28 ms·

I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

• danradunchev 3y ago
  Although capitalism could provide us with used laptops for decades to come, the strategy outlined above should be considered a hack, not an economical model. It’s a way to deal with or escape from an economic system that tries to force you and me to consume as much as possible. It’s an attempt to break that system, but it’s not a solution in itself. We need another economical model, in which we build all laptops like pre-2011 Thinkpads. As a consequence, laptop sales would go down, but that’s precisely what we need. Furthermore, with today’s computing efficiency, we could significantly reduce the operational and embodied energy use of a laptop if we reversed the trend towards ever higher functionality.
  • cyrillite 3y ago
    Content aside for a second: I have been trying to find your magazine again for so long. This scratches an itch. Thank goodness.
  • ip26 3y ago
    laptop sales would go down, but that’s precisely what we need. Furthermore, with today’s computing efficiency... Somehow these conversations never seem to talk about how we would not have current levels of compute if everybody kept their computers for one or two decades before buying another. Good or bad, right or wrong, the present state of affairs only happened with the present replacement cycle. I'm not arguing we have to keep the present replacement cycle, but I think it needs addressing.
    • soulbadguy 3y ago
      > Good or bad, right or wrong, the present state of affairs only happened with the present replacement cycle. Hmmmm... I am not sure that those two things are as correlated (much less causally linked) as it might first appear. We could have the same "average" pace of innovation, just delivered between longer intervals.
      • ip26 3y ago
        Ok, you’re probably right as long as your total spend in dollars is the same. If everyone buys laptops half as often but pay twice as much. It’s the spend that funds the advancements.
• OldManRyan 3y ago
  Quick aside: This should have a (2020) tag. The keyboard and mousepad on my Thinkpad have died twice. I've replaced it twice for 30 dollars each time. I would have had to buy a new laptop if I had something else. The conclusion about this being a hack and not a new economic model is why I'm hoping Framework seems success. Unfortunately I think my Thinkpad is on the way out for good and I plan to replace it with the Framework 16 when it is available, which I hope will last me just as long as my Thinkpad
  • deleted 3y ago
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  • draw_down 3y ago
    If the keyboard or trackpad died on my laptop I would simply take it to be serviced. The company that made it has storefronts around the country where I can bring it in. They have an app that makes the scheduling easy. In fact I just had the battery replaced after 5-6 years (I don’t quite remember). Works for me.
    • OldManRyan 3y ago
      That's great that whoever makes your device(assuming Apple) has stores where they can do repairs. Having a repairable device doesn't mean you have to repair it yourself, it just means you can.
• ido 3y ago
  Nice. Now try to do the same as (some types of) programmer or 3d modeller or video editor. The newest MacBook with an M2 chip compiles and runs my projects drastically faster than the 2015 Dell XPS Skylake-i7 laptop I used to have and the GPU on the M2 is so ridiculously more powerful it's like going from 3dfx voodoo to a modern GPU.
  • deleted 3y ago
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  • rpcope1 3y ago
    At that point, I guess I don't understand why you wouldn't just step up to a desktop workstation?
    • nvrmnd 3y ago
      A laptop can be easily transported for use in a variety of locations.
      • arrowsmith 3y ago
        You can even put them on top of your lap.
        • lost_tourist 3y ago
          most pc laptops I've used weren't very comfortable after some number crunching or kernel building after a few minutes...
          • nvrmnd 3y ago
            yes but have you tried a desktop computer on your lap
    • Casteil 3y ago
      Err, mobility? M1 / M2 Pro MBPs pack a serious punch... and they don't have to sacrifice battery life to do so - they smoke virtually all other laptops in terms of battery life.
• rozenmd 3y ago
  ThinkPads are absolutely magic. Here's one I built for travelling: https://maxrozen.com/replacing-my-macbook-m1-with-thinkpad-t480 https://maxrozen.com/replacing-my-macbook-m1-with-thinkpad-t...
  • luciusdomitius 3y ago
    They used to be. I am writing this from the above-mentioned T480. It is 3 years old, has both usb-c ports replaced, small crack on the backside of the screen and the keyboard zif is broken, so the tape cable is... well taped to the connector. On the other hand my X200, T420, T450 are still in mint condition. To be completely fair, modern macs are also way off from well-built. Shiny yes, but sturdy is the last thing I'd call them. BTW, in older ThinkPads, the drain-pipes under the keyboards actually worked - you could pour water on it just for kicks. Now it is there only for decoration.
    • simfree 3y ago
      It really is a shame that the USB C ports are not modular on newer ThinkPads, you basically have to send the laptop for board work to get them replaced once the USB C ports go.
      • luciusdomitius 3y ago
        Not really, I had mine replaced at revolt.bg for about 60 EUR, both labour and spares. Miraculously, they had both of them on stock, so it was a Thurday to Wednesday job. Massive respect to those guys.
  • cache_hit 3y ago
    They really are. For example, I have a P53s (basically a renamed T590) that will randomly clock the i7 CPU it came with down to 400MHz under active use for extended periods of time, and I can't run anything that actually uses the cores on the i7 for more than a minute without hitting the 95 degree PROCHOT. The dedicated GPU also will clock itself down to 100MHz and shift the termal throttling range from 75 degrees to 65 degrees randomly, on a system with a single fan cooling solution. Just magical, and I can't wait to see Lenovo's next trick.
• RecycledEle 3y ago
  The last 3 laptops I bought were a pair of Lenovo e570 machines and a Lenovo e580. Two went to college kids and I keep the third. When I configure a laptop, I use less RAM than I would otherwise want (16 GB lately) and make up for it with a fast NVME boot drive as swap space. Intel NVME drives are fast and power efficient. That gives me a better mix of performance and battery life than would a laptop with more RAM.
  • isoos 3y ago
    Wouldn't the increased swap load reduce the lifetime of the nvme drive?
    • RecycledEle 3y ago
      I'm not worried about service life when I buy Intel NVME drives.
• rpcope1 3y ago
  > Most of the 160-200 million laptops sold each year are replacement purchases. The average laptop is replaced every 3 years (in business) to five years (elsewhere). 3 My 5.7 years per laptop experience is not exceptional. This is one of the many aspects I don't like about how laptops are designed today. Even with OEM desktops like my Dell Precision T1700, it's still serviceable and fixable today without a whole lot of effort. For both my Dell and Supermicro workstations, they basically last 10+ years, and I've got a lot of options to keep them going; I wish I could say the same about laptops. I really wish I could get a new 2k screen for the old Dell Latitude E6530 I have -- it's built a lot more robustly than my newer latitude. I really would like to see our government mandate user serviceable parts (kind of like how the EU apparently mandated replaceable batteries, which is a huge win), as there's so many older designs that would continue to chug along with a few fixes, like IBM era Thinkpads or some the more robustly designed Latitudes. Lenovo has been going the wrong direction lately...I have sworn them off after having a two P1s and a P53, which were gently used and taken care of, die in under 2 years.
  • jwcooper 3y ago
    This is what Framework set out to do (and is pulling it off so far...I'm typing this out on my 12th gen framework). They have an entire marketplace of replacement parts you can buy, including screens. They've even got battery upgrades (increased capacity), better speakers, new screen type (matte) that you can retrofit into your existing Framework. They support upgrading from their first gen laptop (admittedly they are a very young company, but their promise has held up thus far). Hopefully more folks that are interested in upgradability and repairability are purchasing frameworks to show other companies that it's worth it to do (I'm unaffiliated with Framework, just a customer).
    • a1o 3y ago
      I wish something like Framework could be more popular so it could be easily available on other countries. As is, the impact something like it is small. Hopefully this changes at some point.
      • 3y ago
• wyldfire 3y ago
  I often buy a ~one generation old phone for this same reason. It's just so much better value to buy someone else's phone. The folks who keep buying the newest generation tech often seem to take really good care of their gear - perhaps because they plan to resell it later. I haven't done this as much with laptops because I do tend to keep those for such a long time that I can reasonably amortize a bigger investment over ~5+ years. Curated marketplaces like "swappa" are a good way to purchase used gear. But anywhere you've got an escrow/guarantee should suffice.
  • zokier 3y ago
    But the biggest reason (for me) to replace phone is to get security updates; buying used is counter-productive to that end
    • mattl 3y ago
      Because the time to get updates is less on an older phone or that a used phone is less secure because someone could install malware on it?
    • wyldfire 3y ago
      Just replace it with another one generation old used phone when it stops getting updates. Still better value.
    • yardstick 3y ago
      I think that is more of an issue with the manufacturer. Apple supports their phones for a very long time. They updated iOS 12 this year with security fixes, so that covers iPhone 6 and up. https://www.macworld.com/article/675021/how-long-does-apple-support-iphones.html https://www.macworld.com/article/675021/how-long-does-apple-...
    • dehrmann 3y ago
      Then buy Apple. The 6s is up to 8 years of updates.
    • Shekelphile 3y ago
• pg5 3y ago
  I buy back my decomissioned work laptop for $50, which means I get a fairly new ThinkPad that works pretty perfectly with Linux.
• easeout 3y ago
  > Furthermore, Linux operating systems do not steal your personal data and do not try to lock you in, like the newest operating systems from both Microsoft and Apple do. Is recent macOS accused of stealing or shown to steal personal data? Platform lock-in is not news, but that would be. This is an earnest question; maybe I'm in a bubble and missed a big story.
  • sounds 3y ago
    Note that the only data tracking Apple was caught doing was in iOS, not macOS, but there are many signs that Apple collects aggregated usage data in macOS (which probably cannot be later reduced to expose the behavior of any single customer). 2021 Jun 7: > "Anyone opting out of tracking right now is basically having the > same level of data collected as they were before. Apple hasn't > actually deterred the behavior that they have called out as being > so reprehensible, so they are kind of complicit in it happening," > Seufert explained. * https://www.macrumors.com/2021/06/07/apps-continuing-to-track-users/ https://www.macrumors.com/2021/06/07/apps-continuing-to-trac... Apple did finally close this loophole in iOS 14.5, causing Facebook to lose what some analysts think was ~$10 Billion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identifier_for_Advertisers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identifier_for_Advertisers - however, by March 18, 2021, Mark Zuckerberg stated that it could actually encourage advertisers to use the explicit targetting and tracking happening on facebook, and he made it sound like a win-win. 2022 Nov 8: > The recent changes that Apple has made to App Store ads should > raise many #privacy concerns. It seems that the #AppStore app > on iOS 14.6 sends every tap you make in the app to Apple. This > data is sent in one request: (data usage & personalized ads are off) * https://gizmodo.com/apple-iphone-analytics-tracking-even-when-off-app-store-1849757558 https://gizmodo.com/apple-iphone-analytics-tracking-even-whe... * https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/14/apple-faces-new-lawsuit-over-its-data-collection-practices-in-first-party-apps-like-the-app-store/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/14/apple-faces-new-lawsuit-ov...
    • easeout 3y ago
      Thanks for all the details. The App Store app bit is a very bad look. The rest seems on the up and up, or at least isn't the OS phoning home your personal data. I'm inclined to think the quote only meant to claim that Windows and macOS try to lock you in, and that Linux doesn't steal your personal data. The sentence structure is ambiguous.
• tristor 3y ago
  I average 8 years and two batteries for a laptop since I switched to Macbooks, prior it was about 5 years and one battery. MacBooks have a much better lifecycle.
  • madduci 3y ago
    Aren't new models with soldered batteries as well? The lifecycle is a disaster, especially if you would like to change the drive or upgrade the ram, you simply can't
    • jlokier 3y ago
      In some countries Apple provides a battery replacement service for the Macbooks at a fixed price, but you have to leave it with them for a little while like any other service. I think the price is reasonable for the quality of the batteries. The Apple price was much lower than a local Apple reseller store quoted for battery replacement - they pretended not to know about Apple's own service, and when I showed them they said they couldn't match Apple's price as it was too low. The inability to upgrade storage space is a big problem though. Apple storage is prohibitively expensive up front yet you know you might run out of space during the long life of the device. External drives work and are fast so that's the practical solution but it's not as convenient.
• YZF 3y ago
  Typing this from my `MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013)` ... Also have two working ThinkPads in use in my household that are older where I've had to replace the CPU fans, at some point they just crumble, but otherwise work OK-ish (but maybe getting to a point where I should really retire them).
  • mholm 3y ago
    The Pre-touchbar Retina Macbook Pros were the perfect laptop for the era. They could run a bit hot (but what didn't, back then?). Excellent hardware quality, and can generally still run well today if you don't do anything demanding. I've got a 2013 13" that doesn't have a single issue other than age.
    • jimworm 3y ago
      The touchbar feels to me like a time bomb that explodes when Apple thinks it's time for you to give another stack of cash to them.
    • InvaderFizz 3y ago
      The heat and constant fan noise was a real problem. That's the entire reason we upgraded my wife from a 2015 15" MBP i7 to a 2020 MBA M1. The extra hours of battery was a nice bonus, the main gain was the lack of noise.
• pengaru 3y ago
  Oh how I miss the form-factor+keyboard of my X40/X60. Seeing that tent of an X60s has me feeling very nostalgic. One of the few devices capable of doing that for me. It's too bad they had so many flimsy plastic parts until the X220 era, which still tends to crack palmrests and bezels with use. If someone packaged a modern SoC beneath an X40/X60 keyboard in a rugged light chassis with all the modern display/battery junk I'd be all over it.
  • mpenet 3y ago
    Same. It really was the best screen size/ratio for me. I was basically carrying it everywhere.
    • pengaru 3y ago
      IBM used to make some genuinely great end-user stuff.
• cempaka 3y ago
  I'm still getting great mileage out of a T430 I bought in 2017, and I'm not particularly nice to my laptops. The one frustration I've had recently is that it can't drive my nice 38-inch monitor at its full resolution, so I've started eyeing a T470.
  • btgeekboy 3y ago
    The T430 is a rugged laptop, but it’s getting pretty far up there in age. For example, I use mine in the shop to read PDFs, update the project’s Trello board, fetch software updates and drop them on SD cards, etc. I used to think Trello kinda lagged. Great tool, but man it’s kinda slow. Then I opened it on a modern computer - it’s just the old hardware holding it back. Same with PDFs - these are graphical 11x17 pages, and it really does get bogged down easy. You’re gonna be amazed how much faster everything feels when you get to the newer machine.
  • lwdf 3y ago
    Go for the T480, it has 4 cores and 8 threads compared to the T470 2 cores 4 threads. Big jump if you do anything like compiling.
  • deleted 3y ago
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• dbg31415 3y ago
  I mean... you can save a few bucks on a laptop. Sure. But the real cost is the downtime. If I have an employee that I value at $100,000 a year, working 1800 hours, that's $55 / hour. Assuming their work doesn't impact anyone else, it would be silly for me to take that employee out of commission for any expense that costs less than $440 / day. Way smarter for me to buy a new laptop, which is less likely to have any issues, and then sell the old ones to offset the costs. And I'd also point out that most people in tech make more than $100,000. Also I'd point out... the new Apple Silicon is really nice. Battery life is a lot longer. Heat is a lot less. Screens are fantastic. No stupid touch-screen function bar. Great keyboards. MagSafe power... like, honest to god if you haven't got one of the new Apple Silicon laptops you're really doing yourself a disservice. You should get one! (= (Also... my opinion... every other laptop maker should just quit. Just close shop. They can't touch the new Apple machines. That's how much better the Apple Silicon laptops are. Everything else that's being made is just e-waste by comparison. Even the Intel MacBooks from 3-4 years ago are just dogwater in comparison.)
  • eatsyourtacos 3y ago
    It's crazy that you think that actually makes sense in practice. Yeah you can put the numbers out there and it may "seem" correct but in reality that is ridiculous logic.
    • zokier 3y ago
      And that is just one factor in having pre-emptive laptop renewal cycle. In general it makes IT happier to have more homogenous fleet, makes managing things easier, possible to have spare parts at hand etc etc. It also removes the need of negotiations if someone "deserves"/needs new laptop or not, which might otherwise be discussion wasting the workers, IT depts, and possibly managers time.
  • pessimizer 3y ago
    > Way smarter for me to buy a new laptop, which is less likely to have any issues I don't think that's a safe assumption.
  • 3y ago
• pmontra 3y ago
  HP ZBook 15 first gen here, 9.5 yo. I use it to develop with Django, Rails, Phoenix. Docker, psql, Mongo, mysql, whatever js frontend my customers choose. Debian 11. I upgraded it to a double SSD configuration, 32 GB RAM. I replaced worn out keyboards a few times, the battery once a few months ago. It works well and I hope that it keeps going for a while. It still sells second hand for about 600 Euros last time I checked, too much to buy two of them as mines of spare parts.
• novaRom 3y ago
  "Laptops don’t change" - this is most important reason if we're talking about Apple laptops. My 10 years old MacBook Pro is almost absolutely the same as MacBook Air of 2023. Performance, screen, OS, weight, battery, keyboard. And old laptops look even better; look how ugly are new M1/M2 Air cases in comparison with first versions of Airs.
  • lost_tourist 3y ago
    your 10 yo mabook pro is not nearly as fast as a macbook pro M2, not even close. Does your old Pro work as good for your -needs-, that is quite possible depending on what you're doing with it.
• chaostheory 3y ago
  This making sense depends on your career. It makes sense for writers, but not for everyone. Why? Because silicon is cheaper than carbon ie the hourly costs for most machines tends to be far cheaper than my salary. In my case it’s more expensive to buy something cheap and slow, than it is to buy something that allows me to maximize my throughput per hour.
• pessimizer 3y ago
  I'd like to defend the T430 from a T430. Yes, it was a bad purchase when I made it (and when the author made it), but you can buy them for $100 a piece now on Ebay. Keyboards you can probably buy 20 for $50. Since they are from the dawn of Thinkpad's bullshit, they hardcoded the hardware choices you could make for upgrades into the firmware. Awful. But 1vyrain (https://1vyra.in/ https://1vyra.in/) came along and fixed all that. A T430 doesn't even feel underpowered these days, and has a (horrible) webcam (that can be improved a bit by judicious software postprocessing.) With a dining room table, a router running OpenWRT, 4 T430s, and a 5-10 year-old gaming PC as a server to compile things on/serve things from/etc., you could start a little software company and your biggest expense would be the table.
  • simfree 3y ago
    The 35 watt processor in the T430 is just way too easy to get toasty. The T440 or above with a 1080p screen upgrade and trackpad replacement is so much nicer to use since it cooks your legs less, has a nicer screen, is lighter, thinner and still able to take hard falls without issue.
    • pessimizer 3y ago
      > The 35 watt processor in the T430 is just way too easy to get toasty. Definitely true, but I don't use laptops on my lap very often. I also have a fear that > lighter, thinner may mean harder to get into and repair/replace things. ----- edit: let me let these people argue in favor of the T430... https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/r88wag/my_almost_there_ultimate_t430/ https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/r88wag/my_almost_...
    • InvaderFizz 3y ago
      I really enjoyed my T460s from a job back in 2017. My main complaint was the rather anemic 2c/4t CPU. I have a LG Gram 15 that is pretty decent, but very wobbly/flexy. It's saving grace is the lightweight of it. My 16" MBP M1 Max is phenomenal, but very heavy, and I move it 5-10x daily. I plan on replacing it with the ~2025 MBA 15". My wife's 13" M1 MBA is great, but the 13" is not nearly as comfortable for a single display as the 16".
• redroyal 3y ago
  “Laptops don’t change” Really? because a few years ago battery life was maybe 7 hours and now it’s 18. And with faster processors, thunderbolt 4 and USB C charging, wifi 6, better screens and lighter. I keep hearing this argument for not buying a new laptop every year and it just doesn’t hold water. I say buy the latest MacBook, expense it, factor it in as a monthly cost. These are expendable and essential tools. They pay for themselves And these framework laptops are pretty awful. They run hot and are poorly designed. The modular usb addons are a joke and exchangeable GPUs? heavy, power hungry, not for laptops. 3 hour battery life. The main product feature AFAICS is virtue signaling. These products are not open hardware either. Then, there’s this modularity argument. Like this is the last laptop you’ll ever own and forever will be replacing it piece by piece. Disassembling over and over. But that’s not realistic. You’ll have to upgrade to faster processors and the form factor of the mb will change regardless of what they say, and you’re counting on the company being around in a few years which is a poor bet. They can’t compete with Apple or even Lenovo
  • smoldesu 3y ago
    > 3 hour battery life. Maybe if "laptops don't change", sure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuw-YpbFkkM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuw-YpbFkkM
    • redroyal 3y ago
      Using the modular GPU
  • gremlinunderway 3y ago
    If you read the rest of the site, you would see that the argument against not buying a new laptop every year is to find ways to lower the insane amount of electronics waste we're generating any single year. It's not just about lack of features, it's also just ridiculously wasteful even for an industry already known for it. At least my PC, I'm just swapping out parts for upgrades. I'm not dumping my entire PC tower in the garbage every few years. We're so goddamn lucky that PCs haven't become these disposable machines like every other piece of tech out there. Video game consoles, phones and laptops are just the worst for this and while it's cheaper in the short term, the costs are there we just don't see them.
• JEDI-HACKER 3y ago
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• nperez 3y ago
  I feel like 2010-2020 was a stagnant time for hardware, which was most visible in the lack of huge leaps in gaming console quality. AI is changing that. Having tons of RAM and VRAM really does open up options that would simply be impossible before. Running large AI models locally is a bit niche right now but I'm doubtful it will stay that way, so I say it's a good time to value bleeding edge machines
  • zokier 3y ago
    2010-2020 includes the launches of Intels Sandy Bridge (and to lesser degree Haswell) and AMD Zen (and with it Threadripper), many great products from nvidia (980, 1080, RTX, Titan). 2010s were also the decade of Apple Silicon, mostly on mobile though but culminating on M1 launch in 2020. In 2010 SSDs were just becoming a thing, but were still pretty anemic small sata ones with notoriously buggy firmwares, no comparison to modern-day nvme drives. And finally, after decades of stagnation, in 2010s we saw great improvements in displays, both getting hidpi, hdr, and larger gamuts. Sure, it might pale in comparison to the absolute wild ride that were the 90s, but I would not call 2010s stagnant as a whole.
• Tade0 3y ago
  > According to the most recent life cycle analysis, it takes 3,010 to 4,340 megajoules of primary energy to make a laptop 4340 MJ is around 135 litres of gasoline in terms of primary energy, or a little less than 36 US gallons. Commuters blow through this much in 1-2 months, depending on distance. My point is that if you're concerned about embedded energy, there's a lot of other, lower hanging fruit to pick.
  • mahogany 3y ago
    Energy usage isn’t the only thing to be concerned about. There are resources that have to be extracted, and non-recyclable waste piling up in huge quantities. Seems like a fine fruit to pick if you consider broader environmental impact. (Also, we can do multiple things at once. Burning an extra 36 gallons of oil if you don’t have to is still bad.)
    • Tade0 3y ago
      I want to agree, but fossil fuels are generally non-recyclable and extracted on a much larger scale. I mean, global production of cobalt - a highly controversial material - is around 200k tonnes. By weight this is approximately 1.6% that of daily oil production - 90mln barrels a day.
• zimspy 3y ago
  I'm a software developer and an older laptop is not great for productivity. I have an old Dell Latitude from 2017 and I pumped as much life into it as I could. Bought more RAM, an SSD but despite all that, it's a pain to run the IDEs I need to use for work. I keep it as a backup and work on an M2 Max now. Same goes with my S.O. who is a Chemist. Older computers are just not ideal for new software.
  • zokier 3y ago
    Age is not really the only aspect here; almost certainly top tier 2017 Latitude is more powerful machine than bottom tier brand-new Latitude today.
• albertopv 3y ago
  I have a still working 2010 Acer 4810TG upgraded with a SSD and 8GB RAM, I use it to play very old games and a little of Internet browsing, for that it still works.
• zabzonk 3y ago
  my brother is fanatically opposed to buying anything new. when i wrecked my last new laptop, by spilling a gin & tonic into it, he got me a S/H HP Z15 workstation on ebay, and i must admit i have been pretty happy with it. i will think again before buying new.
• bodge5000 3y ago
  I can't say I stick to this 100%, but I actually like using underpowered laptops. Optimisation is an important step in the development process but its often rushed through even by those who consider it most important (myself included). However, if you NEED to optimise your code just to get the thing to work on your computer, a lot more attention is put into it. If I'm optimising for a lower spec machine than my users are likely to have, that gives me plenty of leg room. For the record, I'm mostly talking about personal projects, which are game dev, where performance is more of a factor than something like a web app.
  • viraptor 3y ago
    You can easily underpower your better laptop on demand for a specific task. And also you can do it in more controlled ways: what happens if the process gets less memory, fewer cores, lower cpu speed, worse network, etc. Getting an underpowered laptop to do both development and testing is not the only, or even best way to do this.
    • kelnos 3y ago
      To expand on that, one of the main reasons I upgrade my laptop is to make development tasks better: faster compilation times, and less sluggishness when I need to work in bloated IDEs like IntelliJ. Sure, that may put me a bit out of touch computing-power-wise from many of my users, but, as you point out, there are ways to compensate for that.
    • bodge5000 3y ago
      You can, but you won't. Not regularly anyway, thats not the way you'll run your computer daily. Maybe for a while, but then you'll forget or want the extra power for something and get too used to it. Instead, you'll do it occasionally at specific times. You've just recreated the problems I was talking about with an optimisation step but in a new environment.
      • viraptor 3y ago
        You can be more specific. Don't lower the performance globally, just for the app you're developing. It's easy to automate in your ide configuration / run script / app itself when running in debug mode, etc. It's a one-off setup per project you're developing.
• deleted 3y ago
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• botulidze 3y ago
  I rely on laptops provided by corporations I work at, so here's the breakdown of the remaining electronics: 1) samsung s10 (2014) -> iphone 8 (2018) -> iphone 13 mini (2022) -> no replacement planned since Apple dropped mini lineup. 2) gaming pc: amd fx-8350 (2012) -> i7-6700k (2016) -> 7800x3d (2023) -> hopefully no replacement till 2027 3) tablet: nexus 7 (2012) -> galaxy tab s3 (2018) -> ipad pro 2021 (2022) -> unless battery completely dies earlier than in 4 years like it happened with nexus 7 (making it stationary device). So overall, my update cycle is every 4 years on avg, with PC upgrades having longer cycles thanks to exceptional performance of the chosen platform at the time I.e. I still have i7-6700k working at another location and delivering strong both for productivity and gaming use cases.
• ac130kz 3y ago
  I got tired of laptops being: non-upgradable, poorly designed, overheating, having cheap components, cheap materials, so I'm switching to a backpackable mini-ITX build. For a journalist, even a first gen iPad should do the trick, but for quick compilation and development in general with all those heavy apps and daemons even a relatively fresh laptop CPU just doesn't keep up. The only two downsides are: no battery, space.
  • LoganDark 3y ago
    There are also dedicated backpack PCs that are designed to run in the backpack, usually for virtual reality. I think those are super expensive though... (search "VR backpack") Also they probably take up the whole backpack instead of being "backpackable". And they might be built like laptops (proprietary form factor, mobile/ultrabook CPU, etc.) depending on the model.
    • ac130kz 3y ago
      Nah, they are based on laptop components and cost twice as much.
  • fbhabbed 3y ago
    > the only two downsides are: no battery, space And not being able to use it on the couch, on the toilet, outdoors in your backyard, on a plane, on a train and so on.
    • paulmd 3y ago
      > on the toilet sure you can, there's even a little shelf to hold the keyboard while you poop
    • ac130kz 3y ago
      It's not that big of a problem compared to a performance oriented laptop, which is most probably on the cord 95% of the time anyways.
• SoftTalker 3y ago
  I used a 12" Apple PowerBook G4 for years, long after Apple switched to Intel and came out with Macbook Air and Macbook Pro lines. I loved that laptop. Long after Apple stopped providing updates to the OS or browser I used TenFourFox to run a reasonably up-to-date FireFox on it. I finally gave it up, the battery life had degraded a lot and while that could have been replaced I was growing increasingly nervous about using such an out-of-date OS on an internet-connected laptop. I still miss it.
• YmiYugy 3y ago
  I used to think that as long as all you needed to do was some web browsing that older or underspeced machines were fine. But in the last few years websites have become insanely resource intensive. Even using something as seemingly simple as Gmail is a frustrating experience on older laptops (speaking as someone who just upgraded from a 2017 dual core MacBook Pro). I also have a hard time believing that the same hardware could handle that task much better if it used some lightweight linux distro. The browser engines are the same after all. You could swap Gmail for a lightweight email client, but I find that this approach of choosing software compatible with a capabilities of these low powered machines runs into some limitations sooner or later, e.g. when someone decides to sends you a Microsoft Office file, asks you to collaborate on a Google doc, insists on doing a meeting via Google Meet or Zoom. I may also want some of the other amenities modern laptops have to offer, like bright screens, long lasting batteries, the possibility of using a modern IDE or IDE like editor instead of having to learn VIM.
  • mahogany 3y ago
    Huh, I have a Thinkpad t450s from 2015 which I’m sure has less power than a 2017 MBP, and I use it for email and streaming YouTube just fine. It runs Linux and I use an adblocker, so maybe that’s a difference? Or maybe I don’t mind the decreased performance as much. I don’t do my programming on it, so I can’t speak to that.
  • DeathArrow 3y ago
    >Even using something as seemingly simple as Gmail is a frustrating experience on older laptops I don't think Gmail is simple. It runs a lot of Javascript in background.
  • kryptoncalm 3y ago
    I have the same problem on my 2015 Macbook Pro, I can do all usual work I want, but website are getting slower and slower burdened by heaps of JavaScript, autoplaying video and what not. Sometimes I even have input lag when typing in a search bar(!). The Ikea website is a good example of bloated website. Adblock only helps a bit, and most websites don't work without javascript.
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• hackan 3y ago
  I have a Thinkpad T460p myself, and its battery lasts as long, or longer, than most new laptops I've seen! I was just searching for a new one for a friend, and noted that most new laptops are absolute garbage, total crap. Most have the same specs as mine, almost a decade later, WTF (yeah, "new gens", whatever) It's really sad, we are dropping all quality for mere quantity and consumerism...
• szundi 3y ago
  My version: Intel did not do shit for 10 years. That’s it.
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• mattlondon 3y ago
  I recently did the same - needed a laptop, but balked at the costs for an "occasional use" device. Even a non-shite Chromebook (so decent ram and non-awful CPU) was £500+. I got a used ThinkPad X1 from 2017 for £200 from ebay and it has been superb so far. It is modern enough for me - USB-c charging, Wifi-5, win11, 3ghz quad-core i5 etc. I feel like it is very much luck of the draw for what the condition is like when you buy used, but for the ThinkPad X1 I got it appears to have held up very well. Highly recommended. Will do the same again when I need another.
  • Avshalom 3y ago
    >>Even a non-shite Chromebook I don't have a shit chromebook exactly but I have a shit big-box retail HP laptop that was ~$200 new that I bought on clearance in 2016 (so in the box but not recent), wiped the windows install and put CentOS7 on it. It got me through most of a CS minor and a geology (focus geophysics) major. It still works pretty well for an "occasional use" device, didn't handle Office365 very well but I think that was as much firefox as it was the hardware.
• rollcat 3y ago
  I agree with TFA. Probably the best value for the buck is a 3 year old high-end Thinkpad (T or X series); you can often find one for €250-350, as many businesses will be replacing whatever is at the end of their 3 year cycle. I've been getting a new one roughly every 3-5 years and they definitely stay good enough for another 5. My latest score is a T495 (replacing an 11 (!) year old X230); it has 4 cores (8 threads), 24GB of memory, two NVMe drives, 4-5 hours of battery (~270 cycles), full HD 400 nits screen, and a GPU that actually handles some games. It's definitely less powerful than my M1 Mac mini, but it's good enough to the point that I'm not missing the extra horsepower all that much, even when doing "Actual Work" (it can get tad hot tho). Also, developing software on less powerful hardware has another, indirect benefit: your software tends to suck less, because you have less cycles to waste.
• jcpst 3y ago
  I have not directly bought a computer in 13 years. I’ve been a programmer for 10. My daughter uses the one I was issued at coding bootcamp in 2013. My home recording studio uses a 2010 mac mini. My wife uses an out-of-warranty one from my work, as do I for my home dev machine. My son uses a really old cheap laptop that was laying around. I installed SSDs and maxed out the RAM on all of them. Maybe people are attracted to the latest shiny thing, or give up early on a computer that would go to scrap without a little TLC.
• mgraczyk 3y ago
  I just bought a new Macbook Pro and have been using it for ~1 week. Even compared to my previous 2019 Macbook Pro, it's a huge step up in build quality and speed. If you spend any time waiting for code to compile, web pages to load, or dependencies install, I'd say buy the fastest laptop you can find. I'd guess this new machine has already saved me around 20 minutes of waiting. At that rate it will pay for itself in around 6 months. If you're just using the laptop to write and browse the web, maybe it's ok to try to save some money. Even ignoring economics, I spend like 12 hours a day staring at this thing. It's really important to me psychologically that the screen be high quality so I don't loose my mind.
  • hoherd 3y ago
    The high quality screen is so important. Every time I go looking for cheap laptops, it's the screen that steers me towards higher prices.
  • soulbadguy 3y ago
    +1 on the importance a high-quality screen. I never quite understand why PC manufacturer skimp on what is agruabably the most important interface with the device. And when they do, they of course jump into spec chasing with resolution and frame rate taking the focus instead of contrast, color reproduction and PWM (for people sensitive to it ). What's the delta in BOM cost for a high quality display ? Maybe someone with industry knowledge can comment.
    • giantrobot 3y ago
      > What's the delta in BOM cost for a high quality display ? Maybe someone with industry knowledge can comment. Higher quality screens are more expensive than shitty ones. It's not just the cost of the panel itself but more pixels take more power. That means more expensive driver circuitry and likely a larger battery to be able to offer a marketable battery life. That higher power may not work in your current design's thermal envelope. A different panel may also need a redesign of the display shell, bezel, and even hinge(s). Each component might not have a significant increase in cost on the BOM but all of them together add up as does any redesigns to support the extra power usage.
• eimrine 3y ago
  I use a Core2Duo laptop on a regular basis and all my tasks are met except of poor battery life. More cores does not give me such a boost as migration from a single-core Pentium 4. I still use Windows 7 on half of my machines as the best OS in my life ever but I am migrating on GNU/Systemd/Linux on all new laptops because Windows 7 is as much vendor's presence as I tolerate.
• a-dub 3y ago
  it would be pretty cool if someone released a 10 or 15 year chromebook.
• me551ah 3y ago
  Rather than buying an old laptop which was high end at its time, it’s better to buy a cheap laptop which is new. The processor will be more efficient and powerful, it’s going to have multiple newer ports and you don’t need to run an obscure version of Linux which won’t run tools that people in your industry use. Running Linux as your daily driver is hard as it is, running an obscure version of Linux on an old laptop as your primary machine will drive you crazy. You would end up losing productivity fixing all the bugs and random issues.
• bitwize 3y ago
  I knew a guy who would buy a laptop, use it for like 3 months, then flip it on eBay and buy another. He said this is how you get good value for money -- flip it before it loses much of its resale value and buy new with the proceeds. I'm not sure why people would do this. I use computer equipment to the point of exhaustion. I still have laptops from the 90s that work fine; while they will never be a main they are fun to play with. My main laptop currently is a ThinkPad from 2014 -- it does just about all that I need it to do without a hitch or stutter. My main PC is a Ryzen desktop I bought in 2018. It's probably due for some upgrades, but I cannot afford them currently.
  • dangus 3y ago
    These days you’d have to keep extensive tax records to do that scheme because eBay is going to report earnings over $600 to the IRS. And you’ll get eaten alive by eBay fees.
    • DeathArrow 3y ago
      You can use Facebook marketplace, Craigslist or another site.
• gregw2 3y ago
  The original article makes a good point but neither it nor the comments here mention my main concern with used computers-- They don't have the same clean/new-system "security" properties as a new computer. Who knows what malware/security rootkit was installed on some consumer machine that persisted in some corner of it and didn't get detected/wiped? It's kinda a crapshoot in my view.
• aj7 3y ago
  The same reasoning applies to cars even more.
• Crywastaken 3y ago
  Apple is a business first and formost. Software closing to replace the same part with different id is trash. more money to them looking back what mac have is it closer to Linux than win (I know subsystem Linux exist) - Linux is but Programs is key for market You can't import ios apps to win It's monolith Unix system and then modules for desktop etc (hmm it wouldn't work how I imagine) / Animation is a problem Graphics 4k Before you click then need to be spectrum of color time to react to do a function it's weird you didn't speed this too much features bare bones isn't great either Hmm
• user_7832 3y ago
  Somewhat meta, but having seen the breath-takingly shitty hinges on many HP laptops including mine, followed by all the inevitable hardware issues with nearly every laptop at home (choose between buggy/unreliable/disabled x touchpad/left speaker/audio jack/webcam/Bluetooth/WiFi/screen/hinge/chassis shell/keys) made me realise that the only “true” solution is to spin your own laptop or similar. Frameworks may be good starting points for most, I prefer smaller devices and hope to build a cyberdeck with a 4”*4” SBC as soon as I have the necessary resources. I am done with troubleshooting glitchy hardware/software. (Modern) HP can go burn in an eternal hell. (Oh, and Lenovo and Asus are at the gates as well.)
  • soulbadguy 3y ago
    +1 At the high-end windows laptop are usually a coin flip. If you want any guaranty you need to basically sign on for a PhD level of research and review watching to make sure you don't get a turd. At the low-end/middle end... God damn it's rough... The average quality from poor screen to poor keyboard, bad termal you name it ... just plain sucks.
• deleted 3y ago
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• mumblemumble 3y ago
  I'm more or less in that boat. I did by my laptop, a 2013 MacBook Pro, new, but 10 years later it's still fine for my purposes. For productivity purposes, the only real concessions to its age are that I did have to get the battery replaced about a year ago, and I do some light adblocking (no autoplaying videos or heavy scripting or anything like that, but I still let static ads through) to keep webpages usable. For light gaming I recently bought a refurbished 2019 desktop for $250. I mostly only play older games (because I'm cheap), so that was more about Apple dropping support for 32-bit apps than it is about the MacBook not being powerful enough, though I am admittedly happy about having a computer that can play KSP without everything turned down to the lowest quality level. Overall, happy there, too - it's hard for me to imagine that a new computer would provide enough utility to justify the added cost. The latest generation of this computer retails for four times as much money as I paid for the used one, but the specs are very, very similar.
• DeathArrow 3y ago
  On my development machine I run at the same time: at least two instances of Visual Studio each containing a big microservice based app, an instance of Visual Studio Code containing a large front-end, Docker Desktop, Postgres, Redis, MongoDB, management apps for databases, at least three Windows Terminal tabs, dozens of tabs in browser, dozens of tabs in Notepad++, Teams, Outlook and some other random stuff. I need beefy laptops and I usually change them after two years.
• SimonPStevens 3y ago
  I last bought a laptop (in fact any PC at all) in 2015. It was pretty beefy for the time. A desktop 4790K CPU, 32gb RAM and a GTX 980M. It was a long time ago, but I think I paid around £1500 for it. Shout out to https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/ https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/ for a great long lasting machine that is very open for maintenance, long before Framework was around. I will absolutely buy from them again next time. Removable battery, replaceable hard drive, ram, cpu, graphics card. Easily open-able case (screws, but I've had it open). They sold me a replacement keyboard for something like £30 when I smashed a few keys by dropping my camera on it. My inner tech geek is keen to buy something new, but this one is still going strong, and I can't justify spending money when this one works so well. It still plays all the latest games. It's only had two problems over the years. 1) Obviously, the original battery doesn't last very long now. 2) The CPU started overheating after about 5 years when pushed, so I popped the cover open, took the heatsink off and reapplied fresh thermal paste. Has worked perfectly since. I mean honestly, the single threaded CPU performance only seems to be about 50% behind modern chips. I don't really see many machines even today with 32gb ram. Things it struggles with these days that I suppose would require a new machine if it bothered you: - 4k gaming. - VR games are a bit too choppy unless you turn the settings right down. (HL:Alyx is playable at pretty much lowest settings) - Probably going to struggle with any generative AI stuff given the older GPU, but I've not tried it. I code on it, but I don't do high intensive stuff like video editing, 3d work, rendering, etc, so perhaps it would struggle with that kind of stuff.
• activiation 3y ago
  I always buy my phones used, from swappa.com... saved hundreds of $ for phones that are in mint condition
• kunalgupta 3y ago
  I never buy new computers more than once every 5 years because it takes like 3 days to get local versions of openssl and node or whatever to run correctly enough to run an app and it's the hours of my life I most abhor. It's just lost time on earth. That being said it obviously pays off in productivity at least every 5 years. Maybe 3 is net positive? At this point i think we are climate doomed without acceleration so productivity is environmentalism
• kelsolaar 3y ago
  > This is facilitated by the fact that laptops are now a mature technology and have more than sufficient computational power. Depends what you do with them, if you program, edit movies, do 3D rendering or play games, there will never be enough power.
  • lost_tourist 3y ago
    depends on what you're programming tho. For web work just about any old laptop will work. AI, number crunching, 3d? yeah you need the best you can afford.
• DeathArrow 3y ago
  I can use old laptops because I can't run what I need, but at least I won't buying new cars as old cars seem to have a better bang for the buck. I like my actual car because is quite reliable and if something breaks, it's easy to fix. Also, being Diesel it's also cheap to run. My next car will also be an old Diesel. Probably I should buy more cars at some point because they'll forbid new cars with internal combustion engines and it's good to have backups.
  • dangus 3y ago
    Ugh, diesels need to go, they’re an air quality nightmare. I agree with you that new cars are a bad value, they’re a rapidly depreciating asset, but that has little to do with the drivetrain. The truth is that if you give any shit about the environment or people breathing the air around you, EVs or at least a gasoline hybrid are the verified lesser evil. They’re just so much more efficient on energy consumption during operation that it easily negates their production impact. But the best thing to do is reduce car trips and car dependency entirely, because cars themselves are not sustainable and waste all our hard-earned money on inefficient infrastructure.
• downrightmike 3y ago
  One really good reason to buy new gear: Discovery of new UEFI rootkit exposes an ugly truth: The attacks are invisible to us Turns out they're not all that rare. We just don't know how to find them. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/07/researchers-unpack-unkillable-uefi-rootkit-that-survives-os-reinstalls/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/07/resea...
• EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
  Well, I'm retired, so I don't do much emails or zoom anymore. I do serious stuff now, like Cyberpunk, MFS and Hogwarts. So I need serious hardware, updated often. And I'm constantly on the move too, so serious hardware needs to fit into my backpack. Sorry, snowflake millennial applebooks not up for the task.
  • dangus 3y ago
    Believe it or not, Apple laptops are now quite capable of gaming, and Apple’s recent release of a game development porting toolkit shows that they’re getting serious about the space: https://youtu.be/bIPl71ZeOYk https://youtu.be/bIPl71ZeOYk 40fps in Cyberpunk 2077 on a Mac laptop including a translation layer.
    • EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
      1080p, no ray tracing ... long way to go.
      • dangus 3y ago
        Sure, but you’re really missing the point I’m making here. It’s good enough to play any modern game you throw at it, even poorly optimized and demanding ones like Cyberpunk. So all it needs is better software compatibility and you have a lot of Mac users who are no longer motivated to buy a second system. Apple sells 1/4 of all laptops in the US to the most affluent segment of the market.
• teekert 3y ago
  Nice read. I do the same, but with 3-6 year old laptops. I recently bought an HP ProBook 440 for 450€, you can still buy it new for 1050. The “used” one was brand new, there are people that buy such stock from companies and when they say “No signs of usage” they mean it, I so far got 2 spotless machines.
• simonblack 3y ago
  I really like the idea of using an SD card for the home directory, because that's the thing that changes constantly, and it's a pain trying to synchronise the home directory over several machines. With one instance, that's backed up regularly, it makes life fairly simple. Now I just have to work out the mechanics of implementing it smoothly. I have an archive disk/directory that holds all the 'write once, keep forever' stuff like photos, music, ebooks, etc. That can be rsync'd periodically and that won't take much time because the archive grows fairly slowly over time, and rsync will only need to transfer those relatively few additions. I'm also somebody who prefers the feel of my old Lenovo ThinkPad T410 from back in 2010 to my much later P53. Perhaps I should resurrect it with the upgrading of its 2TB hard drive to a 2 or 4 TB SSD. I must look into that.
  • jacknews 3y ago
    A portable home dir works if you have the same os and software on all the laptops. When I bought a macbook the first time (ostensibly to develop for iphone), I hated the UI, so ran linux in a virtualbox as my main os. I think that would work really well from an external drive - but an sdcard is way too slow, it should be on a usb c nvme.
    • simonblack 3y ago
      but an sdcard is way too slow, it should be on a usb c nvme. Hmm, yes, that would probably be better and faster. And not only that, it could be possible to include a grub boot partition as well. I wonder if that would easily be doable, or would be just another can of worms.
      • jacknews 3y ago
        I have tried this, and also using e-sata, though not as a daily driver, and it does work, but as you say it can be a bit wormy to setup; bios vs gpt partition table, efi vs legacy bios support, disk numbers can change depending what other disks are on the machine, etc. One other problem is that boot-from-usb is usually not enabled by default so you have to fiddle with bios boot order every time.
• jacknews 3y ago
  "I calculated that my keyboard had 90 keys and that replacing them all just once would cost me 1,350 euros." This is a problem in the godawful 2016- macbooks, but with thinkpads, you can replace the entire keyboard, and do it yourself, for $30.
• HydianSnake1 3y ago
  >Between 2000 and 2017, I consumed three laptops This is the story I really want to hear wtf
• dang 3y ago
  Related: How and why I stopped buying new laptops - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32674830 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32674830 - Sept 2022 (111 comments) How and why I stopped buying new laptops - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26188282 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26188282 - Feb 2021 (100 comments) How and why I stopped buying new laptops - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25486191 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25486191 - Dec 2020 (279 comments)
• nathants 3y ago
  ram, disk, and cpu cache all continue to improve. if you live on your computer and can afford to it is absolutely worth to continuously upgrade. donate your old machines to charity! many people can’t afford computers.
• eBombzor 3y ago
  > Laptops don’t change > New laptops may be more energy-efficient per computational power, but these gains are offset by more computational power Guess this was written before the M1 :) I also felt the Zen 2 Laptop chips marked a huge step forward on the Win/Linux side at that time: generationally more power efficient than the best laptop chips from Intel, same core/thread count as the desktop equivalents, and cheap enough to be in a lot of budget laptops.
  • zakki 3y ago
    OP claims still holds I guess. There are secondhand M1 in the market.
  • Dalewyn 3y ago
    I'll also point out that quoted argument doesn't even make any sense. The vast majority of people are not going to run their computers at full tilt all day every day all year long. Most of the time is spent in idle cycles or very low usage, so efficiency gains matter a lot. If you are the few people who run their computers full tilt, it still doesn't make sense because you will finish your task sooner meaning you will spend less energy and time overall completing the same task as before.
  • turdprincess 3y ago
    Anecdotal, but my M1 MacBook Pro doesn’t have amazing battery life. The other day I went to a coffee shop with 60% charge and only made it about 2.5 hours doing iOS development.
    • sb8244 3y ago
      Same here. My MacBook air easily could go 6+ hours and it feels like the pro goes 2-3. Same workload.
      • Reason077 3y ago
        I have an M1 MacBook Air and use an app called CoconutBattery to monitor power usage. What I’ve noticed is that while the laptop is usually super efficient (say, 2.5-4W while web browsing giving 8+ hours battery life), occasionally the power draw climbs up to 6, 7, 8W or more with no obvious explanation, draining the battery in 3 or 4 hours. Activity Monitor will show no apps using unusual energy yet the power is going somewhere? I’m suspicious that there’s something with maybe the WiFi hardware or the SSD which sometimes causes elevated power use, unseen by Activity Monitor? Even a reboot won’t solve the phantom power drain while it’s happening, but it does seem to go away on its own eventually…
• edfletcher_t137 3y ago
  There is one, galaxy-sized, deal-breaking issue with any used laptop: you can never clean them thoroughly enough. I'll leave it at that.
• 1xb3l 3y ago
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• patchtopic 3y ago
  I work for a non profit org. We sometimes purchase reconditioned laptops as they are good value for some use cases. We have a lot of WfH users so need to courier laptops to some staff. We recently had an insurance claim denied for a damaged reconditioned laptop as TNT/Fedex used a "no second hand goods" clause in their insurance to wriggle out paying up. This has not stopped me purchasing reconditioned laptops, but something to be aware of and taken into account. In fact just buying another reconditioned laptop was not a large expense and damaged laptops in transit are relatively rare.
  • poisonborz 3y ago
    Good to know, but in practice this just means more and cheaper second hand devices to be available to the public.
  • kelnos 3y ago
    You sorta hint at this in your post, but I assume that eating the cost of the rare damaged-in-transit laptop is still cheaper than paying full price for all-new hardware. And while I certainly understand that environmental impact might not be the chief concern for a company (even a non-profit), continuing to give secondhand hardware a new life is certainly way better for the environment. Regardless, it seems bonkers to me that a courier can get away with such a clause. You're paying them to ship something safely from point A to point B; it should be completely irrelevant what that thing is when it comes to paying you out for their mistakes.
    • crazygringo 3y ago
      If you look at it from the courier's side it makes more sense though. It's obvious if an item was new and you can safely assume it was the delivery company that damaged it. Whereas for secondhand items there's no way of knowing the original shipping condition. And it would open up massive amounts of fraud where people would buy a cheap broken item on eBay (sold for parts), ship it to a nearby friend with full insurance, and then claim the shipper broke it. Insurance should still cover the case of an item lost in shipping however, regardless of new/secondhand, since there's no opportunity for fraud there.
• causality0 3y ago
  My laptop runs on Linux Lite, one of several open-source operating systems specially designed to work on old computers. That use to be a better tip than it is now. These days the thing that bogs the old computer down isn't a heavy OS, but all the heavy sites you visit with that OS. There's only so much you can do to get your old Bay Trail to play 4K Youtube.
• LeFantome 3y ago
  For a lot if what I do, the CPU on an older laptop is just fine. So, I too use really old laptops. That said, I am upgrading laptops that sold with 2 - 4 GB of RAM to 16 GB, or at least 8 GB. Often I am replacing on old HDD ( maybe as slow as 5400 RPM ) with a faster SSD. That SSD also juices the battery life. So, what I am using is a lot nicer than what the original owner had to deal with. Many laptops today will not age as well as, in ten years, that soldered on 8 GB is really going to be a bummer. I use Linux a fair bit which makes a difference. Linux is fantastic on older hardware and the software itself is totally up to date. I use old Mac laptops a fair bit. The version of MacOS they support would be unusable as would the applications that would still run on it. The same is becoming true of Windows.
  • Dalewyn 3y ago
    >Linux is fantastic on older hardware I've been having a hard time getting Linux to work on older hardware ever since the majority of distros dropped 32-bit builds. Then again, "older" for me means stuff from the Pentium through the Pentium 4 era. Seeing as "older" today means Sandy Bridge and the like, the moral of this little tale is I am a fucking old man angry at the kids on my lawn.
    • ant6n 3y ago
      But there must be some with 32bit support?
      • kwhitefoot 3y ago
        Debian still supports 32 bit for the latest version and there are several small distros that are explicitly aimed at 32 bit.
        • ant6n 3y ago
          Seems like Debian is all one would ever need.
      • tmtvl 3y ago
• vanloi999 3y ago
  yet another example of Lindy effect. I've been using Thinkpad T40s since 2019.
• oneTbrain23 3y ago
  You can get i5 T430-T480 or X220 to X280 for around 200usd (exclude tax and shipping) depending on spec configuration. For journalism, you don't need fancy laptop more expensive than 200usd.
• RomanPushkin 3y ago
  I bought Lenovo 11e chromebook for $24 with free delivery on ebay. Disassembled the unit and unscrewed write protection screw, installed new BIOS and GalliumOS. Works pretty OK'ish. I use it to watch videos: youtube and video services I need (movies online) work well. Battery is pretty good as well. There is no magic though. You get what you pay for - I can't do modern JavaScript development on it.
• decide1000 3y ago
  I have an older laptop which runs Debian 12 with xfce rather slow. Browsing the web with Firefox goes fairly slow. Clicking a button can take a second before something happens. I changed the OS for GhostBSD (=FreeBSD) and now have a major improvement in speed. Buttons and links in Firefox feel snappy again. I was not aware that FreeBSD would be this much resource-friendly.
• RuggedPineapple 3y ago
  I've actually gone even farther. The last 4 laptops I've bought have all been 50 dollar used Chromebooks. Pull out the write-protect screw, flash new firmware and install linux. If it's got enough eMMC space Windows 10 LTSC runs too (depending on model) but I find xubuntu or Fedora XFCE plays nicer with 16 gigs of space. I have a beefier desktop for serious things, but in terms of everyday machines they work fantastically.
  • theodric 3y ago
    Interesting. Any models you'd care to recommend? I'm looking for a cheap, functional Linux laptop to replace my ThinkPad, and this option sounds promising.
    • RuggedPineapple 3y ago
      For the aftermarket firmware that allows non-ChromeOS OSs, theres a compatibility list at https://mrchromebox.tech/#devices https://mrchromebox.tech/#devices that will show you if full UEFI firmware is available, and the write-protect method you need to disable. I usually browse around Mercari looking for a system with specs that are acceptable, then check the list to see if its supported. I haven't paid more then around 50 bucks for any of them.
• ksec 3y ago
  I am still on my MacBook Pro 2015 because of the Keyboard and Trackpad. So in about 2 years time this will be 10 years of usage. I dont intend to replace it any time soon. For browsing it is fast enough. And if you look at the Louis Rossman Channels it seems newer MBP just aren't built the same. It may be worth looking at it again I 2025. How little ( or big ) the past 10 years of Laptop has changed.
• flagged24 3y ago
  I decided to buy a Mini-STX (AsRock X300 64GB RAM/Ryzen 5700G) and wait for a good laptop to become a available. It's still portable, much better performance/price ratio and you can buy a good (portable) high brightness matte display of your own choice. It may not be portable as in battery portable, but it's small enough to go in suitcase.
• windex 3y ago
  I am hoarding older thinkpads at this point. The soldered RAM ones I am not touching. The older ones are cheap to upgrade and pretty snappy. I havent bought a new laptop since 2009.
• pjmlp 3y ago
  Same here, among my personal computers, the most recent one is 5 years old. Even for 3D programming, if the Web is the main target, the 3D standards are made for 2009 hardware (WebGL 2.0), or 2015 (WebGPU), so having the latest GPU model doesn't make any difference. As much as I like to program graphic related stuff, I am not a one person AAA studio, nor going to create the next AI startup, so the NVidia MX150 is mostly on vacations. Dealing with Docker and friends, is something I leave for work, so again, nothing that really impacts my private computing needs.
• code51 3y ago
  I would still be able to use 2013 Macbook Pro if I could have someone around who understand that GPU related issue would be solved by "holding u8900 chip down with rubber material" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lumJ0cN5oyY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lumJ0cN5oyY https://www.reddit.com/r/macbookpro/comments/ek0pmi/comment/fd5x9ng/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/macbookpro/comments/ek0pmi/comment/... However, Apple declares your device "vintage" and repair shops avoid it like the plague. Because they only know who to replace the entire board. That's when you device to buy another laptop.
• t0bia_s 3y ago
  I still use 13y old ThinkPad x201 with Fedora. Of course with SSD and upgraded RAM to 8GB. I cannot imagine more kid-proof laptop. It's indestructible construction, yet compact and not heavy. Perfect for home with kids. No wonders that it is commonly used in space stations!
• rldjbpin 3y ago
  i think this widely varies between people and what they need their laptop for. personally my previous laptop (7+ years old; the replacement is over 3) was ample for basic tasks even today, but it did not meet my personal needs (gaming, deep learning on cuda). but there is something liberating in getting a very cheap but well-built old laptop if you can get away with using it like a thin client. personally, going forward it makes sense to instead invest in a repairable laptop like framework. while the old thinkpads can only be repaired around the core hardware, this way you should be able to get much more mileage.
• slim 3y ago
  I have an old toshiba laptop from 2008. I use it every day to learn m. my kids use it as an emulator of old games. it still has up to date software thanks to guix
• Vaslo 3y ago
  For what it’s worth - I bought one of the “controversial” Alienware laptops in 2015. It won’t play the latest games but it still runs beautifully to everything I need including coding and Excel work. While a few of these brands are a bit pricey, I’ve bought family members other brands like Dell and Acer laptops, and they’ve got a few good years out at most before they become clunky and close, even with a fresh operating system reinstall.
• thewileyone 3y ago
  I'm the family IT guru so I always give this advice when buying a new laptop or desktop: Set a budget on how much you're willing to spend and don't try to save from that amount. Buy the best you can for the amount you can afford and you won't feel bad about it. If you could only afford something really cheap and it dies in 2-3 years, you won't feel too bad about it and if you can afford something else, rinse and repeat. If not, try to get it fixed.
• fennecfoxy 3y ago
  I should be illegal to sell laptops where the dissipative power of the cooling system is less than the thermal power of the CPU/etc. Also should be illegal to lock me out of fan control, like Dell does. As always, never buy Dell, people. Teach 'em a lesson for advertising "space age cooling" that slowly cooks the laptop because their default fan profile was apparently designed by a pretty face in a Versace suit.