile, XFCE runs happily snappily on my $200 Thinkpad that is more than a decade old. Newer systems just seem to focus on improving throughput instead of improving latency. I am so fed up with unresponsive systems!

winrid 8y ago
Do you have an SSD?
- zerohp 8y ago
  I have the same problem with Windows 10 on my XPS 13 and it has an SSD. File browsing in certain folders makes the machine nearly unusable. Also, windows updates fill the drive and require periodic manual cleanup. My other Windows machine doesn't have this problem.
  - winrid 8y ago
    Interesting. I have an X1 extreme and even it feels slow at times w/ Windows 10 however my much older Win10 desktop is much more responsive. I am not sure why laptops suck in this regard. Maybe drivers.

johnklos 8y ago

Imagine how much better off the whole planet would be if we recycled computers for use by other people, kept and repaired computers, and didn't accept the idea that rendering a web page should take half a gigabyte.

zanny 8y ago
I have a shelf of old parts including a Pentium 4 ATX board with working CPU and some DDR2 I found. I have a dozen or so hard drives that still pass all their SMART readings (even if most have old age and wear level warnings). I have a few 10+ year old monitors that look like spoiled eggs with how inaccurate their colors are but aren't broken. I keep it all around as a "if someones board etc dies, at least it works" kind of thing. I have some old GPUs too that still work including some 8800s, an X1800, and a GT 520. If they broke, it wouldn't be worth my time to fix them, but they are still working hardware, even if they aren't the latest tech.
- cr0sh 8y ago
  I once saved my bacon with an "old" (I don't really consider it old) 8 MB S3 PCI video card I had lying around. I had bought an AMD chipset motherboard that assumed (in the BIOS) that you were going to use a CPU with onboard video (ie - an AMD "APU"). I was setting things up, and my CPU was an AMD without onboard video, because I figured the motherboard, like all the others I'd ever set up, would switch automagically to the PCIe video slot, which had my old NVidia GPU in it. Nope. POST beeped that I didn't have any video output. So - I could either buy another CPU - or another mobo. Neither was an option. But I thought - maybe I could plug in a PCI video card and it would recognize that...? Dug through my various boxes-o-junk and found one. Dropped it in, and it worked - long enough for me to switch the BIOS video option over, after which I could use my GPU. I was kinda shocked at the BIOS, though - it was my first time using something "modern" - and it was a pretty GUI with a mouse and everything (then I started learning about UEFI which the mobo supported - a lot of things had changed since my last system, which was a Core2Duo board).
waiseristy 8y ago
I wonder at which point the power efficiency of these old machines outweighs the environmental impact of tossing them and buying a modern machine.

sureaboutthis 8y ago

I used to inherit computers for free from friends and relatives who were "upgrading" their Windows systems and turn them into servers or workstations at my company. I hadn't bought hardware in many years as I was getting off the ground. Nowadays, I guess most people have laptops or use mobile cause I haven't gotten one of those in quite a while.

exitcode00 8y ago

Guess what? Electron is everywhere and everything. Electron is taking over - its raining hamburgers.... RUN Seriously though, I guarantee it would nuke old hardware into orbit. Its unfortunately not feasible IMHO due to modern software glut. More power to Drew, but many people are forced into using Skype, Slack, Discord :/

zachruss92 8y ago

This is a _really_ good point the author makes. I definitely am guilty of getting into the trap of wanting to get new hardware when, realistically, I could do all of my work on a 10-year-old machine. This concepts also applies to website performance. I test my projects on physical iOS and Android devices, but they're both relatively new. I should start taking into account lower-end devices, especially on the Android side as JS is notoriously much slower.

ilovecaching 8y ago

I'm fine with slower hardware, and agree in principle with what the article is saying, but not poor displays. The reason I pick a MacBook over a Thinkpad is because the screen quality is cash money compared to the 1080p on the stock T series. I just can't do 1080p anymore. Also, you could solve this problem by just using a VM. If it really bothers you to have so much RAM and CPU, just spin up a 1401 in VirtualBox and use that for all your dev needs.

rpeden 8y ago
I agree with you on display quality. I picked up a ThinkPad x220 for not much money, but I swapped an IPS panel into it because the TN panel it came with was really, really awful. I don't even hate all TN panels - the one one my old MacBook Air was quite decent. When you start getting up toward MBP prices, you can find ThinkPads with decent displays. Even some of the older W series came equipped with a 3k matte IPS, which I found quite nice. I prefer the W series keyboards over the new MBP keyboards as well, but I found the trackpad on my W540 to be ridiculously awful. It's not exactly cheap to buy one of these machines on eBay, but they aren't crazily expensive either.

bkcreate 8y ago

What are some features that you would look for in a laptop so that you could still be using it in 10 years if you bought it new today?

Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
- User upgradable/servicable parts, notably the battery & HDD - All hardware supported by open source drivers in the upstream Linux kernel - Durable frame - Standard ports which have already been shown to stand the test of time (USB, 2.5mm headphone jack, and HDMI) - x86_64 or RISC-V architecture
UncleSlacky 8y ago
At least a 1080p IPS screen and a decent keyboard (no chiclets) with plenty of travel (I don't care how thick it makes the laptop).

unwabuisi 8y ago

There is a similar line of thinking for audio engineers who do a final mix/master of music before it is sent off to radio, streaming platforms, etc. After spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on expensive sound systems and professional speakers, engineers realized the average users listen to their music through inexpensive mediums. A cheap pair of headphones, a small bluetooth speaker, or even laptop speakers. They rarely listen to their music through mediums where the full audio spectrum is present, so in order for an engineer to get a mix that translates well across all mediums, they do their final mixes and tweaks on devices like a pair of apple earpods, or a more famous example, the Yamaha NS-10 [0]. The line of reasoning being: if you can get it to sound good on a basic speaker, it will sound great on high end systems, which is a win-win! [0] - https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/yamaha-ns10-story https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/yamaha-ns10-story

zrobotics 8y ago
This is also done in the toy industry--a sound effect may sound fine through good studio monitors, but will be screech and unpleasant when played through a 10 cent speaker with the crappies amplifier money can buy, so it is important to listen on the actual hardware.
spindle 8y ago
Just to clarify, they do the final mix and mastering of each piece on a variety of speakers. But right - the closer they get to the finished product the less they care how it sounds through expensive equipment.

ris 8y ago

This is so close to my experience it's eerie, down to the X-series thinkpad and KDE. I downright dread each major OS upgrade and the KDE that comes with it - they only ever get slower and more unreliable. I will almost certainly make the jump for the next debian release. I don't know if goes without saying, but the single thing that makes "old" hardware bearable these days is an ssd. Without that the pain can be unbearable.

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dkersten 8y ago

> I showed him how it could cold boot to a productive sway desktop in <30 seconds I'm currently using a new cheapo HP laptop, it cost €600 (substantially lower than the 2k+ Macbook Pro's I've been using prior). I run Manjaro Linux with i3 as the window manager. I'm blown away at how fast it boots. From power on to login prompt in about 3 seconds (bootloader is setup to just boot right away) and from login screen to usable i3 desktop in about a second. I've never had anything boot so fast before. Not that boot speed is meaningful for actual usage performance, but anyway.

agumonkey 8y ago

I use similar class laptops. My only issue is they get hot when compiling too much or HD video (or even non HD actually). Maybe it's a thermal paste issue but anyway, that's my main issue with them, if they could run at full speed without reaching 90degC they'd be near perfect.

interfixus 8y ago

Over the last thirty years, I have bought exactly one brand new device - an Asus Eee, which I still have around somewhere, but which, ironically, I never really used. Everything elese has been other people's lay-offs, including my beloved Thinkpad T440p on which I'm typing this. I am forever baffled by the quality and newness of hardware everybody simply wants to get rid of. Believe me, I ship lean and speedy code.

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Max-20 8y ago

I have the same problem at the moment, I am working with a 4.5 year old MacBook Pro and asking myself when replacing is actually increasing my productivity rather than just a luxury to have a shiny new laptop.

alexeiz 8y ago

I doubt it's possible watch Youtube in a browser on Linux on a 10 year old system. That's the only factor that forced me to upgrade my old PC: I just couldn't watch the damn youtube videos. Everything else worked perfectly fine. Windows 7 32bit upgraded to Windows 10, latest Ubuntu Linux with Gnome desktop. And thanks to an SSD it cold booted quickly enough as well.

SomeHacker44 8y ago
Now I am definitely switching to an old computer. I can’t wait to get streaming video and Youtube out of my professional life. :) (I find video and talking to be in general an amazingly “low bandwidth” way to ingest information, even watching/listening at 1.5-2x speed.) I do listen to podcasts/NPR while doing the dishes or other mindless housework though.
Narishma 8y ago
What I do on my netbook is use VLC to play Youtube videos since it supports hardware video decoding.

hyperman1 8y ago

I've got an interesting comparison here: I have a 2nd hand x220 thinkpad, 10 years old. This machine serves me very well today on linux and KDE. I did give it an SSD and 16g ram. Otoh, most of the time it is forced on the lowest CPU speed to get some extra battery. My previous employer gave us recent laptops. But it has a virus scannerbogging it down to unusable slowness. It has tons and tons of agents for licensing, network security, proxies,etc... It has draconian group policies eating away speed. It has SCCM scanning the whole hard drive on a regular base, which of course awakens tje virus scanner just for some bonus slowdown. I dreaded developing on that beast, and coworkers tended to copy code to their personal laptop, just to get some work done. Now on paper, that work machine was a lot better than my thinkpad. In reality however...

jandrese 8y ago
However your ancient Thinkpad is now a hole in your network security... Most virus scanners are security theater IMHO, so you're probably not much different than those other laptops. At the very least full disk scans are pretty unnecessary after the first if you're running in the default active protection mode. Anything the active protection misses your full disk scan is unlikely to find.
- hyperman1 8y ago
  why would it be? It runs a fully patched Debian with ports closed, etc... There is no difference software wise with a laptop from today.

purplezooey 8y ago

I use an X2xx too and agree it's awesome if you just run i3 or something. The major downside, which is not mentioned, is the 1366x768 max resolution. Ugh.

3xblah 8y ago

Regarding the 11-yr-old laptop I would be interested to know not only the compile time but also the storage required, e.g. size of src tree plus any tmp space required, etc. I like to compile kernels using memory-backed filesystem without any persistent storage mounted. This helps with speed. For example, with BSD, I only need about 200 MB RAM to produce a more-than-adequate kernel (about 17 MB). One of the benefits of doing "development" on old hardware IMO is that the programs I write on the old machines is guaranteed to be very fast on the new machines. I can move these programs back and forth between machines without worrying about performance. If I only used new machines to write programs, e.g., small, relatively simple ones, then I could not be sure that they would run well on the older machines.

swsieber 8y ago

I'd add "working on a monolith java app, along with running Node, IntelliJ and occasionally a VM with Gitlab in it" to the list of domains that require enthusiast grade specs. Oh, and slack.

jeremy7600 8y ago

Just built a NAS from an Asus m3a78-MC, Phenom 2 x4 920, 8gb of ddr2800 and an old case. my Desktop pc is only one gen newer on the motherboard from Gigabyte (990FX-UD3) and 2 gens newer on Processor (8350) with a 560ti, and 16gb of DDR3. the NAS cost $75 for all the parts listed in the last month ($17 cpu, $38 mobo, $20 memory). The desktop was probably $400 for the parts when they were new ($135 mobo, $230 CPU, $50 memory). Right now going just a few years back gets you gobs of processing power for very little. But of course its all relative, in another 10 years these DDR2 based systems might seem quite slow.

earthnail 8y ago

I co-founded Sonalytic and served as CTO until we got acquired. We developed AI for music information retrieval. Clearly an area where every developer needs the newest hardware. Or do they? The entire time I worked from a 2010 Macbook Pro. For really resource hungry stuff, we had a few dedicated servers with 64 cores, 512Gb of RAM and Nvidia GPUs. I.e., nothing you’d ever get in a laptop. Because my Macbook wasn’t particularly fast, we ended up avoiding all kinds of bloat. We kept things simple, which actually helped us move really fast, and used the resources on the big machines for scientific computing. Worked out well for us :-).

kemiller2002 8y ago

Here's my reason for never wanting to use old hardware. Admittedly, I don't need the latest and greatest, but I want something that is reasonable. Several years ago I was optimizing a DB query that was a real hog in the development environment. Two days later, and after trying everything I can do, I essentially gave up and checked in the meager optimizations I squeezed out of it. The query gets moved to QA, and runs completely fine. Why? Because the company had a mindset that developers should program on slower hardware to "make it more efficient" and none of them thought through that the run time optimizers might actually perform differently when given enough memory and processor power to run effectively. Older hardware within certain performance metrics are fine, but it's often a waste of everyone's time to do it to try and save a dollar here or there.

erikschoster 8y ago

I've been using an x201 for programming and music production (and everything else) since 2014 and don't see myself making a change anytime soon. (Though I recently picked up an IBM server from around the same era for less than the cost of a new cellphone, and now I have what feels like a supercomputer to do offline audio renders and such that are possible on the x201 but take a long time...) I do enjoy the peace of mind that if I drop my laptop in a lake, the cost of replacement is somewhere in the $100 range and dropping every year. But I agree with the author of this article that it's also a nice way to (without really having to think about it) keep the software I write reigned in and usable for people who don't have the latest multi-thousand-dollar hardware.

wilsonnb3 8y ago
Unless you’re doing music production in a non-standard way, you would benefit greatly from a better computer. DAWs and plugins eat a lot of ram and processing power.

TrolTure 8y ago

I've been developing in go/node/python on a headless 1cpu 512mb 20gb vultr instance. Tmux, vim, w3m and weechat. I use mosh and firefox from a laptop/desktop/phone/tablet and never had any issues. It does prevent me from writing rust though.

cr0sh 8y ago

Here I was hoping for actual "old hardware"...sigh. I'm in the process of refurbishing, possibly with some custom upgrades (ESP8266 wifi-serial dongle would be interesting), of a TRS-80 Model 100. Days of runtime from a handful of AA batteries. True, I won't be able to do anything modern with it - but that's kinda the point.

Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
You might appreciate one of my older blog posts: https://drewdevault.com/2016/03/22/Integrating-a-VT220-into-my-life.html https://drewdevault.com/2016/03/22/Integrating-a-VT220-into-...

rafiki6 8y ago

I wonder...do the makers of MacOS use old macs? Do the makers of Windows use old ibm pc clones? You can learn to empathize with your user by testing on a range of hardware that would simulate their environment. Your own development hardware doesn't need to be handicapped for this to happen. This is all very context specific. If I am developer working on a web app, and my shop uses several heavy but feature rich IDEs, chances are I need pretty decent hardware. If I'm programming nintendo gaming cartridges, I'd probably be ok with simpler hardware.

paavoova 8y ago

and it can play 1080p video in real-time I'm skeptical of this claim given my X220 (Sandy Bridge) has trouble decoding 1080p with any medium/high quality playback options. Enabling debanding algorithms, for example, which is default in mpv, causes dropped frames with high-bitrate 1080p x264 both software and hardware decoding, and dropped frames in general decoding 1080p HEVC (software only, iGPU doesn't support HEVC).

admax88q 8y ago

Imagine how much smaller/faster Chromium would be (or any of Google's big web apps) if the primary developers didn't get to use supercomputers to build and test on every day.

mixmastamyk 8y ago

In the old days it made a lot of sense to have the fastest computer available and multiple monitors. It was a huge boon to productivity and short-sighted to ignore. However, computers these days are fast enough, have SSDs, and enough memory for 95%† of tasks, for at least a decade. For everything else there are beefy servers and the cloud. As the poster says, there are advantages to old hardware. Like useable laptop keyboards with key travel. A second monitor would probably be a better investment if you don't have one already. I recommend portrait orientation to avoid scrolling.

romeisendcoming 8y ago

For my laptop(s) I tend to go with the best I can afford for multi-purpose development (because everything I do is HPC oriented or virtualized with a need for SMP vms) but I still have a Dell e6400 latitude that provides directory, dns and monitoring services for the in-house testbed. When it dies I have a celeron road warrior from WalMart ready to take it's place. Fit purpose to function to hardware.