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Ask HN: How often does your company replace your laptop?
A large industrial corporation I have worked for would only replace a company laptop after 5 years unless it really stops working. It's all Windows laptop, and the laptops employees could order are mostly models from more than 1 year ago. Needless to say that productivity drops significantly after 2-3 years.
I just would like to know if this is a common practice, and how often does your company replace your laptop?
- llampx 7y agoWhere I've worked, laptops are often seen as fungible resources aside from OS, i.e. all Mac laptops are interchangeable and all Wintel laptops are interchangeable. On the other hand, laptops haven't gotten much faster until very recently with Intel's 8th gen chips going to quad-core so I can see the IT and bean-counter perspective as well. The bigger the company the more likely they are to have a policy such as the one you mentioned. I've been working for startups recently, and what you are issued is what you'll be working on for a long time, at least unless it stops working and can't be replaced (eg, a 2012 Macbook Air that isn't manufactured anymore) As a team lead I have to fight to get the best hardware for my team sometimes, like 16GB RAM and good screens. So sometimes someone gets an upgrade just because of that, and the old laptop goes to someone who doesn't need to run demanding apps.
- gshdg 7y ago3-year leases aren’t all that uncommon. I’ve also been at a SmallCo that would buy brand new top of the line Mac laptops for developers and number crunchers, and then cycle them down after a few years to staff whose workloads were less demanding. They averaged 6-8 years out of a computer. Asking developers to work on 6-8 year old hardware is definitely penny wise/pound foolish, tho.
- segmondy 7y agoHave you been to Amazon? I don't think I saw anyone with a laptop that was newer than 4 years old. Being Frugal seems to work for them and they are the top cloud company. I would say most developers don't need new hardware unless they are building games or developing CPU intensive application. Most laptops today have more resources than your microservice will have in the cloud.
- gshdg 7y agoSo now your test suite takes 15 minutes to run instead of 15 seconds. Sure, that doesn’t matter at all.
- eb0la 7y agoTest what? you don't work in consulting, right? The only way some consultancy firms have to earn the contract each year is: - Give crappy hardware to devs, so they can bill more hours. - Skip testing because if the customer wants to fix those bugs with anoter company, they will ask for an audit fee beforehand.
- gshdg 7y agoWe’ve just moved from amazon to consulting firms?
- milquetoastaf 7y agoMy company doesn't even provide laptops. It's all BYOD D:
- astrosloth 7y agoCompany I work for supplies us with the new MacBook Pros every two years
- nik736 7y agoIn Germany laptops are written off for 3 years, so I would imagine 3 years is the period most companies are replacing laptops here.
- spectramax 7y ago4 years, it’s painful.
- segmondy 7y agoWhy? There's not much difference between 4 years old laptop anymore.
- reilly3000 7y ago4 years of physical cruft is something. Gunk deep in the keyboard, tired fan bearings, HD wear- it all adds up to more risk of data loss. That may be a random reboot or data corruption. One or two days of lost work is generally more expensive than a new machine.
- bobochan 7y agoIt used to be three years, but five years is now becoming common unless there is a compelling need. Honestly, I am okay with it. My current laptop is a Early-2015 MacBook Pro with 16 GB of RAM and it has been flawless since they day that I bought it. The battery life might be slightly less, but it really does everything that I want it to.
- zhte415 7y agoI've refused to give up my laptop, a T420 i7 8GB, from 2011. It's the keyboard. SSD upgrade and battery. When leaving my manager tried to give it as a leaving gift, but was blocked (I bought a second hand one for myself with similar upgrades for a ridiculously low price instead). As a compromise it will forever sit in her desk 'in case you come back'. Give the employer they want and need, justified. A business or tech head (not just manager, but someone the buck really stops with) has a budget and they should spend it as justifies the business case, not conforming to an arbitary rule.
- pkalinowski 7y agoMacbooks every 2 years
- LarryMade2 7y agoAs a developer I don't want the latest and greatest - I gotta think of the least common denominator, Having the best may be convenient for its speed and capacity, but will lead me to not realize problems others are having running things on older hardware. If I can get my performance boost through software decisions and better development practices I get less complaints. Hard part is sometimes we are forced into upgrades as 3rd parties end support for one thing or another, then it dominoes into everything else (Yeah, Windows 10, talking about you.)
- Spooky23 7y agoWe do 4-year refresh cycles. Any less is a waste imo, unless that’s done intentionally as some sort of employee perk. 95% of the developers who claim to need frequent refresh (absent of failures) are full of malarkey. If you have enough resources to begin with, computers don’t improve on fast enough cycles. Exceptions are people doing GPU workloads or who have very high memory requirements.
- t34543 7y agoBrand new device every two years for me - and I can request any device.
- marm7 7y agoBefore 2017 I got a new one every year/6 months. Right now I see it as a environmental issue... So I’m still running code and managing 20 engineers with my old 2017 model and won’t give up until it gives up on me. Sustainability?
- Trias11 7y agoI can open ticket with my IT dept at any time and they will replace my current laptop with whatever one i like (among Mac/PC availables)
- queena999 7y agohi all,any one who know how to enroll for an apple enterprise account? plz kindly contact me at any time fanboer@gmail.com