10 ms·

My daily driver is older than I thought; it's positively vintage

58 points by jgrahamc 3y ago

eddyzh 3y ago
Having a Mac work well for 7 years is definitely what you can expect. Especially if you take care of the battery and/or replace it some time.
rsync 3y ago
Most rsync.net (business) administration takes place on a 2009 octo-mac-pro. A classic tower workstation, beautifully engineered.
- ace2358 3y ago
  I’m sadly selling my 2010 Mac Pro (12 core 128gb ram) because I have no use for it anymore. Beautiful machine
- jseliger 3y ago
  Check the cost of power, cause the power draw may be costing a lot relative to the speed. https://support.apple.com/en-us/102839 https://support.apple.com/en-us/102839 indicates 115w idle or 146w idle, and 263 watt max or 309 watt max. And that is for a machine that is likely slower / less performant than a modern one with much lower draw. Your power bills may thank you.
sohead7291 3y ago
I'm confused, the screenshot is of a 2017 Mac Book. Did I miss something or is the author of the impression, that using a couple of years old laptop is somehow vintage? I expected something from the 2000s being old, something from the 1980s being vintage
- keyle 3y ago
  If you read the article, "Apple considers it vintage".
- jtvjan 3y ago
  It's Apple's words, not the author's: > Products are considered vintage when Apple stopped distributing them for sale more than 5 and less than 7 years ago. ~ https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201624 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201624 Products older than that are considered "obsolete".
- jtwaleson 3y ago
  You’ll enjoy the previous post from his blog about a real vintage masterpiece: https://blog.jgc.org/2023/12/restoration-of-ibm-thinkpad-701c.html https://blog.jgc.org/2023/12/restoration-of-ibm-thinkpad-701...
FullyFunctional 3y ago
I have working hardware from every decade, oldest is from 1982, but my daily driver and what I'm typing on now is a 2019 iMac 5K and Apple still doesn't have anything all-in-one to replace it. My keyboard is from 2002 (the USB version of the Kinesis I bought in ~ 1993). My oldest computer still in 24/7 use is my 2014 FreeNAS, but it's using a monitor that's so old I don't even know. Old hardware is great, but I do appreciate just how much better LCD panels have gotten over time.
- ihateolives 3y ago
  Yep, LCD quality is why I now have relegated my old ThinkPads to be either servers or backup computers. They still work perfectly but once you work with gorgeus color corrected hires display it's hard to go back. You just can't unsee it. Some people don't care but I do.
switch007 3y ago
I almost pulled the trigger on a new MacBook Pro but then I read they made such trade offs with the display that the response time is really, really slow and has ghosting even when scrolling around. I can’t spend £3,000 on a device that does that, no matter how great the rest of the machine is, as I don’t do graphics work. Guess I’m not their target customer. So, my “obsolete” MacBook Pro 2015 continues to be my web surfing machine and my AMD desktop for real work. Thanks Apple!
anonymoushn 3y ago
I don't think the edge teams at cloudflare could run their docker-compose tests very well on a machine like this when it was new. Maybe Docker on mac has gotten a lot leaner in the meantime or maybe jgc doesn't have to do this sort of thing.
- jgrahamc 3y ago
  You really don't want me doing that sort of thing. There are far more capable people keeping our network running, and far more people writing the software.
anArbitraryOne 3y ago
Wow an Apple product being vintage after 7 years
- jacknews 3y ago
  In Apple-land it's basically 'vintage' when the latest macos won't run on it, so 7 years is an antique.
  - timbit42 3y ago
    What's a 1977 Apple II considered to be?
    - anArbitraryOne 3y ago
      Electronic waste or a museum piece
petesergeant 3y ago
I saw someone using an 11 inch MBA recently, and was seriously nostalgic. I really missed that tiny form factor. My M2 MBA is exceptionally capable, and hardly large, but lacks the incredibly small form factor I liked so much
wernsey 3y ago
My daily driver has been in for repairs, so for the past couple of weeks I've been using my Raspberry Pi 4-based "Hack-in-the-box" cyberdeck that I built in 2020. The more I use it, the more I love it: Everything I need is readily available through the package manager. There are no interruptions and no nag screens. There is an unobtrusive icon at the top telling me that an update is available, but I get to install it on my schedule. I've resisted the urge to sign into Google for Gmail and YouTube and my other social media accounts and I'm actually amazed at how little I miss it (though I still use those services from my phone, but I've been using them less) Also, it being a home-built computer it comes with a couple of quirks: Its fan is extremely noisy, when you scroll the mouse wheel you hear a crackling noise on the speakers and the keyboard is very uncomfortable, but all of these gives it a "personality" that only endears it to me.
nuker 3y ago
Offtopic, but I built a 486 PC, to remind me my first computer. 16MB FPM SIMMs, AMD Am5x86 133MHz CPU, Matrox Millenium + 3dfx Voodoo II. Win95. And a fkn external modem. But there is no dial-up ISP left in AU :)
- wkjagt 3y ago
  Same here! But lower spec (486 DX2 66) and running Windows 3.1. But it might be able to do Windows 95.
  - nuker 3y ago
    Specs plz :) Do you have PCI slots? Is PS2 mouse port present? I had to find serial mouse, A4Tech one, with the ball :) No USB lol
    - wkjagt 3y ago
      No PCI, but I do have VLB. Graphics card and IO card are in VLB slots. I have 20MB RAM. For storage I’ve gone through several old hard drives but they all ended up failing. So I went with a CF card to IDE adapter. Mouse is serial, because I don’t have PS/2. I use a nice mechanical keyboard with a USB to PS/2 and then PS/2 to 5 pin DIN keyboard connector adapter. I also have a gotek floppy emulator on it. I mostly use this computer to play around with Borland C++.
      - nuker 3y ago
        > So I went with a CF card to IDE adapter. No no no. The sound is irreplaceable. I ended up with FUJITSU MPB3043AT. Tried Quantum Fireball 2GB but it was too noisy.
        wkjagt 3y ago
        Yeah I do miss the sound :-( it feels fake without it. But I ran out of hard drives… EDIT: I do have an 80MB MFM drive but that would be weird.
kappuchino 3y ago
Wait, nobody mentioned the Open Core Legacy Patcher (yet)? Have a look: https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/MODELS.html https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/MODELS.ht... I myself still run a decade old macbook air - with most hardware parts replaced for a second or third time, except the mainboard: On the Ventura with all security fixes instead of Big Sur. Its awesome. Luckly I went for 8gb and i7 back then. And swapped the NVME with an adapter + vanilla drive, so no pricey upgrades. The computer has 4tb diskspace now ...
kerrsclyde 3y ago
I've got an early 2009 iMac and it is glorious. I've got a range of software which I know exactly how to use. I can focus on creativity and productivity, not learning how to use a new tool before I can produce anything of value.
nyanpasu64 3y ago
My (project machine) Dell Inspiron 15R SE 7520 laptop has started hanging while powered off or sleeping, with the power LED still blinking but the machine not responding to any external inputs (opening the lid, pressing the power button, holding it down). I assume the EC microcontroller is hanging, but I don't know why that is. I took the laptop apart, took the coin cell battery out and put it back in, and the problem stopped for a month or so but has returned. What's causing the issue? Perhaps the coin cell battery is drained (and I didn't know the right way to test CR2032s at the time, so I thought it was good)? Or is the EC fried or corrupted, perhaps because I did a botched BIOS reflash which corrupted the EC, and had to reprogram the EC in flashrom over multiple passes while skipping "hung" flash blocks (the pin to hold the EC in reset didn't make flash properly writable)? Afterwards the laptop would boot, but dumping the EC flash again revealed the image was changed again. Or did the EC die due to flash corruption that occurred afterwards (either from flaky chips or because I damaged it earlier)?
- nyanpasu64 3y ago
  i found why the laptop was crashing it wasn't an obscure hardware issue related to corrupted firmware, but just the laptop (Windows 7) dies when it tries to go from sleep to hibernate after 6 hours
  - nyanpasu64 3y ago
    unfortunately the laptop still sometimes (not always) dies after shutting down, and cannot be powered back on. maybe dies during sleep too? i don't know.
wkjagt 3y ago
I just bought a used Thinkpad T470, and with arch linux (btw), hyprland, and neovim, I’m starting to like this machine more than my M1 macbook. The one thing I always thought my M1 couldn’t be beat at by an IBM compatible laptop is battery life, but the T470 actually has very good battery life. I’m not using the T470 for anything CPU intensive, but it’s the same with my MacBook. Just hobby projects, mostly writing code. I’m starting to wonder why I paid > 1k for a MacBook when a $200 used thinkpad is totally fine.
- jerednel 3y ago
  Same. I just bought a t480 off eBay a week ago while I already have a m2 pro MBP with 32gb RAM. I don’t know what compelled me but it’s just so cozy. By all measures the Mac is superior. Thinkpads are like the vinyl records of laptops.
  - wkjagt 3y ago
    I like that. I feel similar. I picked it up locally, and while I was driving over, I thought to myself: why am I even doing this, I have a perfect MacBook. But I'm happy I did it. It feels better in a way. Somehow like vinyl maybe, but not as fragile ;-) And my excuse is: can't run Arch on an M1 MacBook.
phil21 3y ago
A 2017 MPB is still my daily driver. The only thing having me switch to a M3 at the moment is I'm finally done with that horrible keyboard. Battery life is getting a bit annoying, but otherwise it's chugged away ever since I got the thing on release day. That said, the M series laptops are such a huge step forward it's a little mind blowing!
- tommychillfiger 3y ago
  Mine is a 2012 MBP. I am only just now seeing real performance issues; until about mid last year it worked as well as the day I bought it aside from some battery degradation (I put an SSD in it around 2018). Pretty excited to upgrade and hope I can get at least 5-6 years out of a new MBP. This was my first MacBook, and 12 years of use is pretty insane value.
  - justusthane 3y ago
    Mine's a 2014 MBP, and even the battery is still mostly okay. My biggest annoyance at this point is because it no longer gets updates, it's not on par with my new iPhone and I've lost functionality like copy/paste between computer and phone.
NoGravitas 3y ago
My daily driver is a 2013 ThinkPad. It's not usable for gaming, but other than that, I just never notice any performance problems (except Android Studio, but Android Studio seems to be Uniquely Bad (TM)).
baerrie 3y ago
I still use a 2009 macbook pro for music recording. It even served me during my bootcamp a few years ago but because the os wasn’t able to update, I learned a lot about supporting old versions of stuff :)
acuozzo 3y ago
The server and workstation I use at home are from 2013-2014. C602 chipset: the X79 of the server room. They draw more power than I'd like, but they perform very well on the workloads I throw at them. I'd save a good amount of money by purchasing newer energy-efficient hardware, but even when presented with the numbers I can't rationalize away the sticker-shock.
krmboya 3y ago
What an incredibly wasteful world we live in. A 16g ram core i7 laptop from 2017 is considered vintage? When it comes to cars, vintage is like a century ago. How has software qualitatively improved since 2017? Even since 2010? We are still slinging the same sht around together with an ever increasing amount of 'node modules' on our disks. The cause of climate change is not the use of fossil fuel, but the extreme extraction and processing of raw material for releasing the next new thing that will increase quarterly revenue targets leaving in its wake extreme waste that no one knows what to do with except force third world countries absorb it.
- AHTERIX5000 3y ago
  Indeed. My old Intel Atom netbook just doesn't handle modern web at all. Even sites with just text such as Medium are unusable. I guess all this at least makes modern web developer experience great since as an user I don't get any benefits?
segmondy 3y ago
my daily driver is an i5 PC that I bought in 2012. Haven't even thought much about it. It had 12gb, I recently upgraded it to 24gb. No plans to really upgrade, it runs linux and get's the job done. My macbook is a 2012 too. computers have gotten great enough that we can probably run these for the next 10 yrs. The only reason I'm thinking of upgrading desktop is for GPU and likewise the macbook. Outside of GPU, I'll be fine. I'm still running the numbers to decide if I might just stick to cloud workload and if I do, these will chug on along for some more years.
ttyprintk 3y ago
I would plan on this not getting patched for Downfall. Anyone know the status on that?
raverbashing 3y ago
"A lot older than I thought", my daily driver until recently was a 2011 MBP and it kinda worked for most tasks, while of course, it needed to be plugged. But it worked fine
simonblack 3y ago
I tend to keep laptops a lot longer than most. My second-last laptop was a Lenovo T410 from 2010. Still works well, and I really like its keyboard. My current laptop is a Lenovo P53 from 2020. I still think of it as being 'new' but it's coming up for about four years old.
apantel 3y ago
Computers can last a long long time. I built a pair of dev computers in 2012 for about $2500 each, using one of the fastest CPU’s on CPU Benchmark that was also quite cheap (about $350 per CPU). I still use one of them as my main dev computer. Nothing has ever broken inside it, not even a fan. The original SSD raid setup is still in place. It works as well as it ever did. I don’t notice any issues when all of the different IDE’s and tools I need are open. 11 years of daily driving.
- jjav 3y ago
  Same here, not into upgrading continuously for no good reason. My primary home server (ZFS pools and hosting many VMs) is one I built in 2010, still nothing wrong with it. I keep wanting to upgrade to a new one but there's nothing wrong with it so can't really justify change. My desktop mac mini is from 2014, works just fine. My windows laptop (toshiba) is from about 2009-2010 (I bought it used in 2011) and still works just fine (I don't use windows generally but have a bunch of niche astrophotography programs which are windows only). Meanwhile... A Mac work laptop from 2021 lasted a year before the right side usbc ports both died. A Mac laptop from 2021 lasted a year before the screen died completely. The new machines have terrible quality problems.
- webignition 3y ago
  My main dev machine is the same age and is similarly chugging along just fine. Cost £1400 in 2012. It has no moving parts and I hoped this could lead to it lasting well beyond what I would normally expect. Regardless of part wear, or the apparent lack thereof, it feels to me as performant as the day it was born.
- shalmanese 3y ago
  You bought that computer at the exact right time when the bulk of the industry talent went into trying to make mobile processors more power efficient rather than making desktop processors more powerful.
- wkjagt 3y ago
  I still have one of those small form factor Dell Optiplex 9020 (with i7 4790) and with the RAM upgraded to 16G and SSD this things feels super nice and snappy for what I use it for. I paid around $100 for it last year. I’m really starting to wonder if newer hardware has any real advantages for me.
jasoneckert 3y ago
I love using old machines for productivity. I still write my blog posts in Markdown within vi running on a 1998 SPARCbook 3000ST (Solaris 2.5.1): https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/copyleft-is-dying/hipsterism.jpg https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/copyleft-is-dying/hipst...
- jseliger 3y ago
  Reminds me of https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/my-long-goodbye-to-windows-xp https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/my-long-goodbye-to-windo...
  - andsoitis 3y ago
    Their love for Windows XP resonates. But “My belief is that computer security is highly overrated” is just ignorant.
  - torh 3y ago
    Wonder how long Windows 7 will last for him. I have Windows 8.1 at home (not my daily driver, for that I use Linux), and Google Chrome is no longer updated. Nor is much else. But it works for my tasks, which is Lightroom (the last one that was not subscription I guess).
- emchammer 3y ago
  Cool machine. How is the battery still functioning, have you replaced it?
  - jasoneckert 3y ago
    Yes - I replaced the battery with a smaller/lighter version that provides much longer usage.
- jacknews 3y ago
  That keyboard (and trackpoint) is begging to be touched. I'll guess it's a thinkpad k/b. I do love vintage gear, but as a daily diriver, the rest of the machine looks, um, very vintage. Check those bezels! Though the LCD is barely visible anyway.
vosper 3y ago
> But there is one thing I hate about it: the bloody Touch Bar and it's phony ESC key. Remap the useless Caps Lock key to Esc in system settings (no third party tools needed) and problem solved?
- arrakeen 3y ago
  caps is already remapped to ctrl
  - zacwest 3y ago
    You can somewhat work around this using Karabiner Elements. I map caps lock to esc (when tapped) and ctrl (when held) with a 'complex modification' rule that looks like: { "description": "caps_lock to left_control or escape", "manipulators": [ { "from": { "key_code": "caps_lock", "modifiers": { "optional": ["any"] } }, "to": [ { "key_code": "left_control" } ], "to_if_alone": [ { "key_code": "escape" } ], "type": "basic" } ] }
tom_ 3y ago
I'm still using the macbook pro i bought new in april 2015. Nearly 9 years of use! You never got that in the 90s. And to think some say progress has stopped!
- prmoustache 3y ago
  Yes we did. We used an intel 8088 + CGA monitor all our DOS period and only upgraded to pentium when windows 95 was released. That was quite an upgrade.
- bombcar 3y ago
  It was really an interesting time. In 1990 you’d still have quite a few 1980s era machines, and even into 1995 there would be old 8086 machines doing their thing. But then everything changed when Windows 95 attacked, suddenly the upgrade treadmill was on and those older machines stopped being used not because they were to slow or broken, but because upgraders were dumping used hardware, and you might as well. Somewhere after the proliferation of SSDs I feel it slowed down again.
  - crq-yml 3y ago
    I believe it's related to PC standardization really kicking in during the 90's. Before that point, cross-platform abstraction existed but was relatively bespoken to the application, and you couldn't rely on coordination of developers with users that could run out and upgrade to this year's latest, because the pre-32bit desktop hardware kept changing architectures in radically incompatible ways - segmented memory, cooperative multitasking, etc. As such your data export was usually not to another computer, but to paper. After 1995 you had convergence on Wintel: they won the desktop architecture wars, the address space was large and flat so applications could grow, and Linux, Unicode and the Web were still nascent but all existed in a "right place, right time" sense to drive adoption. The SSD era slowed things down because right around that time, the focus shifted towards mobile computing, which saw the same treadmill from the start of the iPhone era. The older generation phones of this era are largely uninteresting curios, perhaps valued only if they happen to store an old game that got removed from the stores. IoT seems to be the next wave, still working towards the big shake-out and standards convergence: "computer as a feature" is increasingly possible to a degree that was unreasonable before.
ars 3y ago
My daily driver is from 2009, an Intel i7-860. Works fine. I'll probably upgrade at some point, when I have time...... 15 years of daily driving.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
  I don't make the 15 year mark because it's all 5+ yo when I wind up with it.
justinclift 3y ago
A ~2017 era cpu is not all that old. That being said, it's probably using a 7th gen intel core cpu, which was one generation before the move from 4 to 6 cores for many desktops cpus.
jimmyjazz14 3y ago
I am still using a PC I built in 2012, that is over twelve years of daily use. Honestly for 90% of task I do I see no reason to really upgrade it, though I did put a newish GPU in it last year because the old one was failing. I feel like personal computing power somewhat plateaued in the last decade or so which is fine with me really, less upgrades is less waste. I think phones will hopefully reach this point soon though sadly I don't see most of them lasting over a decade.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
  > I feel like personal computing power somewhat plateaued in the last decade It did in the WinTel world, after the 4th gen i7. Performance stayed flat from 5th gen until 10th or so. It's better after that. Between these later CPUs and and NVMe drives, it feels like computing has picked up a lot. At least until Windows 11 ad/crapware bloats it all away.
beardicus 3y ago
i'm typing on that very same computer. it was a free replacement for my 2015 MBP, which had a battery problem that became a warranty/recall of some sort and they didn't have the parts to repair it. my 'F' key is broken but still mostly works, the touch bar randomly doesn't work right (i think that's software though), and the battery is mostly shot. other than that, and the fact that i can no longer upgrade to the latest OS, this thing is quite adequate.
WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
Typing this on my 2012 T430. That's my bedroom notebook. My work notebook is an upgraded 2012 T430.
jebarker 3y ago
I use a 2010 MacBook Air with Debian and i3 for writing and coding practice using vim and cmdline tools. No web browser installed. For those tasks I'm much more productive on it than on any modern machine I own. I just wish the battery life were better.
- wrycoder 3y ago
  So follow iFixit and replace the battery. It is just a few screws. I have a 2011 Air that I resolved with an M1. I expect to put Linux on the 2011. Devuan and i3.
  - jebarker 3y ago
    I did follow iFixit and replaced the battery and SSD. Battery life is still terrible compared to a modern laptop. It's just a limitation of 14 year old tech.
cratermoon 3y ago
I made peace with the touch bar after I found out it could be customized, and I removed most of the default functions and put in a couple that I like having handy, including the ability to lock the screen at a touch.
- TheJoeMan 3y ago
  I agree, I love my MBP 2017 touchbar layout and frankly forgot I had customized it to “how it should have come” so long ago. Borrowed someone’s stock MBP and was like oh this is all wrong. I understand all the brouhaha over the esc key, but you’ll have to pry the wonderful volume and brightness sliders from my fingers. Repeatedly spamming volume up seems so archaic.
- dangus 3y ago
  PSA to anyone who doesn’t know yet: you can lock the screen by clicking the Touch ID button (at least, in the newest no-touch bar Macs). It can be used to both lock and unlock. I’m guessing your Touch Bar system can do this too but I have no way to try it. Sometimes Apple makes random little shortcut modifications when they change button layouts. Control Command Q also locks the screen. I used to have that combo as a fast habit. I jumped off the Touch Bar as soon as I could. I sorta miss the smooth volume and brightness adjustment but it’s not as good as having the keys be physical and always in the same place. No more looking down. If they could make a row of physical keys with little OLED screens and maybe a couple of customizable knobs and/or sliders that could be assigned to anything that might be a really useful concept. But the need to look down at the Touch Bar really killed its magic for me. The other thing you get on a modern Mac that’s arguably under-hyped is just the fact that the function keys are full size. It’s so much nicer.
  - piperswe 3y ago
    The "Touch ID button" is just a power button - pressing it puts your laptop to sleep just like pressing the power button on a non-Touch ID one would.
    - dangus 3y ago
bombcar 3y ago
My M1 Max is now three years old. I cry everytiem. (technically it’s from 2021 and it’s now 2024 but it’s closer to 2 and a half years old)
- imbnwa 3y ago
  These M1s are gonna last a long time
  - tonyedgecombe 3y ago
    Apple will consider them vintage within four years.
Loranubi 3y ago
I am using a desktop pc I built in 2012 for around 350 USD. It's running 24/7. I had to replace the mainboard, psu and ram over time due to failure (with similarly old components). The CPU AMD A10-5800K is still going strong though.
- dangus 3y ago
  Eh, honestly, depending on where you live your yearly electricity bill might justify an upgrade considering you’re running it 24/7. You might want to check your idle wattage with a kill-a-watt and look at your price per kw hour on your electric bill. Basically you can outperform that rig with an Intel Atom N100 with 1/10th the TDP of the A10-5800K. You could jump on Amazon and grab a Beelink mini PC or similar for about $200 and have an entire system that maxes out at 35W, idles at about 12-13W. If you save 20W of power on your idle and your power costs 20 cents per KW/h the new system would pay for itself in less than 6 years. If you’re in a country like the UK or Germany your payoff is 3 years or less.
justsomehnguy 3y ago
Ha, just a minutes before this post I thought again why I recently decided not to bother with upgrading my T440: despite the upgrade (replacing the ugly 1366 panel to a proper FullHD, IPS one) wouldn't cost me much (around $50 for the panel and probably another $50 for the work and maybe cleaning) it would be still a decade old laptop with an anemic i3-4010U (2c/4t 1700MHz), the awful Intel(R) Wireless-N 7260 and a fucking pedal instead of the touchpad. Sure, I can replace the wireless card too (if Lenovo would allow me and I would find the proper one if it doesn't) but at this point... It's easier to add another $50-100 and just buy something a more modern. But hey, if my main notebook would fail, just as JGC, I would be fine with it because it's a glorified terminal: > a lot of my computing needs being offloaded to the cloud https://www.techpowerup.com/cpu-specs/core-i3-4010u.c1607 https://www.techpowerup.com/cpu-specs/core-i3-4010u.c1607
- dangus 3y ago
  You make a point about something that keeps me away from older laptops: WiFi speed. Sure, I could get a USB WiFi card but…ick. I’m paying for symmetrical fiber, I want to use those speeds. When I’m uploading stuff to servers it really can slow me down to have slow WiFi. I could actually really use WiFi 7 to finally un-bottleneck my connection and I’m just waiting here semi-patiently for new client devices and cheaper access points to launch.
nine_k 3y ago
The author says that most time is spent either in a web browser, or in a terminal in ssh sessions. Talk about the year of desktop Linux; I bet most web sites and most hosts to ssh to are Linux-powered.
neilv 3y ago
Last year, I upgraded to a new daily driver: ThinkPad T520, manufactured in April of 2012. Linux (Debian Stable) runs great on it, and it has TrackPoint with a non-chiclet keyboard. And if you drop it on something, the something will probably get hurt more. It doesn't seem "vintage". My previous one, made in 2009, also still runs Debian Stable well, including when running 3 different Web browsers and a couple other bloated programs at once.
- pdpi 3y ago
  > It doesn’t seem “vintage”. And a 7-year old machine isn’t necessarily obsolete either. Apple uses those two words to mean specific things (vintage: >= 5y, < 7y; obsolete: >= 7y) as it relates to their support policies. Full support up to at least 5 years, some support up to 7, no support from then on. Honestly, it’s pretty refreshing to be able to summarise 99% of a company’s product support lifecycle in such a small paragraph.
- theesm 3y ago
  I'm still on a x230 I've bought 12 years ago (which was also manufactured in around 2012) as my personal daily driver. I replaced the keyboard once as I preferred the x220 one, replaced the battery every 4 years, and wouldn't even consider "upgrading" to something else. I mostly write C, Guile and Perl code in Emacs on this machine and spend another large chunk of my time in a terminal emulator, so I'd even argue that my hardware requirements haven't really changed during the last decade and probably won't for yet another.
  - NoGravitas 3y ago
    The X230 is absolutely a classic, a local optimum of computer hardware. I have several of them at this point. It's just too bad that it doesn't have the X220's keyboard.
    - neilv 3y ago
      I've heard of people transplanting the X220 keyboard into X230, but don't knwo how polished that can turn out.
shinypokemon 3y ago
My parents are still using my old 2012 MacBook Pro. Installing an SSD and 16GB of memory a few years ago revitalised it. The last time I used it when visiting them I could see no reason to retire it, but I assume it might lose out on security updates soon.
davee5 3y ago
I've been daily driving a 2013 MBP. After occasional memory upgrades, hard drive upgrades, and battery swaps this decade-young computer of Theseus runs great. But the real reason I'm not upgrading is because of software compatibility: 1. This is about as new a machine I can get that runs Adobe CS6 & Lightroom with perpetual licenses. (F your subscription) 2. The new M machines do not appear to run the Intel-driven CAD software I currently run in Bootcamp, not even in emulation. (I'm not keen on owning 2 machines for my dayjob, nor wholly converting to Windows.) Meanwhile my less mission critical software has gotten cheeky lately and started telling me my machine is too old. Spotify and Signal both refuse to update further and launch with big nastygram windows saying so. Wheeee.
- LesZedCB 3y ago
  my current dd laptop is also an early 2013 MBP, which I had installed Linux on a few years ago. however recently I picked up music again and preferred to use Mac for certain software. oh man was the reinstallation process a nightmare. the recovery install didn't have a browser that would render the Firefox download page. the Mac app store didn't have downloads for the highest version of macOS I could install on Intel architecture. it was problem after problem but now in finally running the last version I'll be able to run: 11.17. funny how much can change or become obsolete in only a decade :D
- dangus 3y ago
  For #1, I can’t imagine either switching over to open source or an Adobe competitor isn’t going to easily surpass CS6 with how old it is. I have to think GIMP has caught up with and surpassed CS6 by now. For #2, I think if it was me and I really wanted to stick with the Mac and upgrad I’d just run Parallels. Sure, it’s yet another license, but it runs a lot of stuff pretty well, including some 3D games, so I think it might be worth trying. Another part of me wonders if Crossover/Wine could run that CAD software. Of course, you want to be able to run these on a trial before you buy any hardware. If you’re not aware of OpenCore Legacy I might as well mention that in case you need a newer version of macOS on that hardware.
  - selcuka 3y ago
grecy 3y ago
I'm daily driving a mid-2014 MBP 13 inch. It's got 16GB of RAM. I bought it used in 2019 for $500 (iirc) Daily Final Cut Pro 1080 video editing, lightroom editing in a catalogue with 5000+ images from a Sony a7iii, web stuff, lots of document writing. If it could edit 4k video, I would have no reason to upgrade, but I've been eyeing used M1 prices lately...
gumby 3y ago
We have a rack with two servers (internet-facing) from around 2000/2001. They haven’t been rebooted since a facility move about a decade ago. They are still in continuous use.
- jmholla 3y ago
  How do y'all handle kernel updates?
  - gumby 3y ago
    I wonder this too but don’t manage it myself.
- tzs 3y ago
  How do you ensure that updates haven’t broken booting? It is very irksome to have to reboot due to a hardware issue and then discover that some software change possibly months or years ago broke startup.
  - bpye 3y ago
    I discovered this the hard way with my home server. The boot drive whilst still working wouldn’t come up on boot. It apparently worked in Linux still but it was no longer bootable. Having to scramble after a power outage to get a bootable Linux image to fix it wasn’t ideal. No way to have discovered this without a hard power cycle, a soft reset didn’t repro it.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Duanemclemore 3y ago
That's awesome. I build my own desktop for $1700 in parts in 2012. Not unsubstantial, but definitely not breaking the bank either. I had really come to take it for granted over the course of the last few years, as it's just one of multiple boxes I work on these days. I started working on it pretty intensively again in the past few months and... man, for being 11+ years old it keeps up. Turns out I got lucky with the longevity of the i7-3820, GTX 770, and (what at the time was a ridiculous for a home machine) 32gb of ram in it. Benchmarked (anecdotally) against a more modern (2021 build, 3x the cost) desktop, raytraced renderings still take 8x as long. But if I'm designing / modeling in 3d or BIM there is LITERALLY no dropoff. I'm still going to make a new build soon because I'm getting back into not having time for that 8x hit on renderings. But I had no idea when I put this thing together 11 years ago that it would serve me so well for so long.
- Duanemclemore 3y ago
  I also have a 7 year old laptop I bought for $140 new that I've put #!++ on and which keeps up just fine for most things the average punter would need in a machine.
oblib 3y ago
I'm still using a Late 2014 Mac mini running Monterey. I use BBEdit and web browsers more than anything so other than the startup time it's not really much slower to use than a current Mac mini. I still want one though.
vondur 3y ago
I was able to get a Dell Precision T7820 off of Ebay. 2x Xeon Gold 6136, 128GB of RAM and an 8GB Quadro P4000 card for $500. Runs Linux great and is pretty zippy at tasks that hit all the cores of the CPU. Will probably spring for an AMD video card in the future.
Duanemclemore 3y ago
My sister snagged a Mac SE that was bound for the landfill from her physics teacher in High School (c 2000). It's not just an old Daily Driver like we're discussing, or like it was when she intercepted it - it's proper retro computing now. But I just realized that 23-4 years later it's still sitting, climate controlled in our parents' house. Next time I'm there I should try to see if it's still bootable and if not how to get it there...
- NoGravitas 3y ago
  Might want to check for capacitor leakage before turning it on for the first time.
memalign 3y ago
The article complains about the Touch Bar escape key. This standard Mac key combo saved me during all those Touch Bar years (and it’s still my primary way of hitting escape): Command+. Works on iPad with keyboard case (on which I use vim in iSH) too!
ruined 3y ago
i'm still using a 2015 imac as my desktop. i bought it primarily for photography. it has a 5k wide-gamut screen, and when i bought it used, an equivalent LG monitor actually cost more. there has just never been a reason to upgrade. the 2022 studio display has the same resolution and color depth.
DaemonAlchemist 3y ago
My desktop is a 2013 custom build, and is still going strong with all of its original parts. My wife's previous computer was a near identical build from 2012 and also lasted nine years.
ttiurani 3y ago
I'm running the last(?) Intel MBP from 2019 for rust and web development and haven't found any reason to upgrade. Interesting observation: my remote junior colleague has a M2 Pro MBP with more memory than me. We're running the same OSX and node versions. Spinning up a development environment in a project using vite and a Java DB process running inside docker is about 3x faster on my old Intel than on their M2 Pro. The problem isn't anything trivial, and I'm struggling to help them figure it out over Zoom. Not saying it isn't fixable, but I suspect there are still ARM potholes you trip on.
- verwalt 3y ago
  Docker on macOS is just a shitshow. It's always using a VM so I am guessing Rosetta is involved and a x86 emulation ist happening. (Again, this is a guess!) If docker is a priority, Asahi Linux might be a great option, but this will of course create new problems, as it's far from done, and switching to Linux is a project on its own. I for myself use a Debian ARM64 VM in UTM to have the most control over the VM and then just use docker in there. Works much better than I anticipated.
  - prmoustache 3y ago
    > It's always using a VM so I am guessing Rosetta is involved and a x86 emulation ist happening. (Again, this is a guess!) Why would it use Rosetta and x86 emulation? Docker can work on arm as well.
    - p_l 3y ago
      Doesn't mean the containers are compiled for arm
- pmontra 3y ago
  I confirm that. A customer of mine was running the full test suite of a Rails web app in 50 seconds on his M1 Mac, in a docker container. I ran it in 75 seconds on Linux on a 2014 laptop. 50 vs 75 could be a large improvement but not as much as one would expect from the difference of hardware: CPU, RAM, bus, everything is much faster on the M1 Mac and yet it's wasting too many resources running an x86 docker on ARM.

58 points by jgrahamc 3y ago

Having a Mac work well for 7 years is definitely what you can expect. Especially if you take care of the battery and/or replace it some time.

rsync 3y ago

Most rsync.net (business) administration takes place on a 2009 octo-mac-pro. A classic tower workstation, beautifully engineered.

ace2358 3y ago
I’m sadly selling my 2010 Mac Pro (12 core 128gb ram) because I have no use for it anymore. Beautiful machine
jseliger 3y ago
Check the cost of power, cause the power draw may be costing a lot relative to the speed. https://support.apple.com/en-us/102839 https://support.apple.com/en-us/102839 indicates 115w idle or 146w idle, and 263 watt max or 309 watt max. And that is for a machine that is likely slower / less performant than a modern one with much lower draw. Your power bills may thank you.

sohead7291 3y ago

I'm confused, the screenshot is of a 2017 Mac Book. Did I miss something or is the author of the impression, that using a couple of years old laptop is somehow vintage? I expected something from the 2000s being old, something from the 1980s being vintage

keyle 3y ago
If you read the article, "Apple considers it vintage".
jtvjan 3y ago
It's Apple's words, not the author's: > Products are considered vintage when Apple stopped distributing them for sale more than 5 and less than 7 years ago. ~ https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201624 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201624 Products older than that are considered "obsolete".
jtwaleson 3y ago
You’ll enjoy the previous post from his blog about a real vintage masterpiece: https://blog.jgc.org/2023/12/restoration-of-ibm-thinkpad-701c.html https://blog.jgc.org/2023/12/restoration-of-ibm-thinkpad-701...

FullyFunctional 3y ago

I have working hardware from every decade, oldest is from 1982, but my daily driver and what I'm typing on now is a 2019 iMac 5K and Apple still doesn't have anything all-in-one to replace it. My keyboard is from 2002 (the USB version of the Kinesis I bought in ~ 1993). My oldest computer still in 24/7 use is my 2014 FreeNAS, but it's using a monitor that's so old I don't even know. Old hardware is great, but I do appreciate just how much better LCD panels have gotten over time.

ihateolives 3y ago
Yep, LCD quality is why I now have relegated my old ThinkPads to be either servers or backup computers. They still work perfectly but once you work with gorgeus color corrected hires display it's hard to go back. You just can't unsee it. Some people don't care but I do.

switch007 3y ago

I almost pulled the trigger on a new MacBook Pro but then I read they made such trade offs with the display that the response time is really, really slow and has ghosting even when scrolling around. I can’t spend £3,000 on a device that does that, no matter how great the rest of the machine is, as I don’t do graphics work. Guess I’m not their target customer. So, my “obsolete” MacBook Pro 2015 continues to be my web surfing machine and my AMD desktop for real work. Thanks Apple!

anonymoushn 3y ago

I don't think the edge teams at cloudflare could run their docker-compose tests very well on a machine like this when it was new. Maybe Docker on mac has gotten a lot leaner in the meantime or maybe jgc doesn't have to do this sort of thing.

jgrahamc 3y ago
You really don't want me doing that sort of thing. There are far more capable people keeping our network running, and far more people writing the software.

anArbitraryOne 3y ago

Wow an Apple product being vintage after 7 years

jacknews 3y ago
In Apple-land it's basically 'vintage' when the latest macos won't run on it, so 7 years is an antique.
- timbit42 3y ago
  What's a 1977 Apple II considered to be?
  - anArbitraryOne 3y ago
    Electronic waste or a museum piece

petesergeant 3y ago

I saw someone using an 11 inch MBA recently, and was seriously nostalgic. I really missed that tiny form factor. My M2 MBA is exceptionally capable, and hardly large, but lacks the incredibly small form factor I liked so much

wernsey 3y ago

My daily driver has been in for repairs, so for the past couple of weeks I've been using my Raspberry Pi 4-based "Hack-in-the-box" cyberdeck that I built in 2020. The more I use it, the more I love it: Everything I need is readily available through the package manager. There are no interruptions and no nag screens. There is an unobtrusive icon at the top telling me that an update is available, but I get to install it on my schedule. I've resisted the urge to sign into Google for Gmail and YouTube and my other social media accounts and I'm actually amazed at how little I miss it (though I still use those services from my phone, but I've been using them less) Also, it being a home-built computer it comes with a couple of quirks: Its fan is extremely noisy, when you scroll the mouse wheel you hear a crackling noise on the speakers and the keyboard is very uncomfortable, but all of these gives it a "personality" that only endears it to me.

nuker 3y ago

Offtopic, but I built a 486 PC, to remind me my first computer. 16MB FPM SIMMs, AMD Am5x86 133MHz CPU, Matrox Millenium + 3dfx Voodoo II. Win95. And a fkn external modem. But there is no dial-up ISP left in AU :)

wkjagt 3y ago
Same here! But lower spec (486 DX2 66) and running Windows 3.1. But it might be able to do Windows 95.
- nuker 3y ago
  Specs plz :) Do you have PCI slots? Is PS2 mouse port present? I had to find serial mouse, A4Tech one, with the ball :) No USB lol
  - wkjagt 3y ago
    No PCI, but I do have VLB. Graphics card and IO card are in VLB slots. I have 20MB RAM. For storage I’ve gone through several old hard drives but they all ended up failing. So I went with a CF card to IDE adapter. Mouse is serial, because I don’t have PS/2. I use a nice mechanical keyboard with a USB to PS/2 and then PS/2 to 5 pin DIN keyboard connector adapter. I also have a gotek floppy emulator on it. I mostly use this computer to play around with Borland C++.
    - nuker 3y ago
      > So I went with a CF card to IDE adapter. No no no. The sound is irreplaceable. I ended up with FUJITSU MPB3043AT. Tried Quantum Fireball 2GB but it was too noisy.
      - wkjagt 3y ago
        Yeah I do miss the sound :-( it feels fake without it. But I ran out of hard drives… EDIT: I do have an 80MB MFM drive but that would be weird.

kappuchino 3y ago

Wait, nobody mentioned the Open Core Legacy Patcher (yet)? Have a look: https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/MODELS.html https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/MODELS.ht... I myself still run a decade old macbook air - with most hardware parts replaced for a second or third time, except the mainboard: On the Ventura with all security fixes instead of Big Sur. Its awesome. Luckly I went for 8gb and i7 back then. And swapped the NVME with an adapter + vanilla drive, so no pricey upgrades. The computer has 4tb diskspace now ...

kerrsclyde 3y ago

I've got an early 2009 iMac and it is glorious. I've got a range of software which I know exactly how to use. I can focus on creativity and productivity, not learning how to use a new tool before I can produce anything of value.

nyanpasu64 3y ago

My (project machine) Dell Inspiron 15R SE 7520 laptop has started hanging while powered off or sleeping, with the power LED still blinking but the machine not responding to any external inputs (opening the lid, pressing the power button, holding it down). I assume the EC microcontroller is hanging, but I don't know why that is. I took the laptop apart, took the coin cell battery out and put it back in, and the problem stopped for a month or so but has returned. What's causing the issue? Perhaps the coin cell battery is drained (and I didn't know the right way to test CR2032s at the time, so I thought it was good)? Or is the EC fried or corrupted, perhaps because I did a botched BIOS reflash which corrupted the EC, and had to reprogram the EC in flashrom over multiple passes while skipping "hung" flash blocks (the pin to hold the EC in reset didn't make flash properly writable)? Afterwards the laptop would boot, but dumping the EC flash again revealed the image was changed again. Or did the EC die due to flash corruption that occurred afterwards (either from flaky chips or because I damaged it earlier)?

nyanpasu64 3y ago
i found why the laptop was crashing it wasn't an obscure hardware issue related to corrupted firmware, but just the laptop (Windows 7) dies when it tries to go from sleep to hibernate after 6 hours
- nyanpasu64 3y ago
  unfortunately the laptop still sometimes (not always) dies after shutting down, and cannot be powered back on. maybe dies during sleep too? i don't know.

wkjagt 3y ago

I just bought a used Thinkpad T470, and with arch linux (btw), hyprland, and neovim, I’m starting to like this machine more than my M1 macbook. The one thing I always thought my M1 couldn’t be beat at by an IBM compatible laptop is battery life, but the T470 actually has very good battery life. I’m not using the T470 for anything CPU intensive, but it’s the same with my MacBook. Just hobby projects, mostly writing code. I’m starting to wonder why I paid > 1k for a MacBook when a $200 used thinkpad is totally fine.

jerednel 3y ago
Same. I just bought a t480 off eBay a week ago while I already have a m2 pro MBP with 32gb RAM. I don’t know what compelled me but it’s just so cozy. By all measures the Mac is superior. Thinkpads are like the vinyl records of laptops.
- wkjagt 3y ago
  I like that. I feel similar. I picked it up locally, and while I was driving over, I thought to myself: why am I even doing this, I have a perfect MacBook. But I'm happy I did it. It feels better in a way. Somehow like vinyl maybe, but not as fragile ;-) And my excuse is: can't run Arch on an M1 MacBook.

phil21 3y ago

A 2017 MPB is still my daily driver. The only thing having me switch to a M3 at the moment is I'm finally done with that horrible keyboard. Battery life is getting a bit annoying, but otherwise it's chugged away ever since I got the thing on release day. That said, the M series laptops are such a huge step forward it's a little mind blowing!

tommychillfiger 3y ago
Mine is a 2012 MBP. I am only just now seeing real performance issues; until about mid last year it worked as well as the day I bought it aside from some battery degradation (I put an SSD in it around 2018). Pretty excited to upgrade and hope I can get at least 5-6 years out of a new MBP. This was my first MacBook, and 12 years of use is pretty insane value.
- justusthane 3y ago
  Mine's a 2014 MBP, and even the battery is still mostly okay. My biggest annoyance at this point is because it no longer gets updates, it's not on par with my new iPhone and I've lost functionality like copy/paste between computer and phone.

NoGravitas 3y ago

My daily driver is a 2013 ThinkPad. It's not usable for gaming, but other than that, I just never notice any performance problems (except Android Studio, but Android Studio seems to be Uniquely Bad (TM)).

baerrie 3y ago

I still use a 2009 macbook pro for music recording. It even served me during my bootcamp a few years ago but because the os wasn’t able to update, I learned a lot about supporting old versions of stuff :)

acuozzo 3y ago

The server and workstation I use at home are from 2013-2014. C602 chipset: the X79 of the server room. They draw more power than I'd like, but they perform very well on the workloads I throw at them. I'd save a good amount of money by purchasing newer energy-efficient hardware, but even when presented with the numbers I can't rationalize away the sticker-shock.

krmboya 3y ago

What an incredibly wasteful world we live in. A 16g ram core i7 laptop from 2017 is considered vintage? When it comes to cars, vintage is like a century ago. How has software qualitatively improved since 2017? Even since 2010? We are still slinging the same sht around together with an ever increasing amount of 'node modules' on our disks. The cause of climate change is not the use of fossil fuel, but the extreme extraction and processing of raw material for releasing the next new thing that will increase quarterly revenue targets leaving in its wake extreme waste that no one knows what to do with except force third world countries absorb it.

AHTERIX5000 3y ago
Indeed. My old Intel Atom netbook just doesn't handle modern web at all. Even sites with just text such as Medium are unusable. I guess all this at least makes modern web developer experience great since as an user I don't get any benefits?

segmondy 3y ago

my daily driver is an i5 PC that I bought in 2012. Haven't even thought much about it. It had 12gb, I recently upgraded it to 24gb. No plans to really upgrade, it runs linux and get's the job done. My macbook is a 2012 too. computers have gotten great enough that we can probably run these for the next 10 yrs. The only reason I'm thinking of upgrading desktop is for GPU and likewise the macbook. Outside of GPU, I'll be fine. I'm still running the numbers to decide if I might just stick to cloud workload and if I do, these will chug on along for some more years.

ttyprintk 3y ago

I would plan on this not getting patched for Downfall. Anyone know the status on that?

raverbashing 3y ago

"A lot older than I thought", my daily driver until recently was a 2011 MBP and it kinda worked for most tasks, while of course, it needed to be plugged. But it worked fine

simonblack 3y ago

I tend to keep laptops a lot longer than most. My second-last laptop was a Lenovo T410 from 2010. Still works well, and I really like its keyboard. My current laptop is a Lenovo P53 from 2020. I still think of it as being 'new' but it's coming up for about four years old.

apantel 3y ago

Computers can last a long long time. I built a pair of dev computers in 2012 for about $2500 each, using one of the fastest CPU’s on CPU Benchmark that was also quite cheap (about $350 per CPU). I still use one of them as my main dev computer. Nothing has ever broken inside it, not even a fan. The original SSD raid setup is still in place. It works as well as it ever did. I don’t notice any issues when all of the different IDE’s and tools I need are open. 11 years of daily driving.

jjav 3y ago
Same here, not into upgrading continuously for no good reason. My primary home server (ZFS pools and hosting many VMs) is one I built in 2010, still nothing wrong with it. I keep wanting to upgrade to a new one but there's nothing wrong with it so can't really justify change. My desktop mac mini is from 2014, works just fine. My windows laptop (toshiba) is from about 2009-2010 (I bought it used in 2011) and still works just fine (I don't use windows generally but have a bunch of niche astrophotography programs which are windows only). Meanwhile... A Mac work laptop from 2021 lasted a year before the right side usbc ports both died. A Mac laptop from 2021 lasted a year before the screen died completely. The new machines have terrible quality problems.
webignition 3y ago
My main dev machine is the same age and is similarly chugging along just fine. Cost £1400 in 2012. It has no moving parts and I hoped this could lead to it lasting well beyond what I would normally expect. Regardless of part wear, or the apparent lack thereof, it feels to me as performant as the day it was born.
shalmanese 3y ago
You bought that computer at the exact right time when the bulk of the industry talent went into trying to make mobile processors more power efficient rather than making desktop processors more powerful.
wkjagt 3y ago
I still have one of those small form factor Dell Optiplex 9020 (with i7 4790) and with the RAM upgraded to 16G and SSD this things feels super nice and snappy for what I use it for. I paid around $100 for it last year. I’m really starting to wonder if newer hardware has any real advantages for me.

jasoneckert 3y ago

I love using old machines for productivity. I still write my blog posts in Markdown within vi running on a 1998 SPARCbook 3000ST (Solaris 2.5.1): https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/copyleft-is-dying/hipsterism.jpg https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/copyleft-is-dying/hipst...

jseliger 3y ago
Reminds me of https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/my-long-goodbye-to-windows-xp https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/my-long-goodbye-to-windo...
- andsoitis 3y ago
  Their love for Windows XP resonates. But “My belief is that computer security is highly overrated” is just ignorant.
- torh 3y ago
  Wonder how long Windows 7 will last for him. I have Windows 8.1 at home (not my daily driver, for that I use Linux), and Google Chrome is no longer updated. Nor is much else. But it works for my tasks, which is Lightroom (the last one that was not subscription I guess).
emchammer 3y ago
Cool machine. How is the battery still functioning, have you replaced it?
- jasoneckert 3y ago
  Yes - I replaced the battery with a smaller/lighter version that provides much longer usage.
jacknews 3y ago
That keyboard (and trackpoint) is begging to be touched. I'll guess it's a thinkpad k/b. I do love vintage gear, but as a daily diriver, the rest of the machine looks, um, very vintage. Check those bezels! Though the LCD is barely visible anyway.

vosper 3y ago

> But there is one thing I hate about it: the bloody Touch Bar and it's phony ESC key. Remap the useless Caps Lock key to Esc in system settings (no third party tools needed) and problem solved?

arrakeen 3y ago
caps is already remapped to ctrl
- zacwest 3y ago
  You can somewhat work around this using Karabiner Elements. I map caps lock to esc (when tapped) and ctrl (when held) with a 'complex modification' rule that looks like: { "description": "caps_lock to left_control or escape", "manipulators": [ { "from": { "key_code": "caps_lock", "modifiers": { "optional": ["any"] } }, "to": [ { "key_code": "left_control" } ], "to_if_alone": [ { "key_code": "escape" } ], "type": "basic" } ] }

tom_ 3y ago

I'm still using the macbook pro i bought new in april 2015. Nearly 9 years of use! You never got that in the 90s. And to think some say progress has stopped!

prmoustache 3y ago
Yes we did. We used an intel 8088 + CGA monitor all our DOS period and only upgraded to pentium when windows 95 was released. That was quite an upgrade.
bombcar 3y ago
It was really an interesting time. In 1990 you’d still have quite a few 1980s era machines, and even into 1995 there would be old 8086 machines doing their thing. But then everything changed when Windows 95 attacked, suddenly the upgrade treadmill was on and those older machines stopped being used not because they were to slow or broken, but because upgraders were dumping used hardware, and you might as well. Somewhere after the proliferation of SSDs I feel it slowed down again.
- crq-yml 3y ago
  I believe it's related to PC standardization really kicking in during the 90's. Before that point, cross-platform abstraction existed but was relatively bespoken to the application, and you couldn't rely on coordination of developers with users that could run out and upgrade to this year's latest, because the pre-32bit desktop hardware kept changing architectures in radically incompatible ways - segmented memory, cooperative multitasking, etc. As such your data export was usually not to another computer, but to paper. After 1995 you had convergence on Wintel: they won the desktop architecture wars, the address space was large and flat so applications could grow, and Linux, Unicode and the Web were still nascent but all existed in a "right place, right time" sense to drive adoption. The SSD era slowed things down because right around that time, the focus shifted towards mobile computing, which saw the same treadmill from the start of the iPhone era. The older generation phones of this era are largely uninteresting curios, perhaps valued only if they happen to store an old game that got removed from the stores. IoT seems to be the next wave, still working towards the big shake-out and standards convergence: "computer as a feature" is increasingly possible to a degree that was unreasonable before.

ars 3y ago

My daily driver is from 2009, an Intel i7-860. Works fine. I'll probably upgrade at some point, when I have time...... 15 years of daily driving.

WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
I don't make the 15 year mark because it's all 5+ yo when I wind up with it.

justinclift 3y ago

A ~2017 era cpu is not all that old. That being said, it's probably using a 7th gen intel core cpu, which was one generation before the move from 4 to 6 cores for many desktops cpus.

jimmyjazz14 3y ago

I am still using a PC I built in 2012, that is over twelve years of daily use. Honestly for 90% of task I do I see no reason to really upgrade it, though I did put a newish GPU in it last year because the old one was failing. I feel like personal computing power somewhat plateaued in the last decade or so which is fine with me really, less upgrades is less waste. I think phones will hopefully reach this point soon though sadly I don't see most of them lasting over a decade.

WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
> I feel like personal computing power somewhat plateaued in the last decade It did in the WinTel world, after the 4th gen i7. Performance stayed flat from 5th gen until 10th or so. It's better after that. Between these later CPUs and and NVMe drives, it feels like computing has picked up a lot. At least until Windows 11 ad/crapware bloats it all away.

beardicus 3y ago

i'm typing on that very same computer. it was a free replacement for my 2015 MBP, which had a battery problem that became a warranty/recall of some sort and they didn't have the parts to repair it. my 'F' key is broken but still mostly works, the touch bar randomly doesn't work right (i think that's software though), and the battery is mostly shot. other than that, and the fact that i can no longer upgrade to the latest OS, this thing is quite adequate.

WarOnPrivacy 3y ago

Typing this on my 2012 T430. That's my bedroom notebook. My work notebook is an upgraded 2012 T430.

jebarker 3y ago

I use a 2010 MacBook Air with Debian and i3 for writing and coding practice using vim and cmdline tools. No web browser installed. For those tasks I'm much more productive on it than on any modern machine I own. I just wish the battery life were better.

wrycoder 3y ago
So follow iFixit and replace the battery. It is just a few screws. I have a 2011 Air that I resolved with an M1. I expect to put Linux on the 2011. Devuan and i3.
- jebarker 3y ago
  I did follow iFixit and replaced the battery and SSD. Battery life is still terrible compared to a modern laptop. It's just a limitation of 14 year old tech.

cratermoon 3y ago

I made peace with the touch bar after I found out it could be customized, and I removed most of the default functions and put in a couple that I like having handy, including the ability to lock the screen at a touch.

TheJoeMan 3y ago
I agree, I love my MBP 2017 touchbar layout and frankly forgot I had customized it to “how it should have come” so long ago. Borrowed someone’s stock MBP and was like oh this is all wrong. I understand all the brouhaha over the esc key, but you’ll have to pry the wonderful volume and brightness sliders from my fingers. Repeatedly spamming volume up seems so archaic.
dangus 3y ago
PSA to anyone who doesn’t know yet: you can lock the screen by clicking the Touch ID button (at least, in the newest no-touch bar Macs). It can be used to both lock and unlock. I’m guessing your Touch Bar system can do this too but I have no way to try it. Sometimes Apple makes random little shortcut modifications when they change button layouts. Control Command Q also locks the screen. I used to have that combo as a fast habit. I jumped off the Touch Bar as soon as I could. I sorta miss the smooth volume and brightness adjustment but it’s not as good as having the keys be physical and always in the same place. No more looking down. If they could make a row of physical keys with little OLED screens and maybe a couple of customizable knobs and/or sliders that could be assigned to anything that might be a really useful concept. But the need to look down at the Touch Bar really killed its magic for me. The other thing you get on a modern Mac that’s arguably under-hyped is just the fact that the function keys are full size. It’s so much nicer.
- piperswe 3y ago
  The "Touch ID button" is just a power button - pressing it puts your laptop to sleep just like pressing the power button on a non-Touch ID one would.
  - dangus 3y ago

bombcar 3y ago

My M1 Max is now three years old. I cry everytiem. (technically it’s from 2021 and it’s now 2024 but it’s closer to 2 and a half years old)

imbnwa 3y ago
These M1s are gonna last a long time
- tonyedgecombe 3y ago
  Apple will consider them vintage within four years.

Loranubi 3y ago

I am using a desktop pc I built in 2012 for around 350 USD. It's running 24/7. I had to replace the mainboard, psu and ram over time due to failure (with similarly old components). The CPU AMD A10-5800K is still going strong though.

dangus 3y ago
Eh, honestly, depending on where you live your yearly electricity bill might justify an upgrade considering you’re running it 24/7. You might want to check your idle wattage with a kill-a-watt and look at your price per kw hour on your electric bill. Basically you can outperform that rig with an Intel Atom N100 with 1/10th the TDP of the A10-5800K. You could jump on Amazon and grab a Beelink mini PC or similar for about $200 and have an entire system that maxes out at 35W, idles at about 12-13W. If you save 20W of power on your idle and your power costs 20 cents per KW/h the new system would pay for itself in less than 6 years. If you’re in a country like the UK or Germany your payoff is 3 years or less.

justsomehnguy 3y ago

Ha, just a minutes before this post I thought again why I recently decided not to bother with upgrading my T440: despite the upgrade (replacing the ugly 1366 panel to a proper FullHD, IPS one) wouldn't cost me much (around $50 for the panel and probably another $50 for the work and maybe cleaning) it would be still a decade old laptop with an anemic i3-4010U (2c/4t 1700MHz), the awful Intel(R) Wireless-N 7260 and a fucking pedal instead of the touchpad. Sure, I can replace the wireless card too (if Lenovo would allow me and I would find the proper one if it doesn't) but at this point... It's easier to add another $50-100 and just buy something a more modern. But hey, if my main notebook would fail, just as JGC, I would be fine with it because it's a glorified terminal: > a lot of my computing needs being offloaded to the cloud https://www.techpowerup.com/cpu-specs/core-i3-4010u.c1607 https://www.techpowerup.com/cpu-specs/core-i3-4010u.c1607

dangus 3y ago
You make a point about something that keeps me away from older laptops: WiFi speed. Sure, I could get a USB WiFi card but…ick. I’m paying for symmetrical fiber, I want to use those speeds. When I’m uploading stuff to servers it really can slow me down to have slow WiFi. I could actually really use WiFi 7 to finally un-bottleneck my connection and I’m just waiting here semi-patiently for new client devices and cheaper access points to launch.

nine_k 3y ago

The author says that most time is spent either in a web browser, or in a terminal in ssh sessions. Talk about the year of desktop Linux; I bet most web sites and most hosts to ssh to are Linux-powered.

neilv 3y ago

Last year, I upgraded to a new daily driver: ThinkPad T520, manufactured in April of 2012. Linux (Debian Stable) runs great on it, and it has TrackPoint with a non-chiclet keyboard. And if you drop it on something, the something will probably get hurt more. It doesn't seem "vintage". My previous one, made in 2009, also still runs Debian Stable well, including when running 3 different Web browsers and a couple other bloated programs at once.

pdpi 3y ago
> It doesn’t seem “vintage”. And a 7-year old machine isn’t necessarily obsolete either. Apple uses those two words to mean specific things (vintage: >= 5y, < 7y; obsolete: >= 7y) as it relates to their support policies. Full support up to at least 5 years, some support up to 7, no support from then on. Honestly, it’s pretty refreshing to be able to summarise 99% of a company’s product support lifecycle in such a small paragraph.
theesm 3y ago
I'm still on a x230 I've bought 12 years ago (which was also manufactured in around 2012) as my personal daily driver. I replaced the keyboard once as I preferred the x220 one, replaced the battery every 4 years, and wouldn't even consider "upgrading" to something else. I mostly write C, Guile and Perl code in Emacs on this machine and spend another large chunk of my time in a terminal emulator, so I'd even argue that my hardware requirements haven't really changed during the last decade and probably won't for yet another.
- NoGravitas 3y ago
  The X230 is absolutely a classic, a local optimum of computer hardware. I have several of them at this point. It's just too bad that it doesn't have the X220's keyboard.
  - neilv 3y ago
    I've heard of people transplanting the X220 keyboard into X230, but don't knwo how polished that can turn out.

shinypokemon 3y ago

My parents are still using my old 2012 MacBook Pro. Installing an SSD and 16GB of memory a few years ago revitalised it. The last time I used it when visiting them I could see no reason to retire it, but I assume it might lose out on security updates soon.

davee5 3y ago

I've been daily driving a 2013 MBP. After occasional memory upgrades, hard drive upgrades, and battery swaps this decade-young computer of Theseus runs great. But the real reason I'm not upgrading is because of software compatibility: 1. This is about as new a machine I can get that runs Adobe CS6 & Lightroom with perpetual licenses. (F your subscription) 2. The new M machines do not appear to run the Intel-driven CAD software I currently run in Bootcamp, not even in emulation. (I'm not keen on owning 2 machines for my dayjob, nor wholly converting to Windows.) Meanwhile my less mission critical software has gotten cheeky lately and started telling me my machine is too old. Spotify and Signal both refuse to update further and launch with big nastygram windows saying so. Wheeee.

LesZedCB 3y ago
my current dd laptop is also an early 2013 MBP, which I had installed Linux on a few years ago. however recently I picked up music again and preferred to use Mac for certain software. oh man was the reinstallation process a nightmare. the recovery install didn't have a browser that would render the Firefox download page. the Mac app store didn't have downloads for the highest version of macOS I could install on Intel architecture. it was problem after problem but now in finally running the last version I'll be able to run: 11.17. funny how much can change or become obsolete in only a decade :D
dangus 3y ago
For #1, I can’t imagine either switching over to open source or an Adobe competitor isn’t going to easily surpass CS6 with how old it is. I have to think GIMP has caught up with and surpassed CS6 by now. For #2, I think if it was me and I really wanted to stick with the Mac and upgrad I’d just run Parallels. Sure, it’s yet another license, but it runs a lot of stuff pretty well, including some 3D games, so I think it might be worth trying. Another part of me wonders if Crossover/Wine could run that CAD software. Of course, you want to be able to run these on a trial before you buy any hardware. If you’re not aware of OpenCore Legacy I might as well mention that in case you need a newer version of macOS on that hardware.
- selcuka 3y ago

grecy 3y ago

I'm daily driving a mid-2014 MBP 13 inch. It's got 16GB of RAM. I bought it used in 2019 for $500 (iirc) Daily Final Cut Pro 1080 video editing, lightroom editing in a catalogue with 5000+ images from a Sony a7iii, web stuff, lots of document writing. If it could edit 4k video, I would have no reason to upgrade, but I've been eyeing used M1 prices lately...

gumby 3y ago

We have a rack with two servers (internet-facing) from around 2000/2001. They haven’t been rebooted since a facility move about a decade ago. They are still in continuous use.

jmholla 3y ago
How do y'all handle kernel updates?
- gumby 3y ago
  I wonder this too but don’t manage it myself.
tzs 3y ago
How do you ensure that updates haven’t broken booting? It is very irksome to have to reboot due to a hardware issue and then discover that some software change possibly months or years ago broke startup.
- bpye 3y ago
  I discovered this the hard way with my home server. The boot drive whilst still working wouldn’t come up on boot. It apparently worked in Linux still but it was no longer bootable. Having to scramble after a power outage to get a bootable Linux image to fix it wasn’t ideal. No way to have discovered this without a hard power cycle, a soft reset didn’t repro it.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Duanemclemore 3y ago

That's awesome. I build my own desktop for $1700 in parts in 2012. Not unsubstantial, but definitely not breaking the bank either. I had really come to take it for granted over the course of the last few years, as it's just one of multiple boxes I work on these days. I started working on it pretty intensively again in the past few months and... man, for being 11+ years old it keeps up. Turns out I got lucky with the longevity of the i7-3820, GTX 770, and (what at the time was a ridiculous for a home machine) 32gb of ram in it. Benchmarked (anecdotally) against a more modern (2021 build, 3x the cost) desktop, raytraced renderings still take 8x as long. But if I'm designing / modeling in 3d or BIM there is LITERALLY no dropoff. I'm still going to make a new build soon because I'm getting back into not having time for that 8x hit on renderings. But I had no idea when I put this thing together 11 years ago that it would serve me so well for so long.

Duanemclemore 3y ago
I also have a 7 year old laptop I bought for $140 new that I've put #!++ on and which keeps up just fine for most things the average punter would need in a machine.

oblib 3y ago

I'm still using a Late 2014 Mac mini running Monterey. I use BBEdit and web browsers more than anything so other than the startup time it's not really much slower to use than a current Mac mini. I still want one though.

vondur 3y ago

I was able to get a Dell Precision T7820 off of Ebay. 2x Xeon Gold 6136, 128GB of RAM and an 8GB Quadro P4000 card for $500. Runs Linux great and is pretty zippy at tasks that hit all the cores of the CPU. Will probably spring for an AMD video card in the future.

Duanemclemore 3y ago

My sister snagged a Mac SE that was bound for the landfill from her physics teacher in High School (c 2000). It's not just an old Daily Driver like we're discussing, or like it was when she intercepted it - it's proper retro computing now. But I just realized that 23-4 years later it's still sitting, climate controlled in our parents' house. Next time I'm there I should try to see if it's still bootable and if not how to get it there...

NoGravitas 3y ago
Might want to check for capacitor leakage before turning it on for the first time.

memalign 3y ago

The article complains about the Touch Bar escape key. This standard Mac key combo saved me during all those Touch Bar years (and it’s still my primary way of hitting escape): Command+. Works on iPad with keyboard case (on which I use vim in iSH) too!

ruined 3y ago

i'm still using a 2015 imac as my desktop. i bought it primarily for photography. it has a 5k wide-gamut screen, and when i bought it used, an equivalent LG monitor actually cost more. there has just never been a reason to upgrade. the 2022 studio display has the same resolution and color depth.

DaemonAlchemist 3y ago

My desktop is a 2013 custom build, and is still going strong with all of its original parts. My wife's previous computer was a near identical build from 2012 and also lasted nine years.

ttiurani 3y ago

I'm running the last(?) Intel MBP from 2019 for rust and web development and haven't found any reason to upgrade. Interesting observation: my remote junior colleague has a M2 Pro MBP with more memory than me. We're running the same OSX and node versions. Spinning up a development environment in a project using vite and a Java DB process running inside docker is about 3x faster on my old Intel than on their M2 Pro. The problem isn't anything trivial, and I'm struggling to help them figure it out over Zoom. Not saying it isn't fixable, but I suspect there are still ARM potholes you trip on.

verwalt 3y ago
Docker on macOS is just a shitshow. It's always using a VM so I am guessing Rosetta is involved and a x86 emulation ist happening. (Again, this is a guess!) If docker is a priority, Asahi Linux might be a great option, but this will of course create new problems, as it's far from done, and switching to Linux is a project on its own. I for myself use a Debian ARM64 VM in UTM to have the most control over the VM and then just use docker in there. Works much better than I anticipated.
- prmoustache 3y ago
  > It's always using a VM so I am guessing Rosetta is involved and a x86 emulation ist happening. (Again, this is a guess!) Why would it use Rosetta and x86 emulation? Docker can work on arm as well.
  - p_l 3y ago
    Doesn't mean the containers are compiled for arm
pmontra 3y ago
I confirm that. A customer of mine was running the full test suite of a Rails web app in 50 seconds on his M1 Mac, in a docker container. I ran it in 75 seconds on Linux on a 2014 laptop. 50 vs 75 could be a large improvement but not as much as one would expect from the difference of hardware: CPU, RAM, bus, everything is much faster on the M1 Mac and yet it's wasting too many resources running an x86 docker on ARM.