8 ms·
Yes, no one uses 16 year old laptops
by Google234 6y ago
Yes, no one uses 16 year old laptops
- faitswulff 6y agoNearly no one, I would venture to guess.
- rovr138 6y agoThis couch side laptop I use to read and search things is a 2011 MBA. Not 16, but maybe it'll make it...
- s0rce 6y agoMy 2011 MBA from grad school is pretty much done, its so slow. I replaced the battery and the charging port and its doing better but still about to end. Good 10 years though.
- rovr138 6y agoYeah, after posting I was thinking about that. I have a very lean setup on it with Linux. I don't think it'll last too much longer to be honest. I mainly use it if I'm on my phone, but find something that a bigger screen/keyboard would help. But I can't do much on it. Even a RPi has more RAM on it.
- _jal 6y agoI have an Iphone 4 that still serves as a remote control for my music setup. The battery was replaced once, 2014 or so.
- m4rtink 6y agoWell, maybe using 16 years old machine today - but what about using current machine in 16 years ? A lot of stuff has stabilized and has been "good enough" for many use cases for quite a while.
- wmf 6y agoSoftware support is less than 10 years so in 16 years you'd be very far behind on security patches.
- m4rtink 6y agoWell, on Mac and other proprietary hardware & software combos. Enterprise Linux distros such as RHEL regularly provide 10-12 years of support you can pay for per major version and presumably you will be able to upgrade the major version to reset the time. Same thing for community Linux distros - Fedora, Debian of OpenSUSE already work on current 16+ years old hardware and one can expect that to continue in the future.
- dukeofdoom 6y agoI still use my apple 16GB ipod touch to play music, its in a speaker that has a dock for it. Still works, and I use it to play music. The hardware works. But almost none of the software works, except the music player. The browser no longer works, otherwise I would play music off of spotify or youtube. That thing is probably 13 years old now.
- culopatin 6y agoGood for you. Do you use a 16yo laptop though? Because that is the topic here.
- Hiopl 6y agoPerformance improvements have slowed a great deal since then. Assuming you aren't doing anything particularly heavy, you can easily get away with using a Sandy Bridge CPU (10 years old) for most tasks. You'll likely still be able to use it in 5 years just fine. That applies even moreso for something as performant and efficient as the M1. Case in point, my ThinkPad T420 has been in use since 2011. Even though it's no longer my main driver, the performance is more than good enough for when I need a backup device. For comparison, 16 years ago, we're talking about single-core 32-bit CPUs, the very first version of their Centrino brand, DDR2 RAM and IDE/PATA HDDs. There's just not much you can do with those limitations.
- auggierose 6y agoThe performance improvements due to parallel computing hardware (think Metal GPUs and their successors) will be so insane in 16 years that your current laptop won't stand a chance at doing anything what will be considered standard then.
- lmm 6y agoIncreasing parallelism is irrelevant for most workloads due to Amdahl's law.
- adrr 6y agoStill use my 2010 MBP 15”. I changed out the battery twice and swapped in a SSD drive. It’s my only dvd drive. I also have a 2011 Air 11” that still works.
- dsabanin 6y agoEspecially 1st gen of new platform laptops, with all the potential quirks. I think that's also why Apple priced them very affordably.
- biztos 6y agoMy 2006 white plastic MacBook is still in use. It's just a friend's kid's video player right now, because with OSX it's become too slow for most uses, but if someone put Linux or BSD on it....
- pwdisswordfish6 6y agoThat’s right. I use an 18-year-old laptop.