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At home I'm still using a 2012 MacBook Pro as my daily driver. It has 16Gb RAM, a quad core i7 and a 512Gb SSD. It runs all my dev tools, multiple VMs, and I do

At home I'm still using a 2012 MacBook Pro as my daily driver. It has 16Gb RAM, a quad core i7 and a 512Gb SSD. It runs all my dev tools, multiple VMs, and I do music production on it. All without any problems. My work machine is a 2015 MacBook Pro that's similarly configured to my home machine. Still runs great. They offered to replace it last year and I asked why? It's still able to do everything just fine. I say this to back up something the author said - you don't need to be so extreme and buy a machine from 2006. Buying a machine that's 3-5 years old is still a good machine to run all but the most-demanding tasks. Even then I ask why are you running your most-demanding tasks on your laptop instead of a server or EC2 instance? Bottom line - yes: you can save a lot of money buying older equipment.

deleted 6y ago
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treesknees 6y ago
My employer lets us upgrade our MacBook Pros every 3 years from our start date and I always do so regardless of whether I need it or not. The "use it or lose it" factor can be major in a large company. Similar to how departments use up budget at the end of the fiscal year, if people stop upgrading their laptop when it's offered, they'll stop offering it so often and it'll be harder to obtain an upgrade when I actually need it. You also have to consider IT support and EoL. If 4k people hang onto their laptops until some required software/security update no longer works, now the company has to make a huge 4,000 laptop purchase instead of spreading that purchase across multiple quarters or years. We also recycle our old laptops back into a rotation as spares for interns, loaner laptops during RMA, presentation or demo machines for customer sales opportunities, etc. It's nice to have a stock that's not 7-10 years old, and also not go out and buy a $2k laptop for an intern.

deleted 6y ago

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treesknees 6y ago

My employer lets us upgrade our MacBook Pros every 3 years from our start date and I always do so regardless of whether I need it or not. The "use it or lose it" factor can be major in a large company. Similar to how departments use up budget at the end of the fiscal year, if people stop upgrading their laptop when it's offered, they'll stop offering it so often and it'll be harder to obtain an upgrade when I actually need it. You also have to consider IT support and EoL. If 4k people hang onto their laptops until some required software/security update no longer works, now the company has to make a huge 4,000 laptop purchase instead of spreading that purchase across multiple quarters or years. We also recycle our old laptops back into a rotation as spares for interns, loaner laptops during RMA, presentation or demo machines for customer sales opportunities, etc. It's nice to have a stock that's not 7-10 years old, and also not go out and buy a $2k laptop for an intern.