7 ms·

PCs arent getting any better. We have pushed our replacement schedule out to at least 5 years now. Almost everything is web based and whatever isn't an ssd and

by eppp 4y ago

PCs arent getting any better. We have pushed our replacement schedule out to at least 5 years now. Almost everything is web based and whatever isn't an ssd and a mediocre processor can do for almost anyone that isnt in engineering or development.

doubled112 4y ago
I think this has been the case for a while. Performance plateaued pretty hard in the middle range spec hardware. Power consumption is getting better though. Somebody gave me an ASUS laptop from a few years ago, probably about 2017. I wasn't expecting miracles, it was a Celeron N3350 (2016), but I wasn't expecting the i5-560 in the M4500 (2011) in the garage is about 2x as fast. Still shipped with an 5400RPM HDD as well. The low end is still as garbage as it was in the past - barely a usable system at the time of purchase.
- joxel 4y ago
  Yeah, I bought a $150 laptop from best buy with windows on it and the latest celeron and had to return it, it was literally unusable for anything, even emptying the recycle bin. I don't know how they get away with selling that stuff.
- criley2 4y ago
  I actually disagree. Middle range hardware is so much better than it was 5-6 years ago. I've built two computers recently around AMD Ryzen 5600 and that chip is so impressive. It runs circles around "high end" from the 5 years ago, and does it on stock cooling and 65W peak. (ex: https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i9-7960X-vs-AMD-Ryzen-5-5600/m357952vsm1822932 https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i9-7960X-vs...) And that's not low end. That's still a $500-$700 computer depending on what we're doing about gpu. And I disagree that lowend is still garbage. I picked up a used business machine from Microcenter for $250 that had Windows, a multicore processor, 8GB ram and a SSD. I'm not quite sure what you want from an emailchecker and youtube watcher but the parents are very happy with it. Maybe that's a bad example but the bottom end feels better than ever for light use. To me the real question mark is high end. $1000 processors? $2000 graphics cards? What in the world is happening?
  - maximus-decimus 4y ago
    A used business machine isn't "garbage tier". In general it's probably better than mid-tier. At least in build quality. Real garbage tier barely has enough ram to run the OS. W11 officially requires 4 GB of RAM (which is insane), and you can find plenty of 4GB laptops on Amazon : https://www.amazon.com/Acer-A515-46-R3UB-Display-Quad-Core-Processor/dp/B09HVC79PC/ref=sr_1_4?crid=3HCM4EUSU0W42&keywords=laptop&qid=1675693216&sprefix=lapto%2Caps%2C147&sr=8-4 https://www.amazon.com/Acer-A515-46-R3UB-Display-Quad-Core-P... Now, that's shit tier (at least if you're running Windows.)
    - criley2 4y ago
      Honestly is that one really that bad? I get that 4Gb is offensive and I consider 8GB to be the minimum, but the reviews on that model are actually pretty universally positive. They say it actually has good performance on low-use tasks and has good battery life. I'm watching a youtube video review of the exact model https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6GIE-bcSQg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6GIE-bcSQg and even doing the 7 minute 4k video edit over ethernet in Adobe Premiere Pro, it stutters at full resolution but can handle basic tasks at 1/2 resolution. Is this thing really shit?
      - doubled112 4y ago
        It is definitely low end. However, it is likely around double the CPU/GPU performance vs the older Celeron laptop I brought up, plus it has an NVMe. Not even the same tier in my mind. If you could put another 4GB RAM in, it would probably be just fine for basic use. It might be an example of where budget machines "caught up" to software again.
      - maximus-decimus 4y ago
        Interestingly, I didn't catch that this was running Windows S which only allows installing software from the windows store and running edge. That version apparently only requires 2GB of ram, so I guess that's why it runs fine. I would consider something that only allows me to run stuff from the Microsoft store to be "garbage", but what do I know, it probably fits a lot of people's use case.
- maximus-decimus 4y ago
  Did they run the same OS? If the 2011 was using Windows XP, that that would be very unsurprising to me.
- rfoo 4y ago
  N3350 is from the Atom product line, which, IMO, is only suitable for embedded / thin clients. It does not tell much if an i7, even very dated, beats it.
  - doubled112 4y ago
    I agree about what the CPU was good for, but I think the situation does tell us something. The problem is that they were putting those in $300 and $400 Windows laptops and selling them to people who didn't know better at BestBuy. Shouldn't a new $400 laptop be able to open Outlook in less than a minute? There used to be enough improvement over time where a budget chip would at least be comparable to a decent chip from a few years back. Now you're stuck comparing chips across most of a decade to see if performance is actually any better.
sokoloff 4y ago
I have a more modern work laptop, but my main desktop is a Haswell 4790 (almost 9 years old, happens to be a Dell 9020) with an SSD and RAM upgrade. Is it amazing? Not really, but it's perfectly usable for most tasks, including Fusion360, 3D printer slicing, light dev work, video conferencing, etc and will drive 2 4K monitors. I bought two more for my kids at the start of COVID ($75 ea plus a $75 SSD); they're perfectly usable for all educational purposes, YouTube, light coding, and light gaming (Minecraft and the like) and way better than whatever $250-350 will buy at the low end of the new machine market.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Yeah, I have a newish Apple Silicon MacBook Pro that I use for multimedia/generative AI/etc. stuff. But my other MacBook and iMac are 2015-era and they're just fine for web browsing, video conferencing, and so forth. They don't even support the latest OS version but they're just fine to use--which certainly wouldn't have been true 10 or 15 years ago.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    You can probably use Opencore Legacy Patcher to get the older devices (if Metal-capable) onto Ventura, if that's important to you.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      Thanks. Not really important. They work fine. I'll probably slide in a new Mac Mini for the iMac at some point. And the other laptop is strictly a browser.
- roryrjb 4y ago
  I have a 3770 Ivy Bridge (a refurb'd HP Elite 8300 with SSD upgrade and 32GM RAM). Genuinely for the work I've done with it, C/C++, Rust, JS and Python, which I'd consider that heavy dev work, media consumption on a 2K monitor, with a Nvidia GT1030, some 3D gaming (on low-medium setting) it's competitive with my work MacBook Pro M1 (although that only has 8GB RAM).
_fat_santa 4y ago
Outside of Gaming or maybe training AI models, there's really no reason to get a brand new PC. I recently bought a Dell Precision T1700, about 5 years old (EDIT: from 2013) for $199. Besides throwing in a better video card to run my 4k monitors, I haven't hit a point where I wished I had bought a better machine. And that's the problem for Dell in the consumer space, going to best buy and picking up a new Dell is no longer the best deal, the best deals are all on used hardware that used to be 5-10x the price when new. Really the only consumers they appeal to are those that aren't technically savvy enough to buy a used computer online.
- doubled112 4y ago
  Wanting to use my 4K monitor rules out many old laptops. Desktops can be fixed with that video card, but not a laptop.
  - _fat_santa 4y ago
    Maybe an external video card will work? But to really utilize that it would require a laptop with a Thunderbolt port which is out of the question for most old laptops.
  - rxhernandez 4y ago
    I've run a 4k monitor and a 1080 monitor simultaneously on a 7 year old Thinkpad P50 (m1000m gpu; wasn't anything to write home about when it was new) for years. I think you'll be fine with an old laptop.
    - gpderetta 4y ago
      I've run a 4k off an x220. It had to run at 30Hz, but it otherwise worked way better than I expected (which was not at all).
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  > Really the only consumers they appeal to are those that aren't technically savvy enough to buy a used computer online. Funny, people said something similar decades ago but it was more like "the only consumers they appeal to are those that aren't technically savvy enough to build their own."
nikanj 4y ago
PCs aren’t getting better, but software is getting worse so you do need more CPU/RAM just to run the latest Electron monstrosities
JKCalhoun 4y ago
I think it's much worst than that. People are becoming "computer illiterate" as the phone has replaced the computer in most people's lives. There will come a time when you and me will be the old guys with a milling machine and a metal lathe in our garage wondering why people don't make things anymore. Or perhaps like the radio Hams. :-(
- chongli 4y ago
  I've been on a 6-month YouTube deep-dive into electronics videos. I am also now seriously considering studying to become a Ham. This stuff is absolutely fascinating to me. It's too bad hardly anyone feels this way. Makes you wonder what will happen in a few decades. Will there be no one left who knows how to build computers? Will the engineers of the future be using software while having no idea how it works?
  - leoedin 4y ago
    > Will the engineers of the future be using software while having no idea how it works Aren't we already at that point? How many people can fully explain how a modern computer works, from the transistors up?
    - D13Fd 4y ago
      Probably an incredibly small number, depending on how you stringent you want to be. But the same is true for cars, airplanes, microwaves, HVAC equipment, and most complex technologies.
    - chongli 4y ago
      I'm losing interest in modern computers, except as tools. Vintage computers are much more interesting as a hobby because you actually stand a chance of being able to understand how the entire thing works, transistors up. It's also nice that a lot of the schematics and repair manuals are available for these old machines so you fire up an oscilloscope and fix just about anything that might be wrong, unless they use some hard-to-find custom ICs.
    - 4y ago
acwan93 4y ago
Even PCs that are nearly 10 years old can still keep going when you add more RAM and use an SSD. We’ve done that for work computers for non-devs and it’s been going great.
pjmlp 4y ago
I still use my old laptops (12 - 5 years), only work laptops get replaced as per company policies. There is hardly anything that I need, although I prefer native 3D APIs it isn't as if my hobby coding skills need to match AAA ray tracing hardware, 3D Web APIs due to their hardware baselines work just fine (one of them is modern enough for WebGPU), same applies to compute coding. Also with the way Microsoft burned everyone that actually believed into WinRT, I lost any interest into updating to Windows 11. Same applies to smartphones, if they aren't broken or lost, I am not getting new ones.
toast0 4y ago
> PCs arent getting any better. We have pushed our replacement schedule out to at least 5 years now. They certainly are getting better, but the pace of improvement isn't very fast. There's not much need to replace a 5 year old computer, but for the most part, the replacement will be better or cheaper or both. If you were already buying low end machines, there's not really room for price improvement though, just a better performance floor. Intel is still coming out of their pipeline stall, but if they get a couple years of consistent product delivery, we may have a competitive market again.

by eppp 4y ago

doubled112 4y ago

I think this has been the case for a while. Performance plateaued pretty hard in the middle range spec hardware. Power consumption is getting better though. Somebody gave me an ASUS laptop from a few years ago, probably about 2017. I wasn't expecting miracles, it was a Celeron N3350 (2016), but I wasn't expecting the i5-560 in the M4500 (2011) in the garage is about 2x as fast. Still shipped with an 5400RPM HDD as well. The low end is still as garbage as it was in the past - barely a usable system at the time of purchase.

joxel 4y ago
Yeah, I bought a $150 laptop from best buy with windows on it and the latest celeron and had to return it, it was literally unusable for anything, even emptying the recycle bin. I don't know how they get away with selling that stuff.
criley2 4y ago
I actually disagree. Middle range hardware is so much better than it was 5-6 years ago. I've built two computers recently around AMD Ryzen 5600 and that chip is so impressive. It runs circles around "high end" from the 5 years ago, and does it on stock cooling and 65W peak. (ex: https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i9-7960X-vs-AMD-Ryzen-5-5600/m357952vsm1822932 https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i9-7960X-vs...) And that's not low end. That's still a $500-$700 computer depending on what we're doing about gpu. And I disagree that lowend is still garbage. I picked up a used business machine from Microcenter for $250 that had Windows, a multicore processor, 8GB ram and a SSD. I'm not quite sure what you want from an emailchecker and youtube watcher but the parents are very happy with it. Maybe that's a bad example but the bottom end feels better than ever for light use. To me the real question mark is high end. $1000 processors? $2000 graphics cards? What in the world is happening?
- maximus-decimus 4y ago
  A used business machine isn't "garbage tier". In general it's probably better than mid-tier. At least in build quality. Real garbage tier barely has enough ram to run the OS. W11 officially requires 4 GB of RAM (which is insane), and you can find plenty of 4GB laptops on Amazon : https://www.amazon.com/Acer-A515-46-R3UB-Display-Quad-Core-Processor/dp/B09HVC79PC/ref=sr_1_4?crid=3HCM4EUSU0W42&keywords=laptop&qid=1675693216&sprefix=lapto%2Caps%2C147&sr=8-4 https://www.amazon.com/Acer-A515-46-R3UB-Display-Quad-Core-P... Now, that's shit tier (at least if you're running Windows.)
  - criley2 4y ago
    Honestly is that one really that bad? I get that 4Gb is offensive and I consider 8GB to be the minimum, but the reviews on that model are actually pretty universally positive. They say it actually has good performance on low-use tasks and has good battery life. I'm watching a youtube video review of the exact model https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6GIE-bcSQg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6GIE-bcSQg and even doing the 7 minute 4k video edit over ethernet in Adobe Premiere Pro, it stutters at full resolution but can handle basic tasks at 1/2 resolution. Is this thing really shit?
    - doubled112 4y ago
      It is definitely low end. However, it is likely around double the CPU/GPU performance vs the older Celeron laptop I brought up, plus it has an NVMe. Not even the same tier in my mind. If you could put another 4GB RAM in, it would probably be just fine for basic use. It might be an example of where budget machines "caught up" to software again.
    - maximus-decimus 4y ago
      Interestingly, I didn't catch that this was running Windows S which only allows installing software from the windows store and running edge. That version apparently only requires 2GB of ram, so I guess that's why it runs fine. I would consider something that only allows me to run stuff from the Microsoft store to be "garbage", but what do I know, it probably fits a lot of people's use case.
maximus-decimus 4y ago
Did they run the same OS? If the 2011 was using Windows XP, that that would be very unsurprising to me.
rfoo 4y ago
N3350 is from the Atom product line, which, IMO, is only suitable for embedded / thin clients. It does not tell much if an i7, even very dated, beats it.
- doubled112 4y ago
  I agree about what the CPU was good for, but I think the situation does tell us something. The problem is that they were putting those in $300 and $400 Windows laptops and selling them to people who didn't know better at BestBuy. Shouldn't a new $400 laptop be able to open Outlook in less than a minute? There used to be enough improvement over time where a budget chip would at least be comparable to a decent chip from a few years back. Now you're stuck comparing chips across most of a decade to see if performance is actually any better.

sokoloff 4y ago

I have a more modern work laptop, but my main desktop is a Haswell 4790 (almost 9 years old, happens to be a Dell 9020) with an SSD and RAM upgrade. Is it amazing? Not really, but it's perfectly usable for most tasks, including Fusion360, 3D printer slicing, light dev work, video conferencing, etc and will drive 2 4K monitors. I bought two more for my kids at the start of COVID ($75 ea plus a $75 SSD); they're perfectly usable for all educational purposes, YouTube, light coding, and light gaming (Minecraft and the like) and way better than whatever $250-350 will buy at the low end of the new machine market.

ghaff 4y ago
Yeah, I have a newish Apple Silicon MacBook Pro that I use for multimedia/generative AI/etc. stuff. But my other MacBook and iMac are 2015-era and they're just fine for web browsing, video conferencing, and so forth. They don't even support the latest OS version but they're just fine to use--which certainly wouldn't have been true 10 or 15 years ago.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  You can probably use Opencore Legacy Patcher to get the older devices (if Metal-capable) onto Ventura, if that's important to you.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Thanks. Not really important. They work fine. I'll probably slide in a new Mac Mini for the iMac at some point. And the other laptop is strictly a browser.
roryrjb 4y ago
I have a 3770 Ivy Bridge (a refurb'd HP Elite 8300 with SSD upgrade and 32GM RAM). Genuinely for the work I've done with it, C/C++, Rust, JS and Python, which I'd consider that heavy dev work, media consumption on a 2K monitor, with a Nvidia GT1030, some 3D gaming (on low-medium setting) it's competitive with my work MacBook Pro M1 (although that only has 8GB RAM).

_fat_santa 4y ago

Outside of Gaming or maybe training AI models, there's really no reason to get a brand new PC. I recently bought a Dell Precision T1700, about 5 years old (EDIT: from 2013) for $199. Besides throwing in a better video card to run my 4k monitors, I haven't hit a point where I wished I had bought a better machine. And that's the problem for Dell in the consumer space, going to best buy and picking up a new Dell is no longer the best deal, the best deals are all on used hardware that used to be 5-10x the price when new. Really the only consumers they appeal to are those that aren't technically savvy enough to buy a used computer online.

doubled112 4y ago
Wanting to use my 4K monitor rules out many old laptops. Desktops can be fixed with that video card, but not a laptop.
- _fat_santa 4y ago
  Maybe an external video card will work? But to really utilize that it would require a laptop with a Thunderbolt port which is out of the question for most old laptops.
- rxhernandez 4y ago
  I've run a 4k monitor and a 1080 monitor simultaneously on a 7 year old Thinkpad P50 (m1000m gpu; wasn't anything to write home about when it was new) for years. I think you'll be fine with an old laptop.
  - gpderetta 4y ago
    I've run a 4k off an x220. It had to run at 30Hz, but it otherwise worked way better than I expected (which was not at all).
JKCalhoun 4y ago
> Really the only consumers they appeal to are those that aren't technically savvy enough to buy a used computer online. Funny, people said something similar decades ago but it was more like "the only consumers they appeal to are those that aren't technically savvy enough to build their own."

nikanj 4y ago

PCs aren’t getting better, but software is getting worse so you do need more CPU/RAM just to run the latest Electron monstrosities

JKCalhoun 4y ago

I think it's much worst than that. People are becoming "computer illiterate" as the phone has replaced the computer in most people's lives. There will come a time when you and me will be the old guys with a milling machine and a metal lathe in our garage wondering why people don't make things anymore. Or perhaps like the radio Hams. :-(

chongli 4y ago
I've been on a 6-month YouTube deep-dive into electronics videos. I am also now seriously considering studying to become a Ham. This stuff is absolutely fascinating to me. It's too bad hardly anyone feels this way. Makes you wonder what will happen in a few decades. Will there be no one left who knows how to build computers? Will the engineers of the future be using software while having no idea how it works?
- leoedin 4y ago
  > Will the engineers of the future be using software while having no idea how it works Aren't we already at that point? How many people can fully explain how a modern computer works, from the transistors up?
  - D13Fd 4y ago
    Probably an incredibly small number, depending on how you stringent you want to be. But the same is true for cars, airplanes, microwaves, HVAC equipment, and most complex technologies.
  - chongli 4y ago
    I'm losing interest in modern computers, except as tools. Vintage computers are much more interesting as a hobby because you actually stand a chance of being able to understand how the entire thing works, transistors up. It's also nice that a lot of the schematics and repair manuals are available for these old machines so you fire up an oscilloscope and fix just about anything that might be wrong, unless they use some hard-to-find custom ICs.
  - 4y ago

acwan93 4y ago

Even PCs that are nearly 10 years old can still keep going when you add more RAM and use an SSD. We’ve done that for work computers for non-devs and it’s been going great.

pjmlp 4y ago

I still use my old laptops (12 - 5 years), only work laptops get replaced as per company policies. There is hardly anything that I need, although I prefer native 3D APIs it isn't as if my hobby coding skills need to match AAA ray tracing hardware, 3D Web APIs due to their hardware baselines work just fine (one of them is modern enough for WebGPU), same applies to compute coding. Also with the way Microsoft burned everyone that actually believed into WinRT, I lost any interest into updating to Windows 11. Same applies to smartphones, if they aren't broken or lost, I am not getting new ones.

toast0 4y ago

> PCs arent getting any better. We have pushed our replacement schedule out to at least 5 years now. They certainly are getting better, but the pace of improvement isn't very fast. There's not much need to replace a 5 year old computer, but for the most part, the replacement will be better or cheaper or both. If you were already buying low end machines, there's not really room for price improvement though, just a better performance floor. Intel is still coming out of their pipeline stall, but if they get a couple years of consistent product delivery, we may have a competitive market again.