5 ms·

Why would anyone want to buy a new computer now unless the old one is worn out? There is no price/performance improvement. Nor will there be for the next five y

by Animats 11mo ago

Why would anyone want to buy a new computer now unless the old one is worn out? There is no price/performance improvement. Nor will there be for the next five years or so. NVidia says to expect 10% price increases each year. DRAM prices have doubled, and Samsung says not to expect price cuts. Micron just exited the retail RAM business. Microsoft is trying to escape this trap by pivoting to Windows as a subscription service. It will get worse, not better.

markus_zhang 11mo ago
My only complain is that nowadays laptops are usually poorly built, so unless one purchases an expensive guarantee, anything beyond the default guarantee is not guaranteed.
- cm2187 11mo ago
  And the manufacturers are in a quest to remove as many keys as they can from the keyboard. Like you can hardly find any light laptop today with page up/down keys anymore. Why?.... Haven't these guys heard of keyboard shortcuts?
  - arccy 11mo ago
    don't you like doing finger contortions to use all the modifier keys?
    - cm2187 11mo ago
      I think it is the single most convincing proof that we are being secretly replaced by lizard people with 8 fingers!
      - AdrianB1 11mo ago
        8 fingers to each of the 4 hands, to be clear :)
    - gerdesj 11mo ago
      You probably didn't grow up with horrors like the WordPerfect function key strip or being faced with a keyboard like that on the ZX80/81/Speccy etc.
      - sixtyj 11mo ago
        Yes, it's a miracle that after 40 years of typing every day, my fingers still work. But that may be a biased view on my part; there may be lots of programmers out there with arthritis in their fingers, carpal tunnel syndrome, and other occupational diseases.
    - OptionOfT 11mo ago
      They aren't always the same: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20110809-00/?p=9943 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20110809-00/?p=99... Also, even when they are the same, on certain laptops you literally hit the key-rollover problem.
  - markus_zhang 11mo ago
    Oh yeah, they sometimes put page up and down on up and down which infuriates me very much. There are other issues like less USB ports, but overall quality is poor comparing to MacBooks.
  - userbinator 11mo ago
    I suspect it's gradual cost-cutting. At the manufacturing scales they're operating with, even one keyswitch adds up.
  - ack_complete 11mo ago
    Worse than that, there's no consistency in Fn+key shortcuts. Recently acquired an HP Ergonomic Keyboard as a replacement for a broken Sculpt, only to find out that it literally cannot send Ctrl+Break -- there's no key for it, no Fn+key shortcut for it and the remapping software doesn't simulate it properly.
    - intrasight 11mo ago
      Buy the keyboard you want. There are plenty of good ones.
      - OJFord 11mo ago
        They're talking about laptops, rarely any choice besides ANSI/ISO; maybe a few countries' accents and layouts of the latter.
        ack_complete 11mo ago
        The keyboard I was mentioning isn't a laptop keyboard, actually, but laptop keyboards tend to be in a slightly better spot as the major vendors typically have Fn shortcuts for the missing keys, like Fn+B for Break, and they also document them in the user guides. Detached keyboards seem to be more of a wild west, especially when they target multiplatform -- and it's always the stuff they don't document that screws you.
  - VerifiedReports 11mo ago
    Nothing tops Apple's infantile refusal to put a (real) Delete key on their laptops. Instead, they have a Backspace key mislabeled "delete." When the Eject key became obsolete, Apple had a perfect opportunity to fix this omission with essentially no effort. NOPE. Meanwhile, everybody else managed to have a proper Delete key on their laptops.
    - joshka 11mo ago
      A hill that I'll die on is that Apple's terminology is more correct than PC terminology for this. Backspace makes sense if you see the computer as a fancy typewriter. Delete makes sense if you consider the actions from first principles. Consider the various forms of deletion (forward, backward, word, file deletion, etc.) Each of these just has a modifier key in Apple's way of thinking. (None, Fn, Option, Cmd) which makes complete sense when viewed against how consistent it is with the whole set of interface design guidelines for Apple software. The only reason that this doesn't make sense is that it's incompatible with your world view brought from places with different standards. They will never "fix" this as there's just nothing to fix.
      - Findecanor 11mo ago
        > Backspace makes sense if you see the computer as a fancy typewriter. Backspace on a typewriter only moved the position (~cursor) back one space. Hence why its symbol is the same as the left arrow key's. Backwards Delete was a separate additional key, if the typewriter even had one, and its symbol was a cross inside an outlined left-arrow: ⌫. Current Apple keyboard has this symbol on the "Backspace" key in some regions instead of the text "delete", but older ones did have the left arrow. Apple calling it "Delete" goes back to Apple II. Many other older computer platforms also called it "Delete". DEC used the ⌫ symbol.
        rzzzt 11mo ago
        At least you don't have to type the same letters while holding a thin tape over your screen to erase them! Apple also had separate Return and Enter symbols on keyboards for a while, which also sounds like typewriter territory but their intended use was a bit different: https://creativepro.com/a-tale-of-two-enter-keys/ https://creativepro.com/a-tale-of-two-enter-keys/
  - crazygringo 11mo ago
    I dunno, I actually prefer Fn+Up/Dn. I just find it more logical, and it feels standard to me now. I press them surely hundreds of times a day and have no problem with it.
  - devilbunny 11mo ago
    It’s been a while since I shopped for one, but a Thinkpad X1 Carbon gen 13 starts at about 1 kg and has a pretty full keyboard.
rob74 11mo ago
Yes. So Microsoft (which manufactures hardware itself and has close ties to other hardware manufacturers) needed to find... other ways to, er, motivate people to buy new hardware anyway. Which brings us back to the blog post we are commenting on. Not sure Windows as a subscription service is the end goal though. But maybe we should all wish for M$ to do that, maybe that would be what's needed to finally bring about the Year of The Linux Desktop™.
- kgwxd 11mo ago
  > motivate people to buy new hardware Open source drivers, and a sense that Linux support will forever be top priority, would be a motivator for me. Most of my tech spend has been with Valve in the past few years. I'd love if there was another company I actually enjoy giving my money to.
  - kalaksi 11mo ago
    May I suggest Framework (https://frame.work/linux https://frame.work/linux).
- CrossVR 11mo ago
  I don't think selling more hardware is the primary motivation. The motivation is ensuring everyone has TPM 2.0 enabled on their device. This allows Microsoft to protect parts of their software even from the user that owns the hardware it's running on. With TPM enabled you finally give up the last bit of control you had over the software running on your hardware.
  - sixtyj 11mo ago
    And clever people found out the way - https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/bypass-windows-11-tpm-requirement https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/bypass-windows-11-tpm-re...
    - bitwize 11mo ago
      Windows 12 will close the loophole: your CPU will require a signed code path from boot down to application level code. No option to disable Secure Boot or install your own keys. But there needs to be an installed base of secure hardware for this to happen, hence the TPM 2.0 requirements for Windows 11.
chocochunks 11mo ago
Any computer that can't run Windows 11 is almost a decade old. There has been plenty of improvement. Compare a laptop with a high end Intel i7 7920HK to even a lower end part like the Core Ultra 5 226V. Right now prices on pre-builts and laptops aren't totally reflecting the craziness at least.
- detritus 11mo ago
  Cool, but my decade-old machine works perfectly well for my needs, as too I imagine a million other such machines.
  - chocochunks 11mo ago
    I'm sure it works, but that doesn't mean there hasn't been improvements.
    - ErroneousBosh 11mo ago
      Not really. Improvements like what? I have a brand-new work laptop which absolutely crawls compared to my nearly-15-year-old Thinkpad T430. Is this slowness the Windows 11 advantage? My personal laptop runs plain ordinary Ubuntu 24.04 perfectly, and everything works.
      - makapuf 11mo ago
        In my experience, i don't consider work laptops as worth anything performance wise since they're loaded up with antivirus, scanning and compulsory work sync software accessing the network for every mouse click that means it crawls and has half second latency for anything.
    - jazzyjackson 11mo ago
      Not a lot of people benefit from having 20 cores to hit.
    - LtWorf 11mo ago
      If by improvements you mean that suspend works like shit on newer machines, yes there have been.
horizion2025 11mo ago
Well it also means it could be a good time to buy so you won't have to pay even more overprice for the same performance years down the line. I just bought one a good month ago. My old one was over 10 years old, not worn out, but not upgradeable to Win 11. I had been thinking waiting one more year before the security updates to Win10 are out... But I bought in when the first stories hit of the DDR5 price rises - at that time there had 'only' been a doubling, now the price is a further 3x of what I paid a good month ago. I thought it might be a good time to buy given the machine was so old and component prices were going up, and might for a long time. But yeah, performance improvements aren't what they used to. Part of the reason is that normal things were already felt so fast on the old one ;-) But I did get a much better gfx cards allowing some games that were unplayable before, and I think the CPU upgrade was needed for that as well, and then you might as well overhaul the machine. I also went from 16 to 64 GB, and the 16 GB had been a bit too little for some things.
JoshTriplett 11mo ago
> There is no price/performance improvement. Both performance and performance-per-watt continue to improve with each new generation of CPUs.
- VerifiedReports 11mo ago
  But that is squandered by piss-poor programming and stupid visual gimmicks. I had to return to Windows as a daily work platform after a long time away (on Macs). I already knew that it had devolved into a grotesquely defective, regressive parade of UI blunders and deleted functionality... but its actual performance is TERRIBLE. I'm waiting for simple operations that I wouldn't have expected to wait for 20 years ago, even on bog-standard office desktop machines.
  - RickyLahey 11mo ago
    it really depends what you are using your computer for a 128GB SoC m4 pro max can do pretty wild data science with close to a terabyte/second speed without the latency of typical offloading/back-and-forth
    - VerifiedReports 11mo ago
      I don't think many people are running Windows on that...
  - IIsi50MHz 10mo ago
    Yes, occasionally using old systems from decades ago can drive this home. Copying a tiny file at 1.1 MB/s should feel instantaneous. But on Win 10 and Win 11 with an SSD, you can get a multisecond progressbar. And if you dare to cancel this tiny operation (because you chose the wrong destînation or wrong file), you get another progressbar. Opening a folder window for a local directory with only a few items in it should never trigger a "Working on it…" message. It should be instantaneous. Searching for filenames with a substring "foo", when an item "foobar" was already visible on the screen, should never result in failing to find "foobar", nor in a long delays before showing any items. VoidTools Everything displays live results as you type. Windows 10/11 often fails on both counts even when searching "indexed" locations; Outook also seems to also suffer from this inability to reliably include in search results items that were already on display. Something is deeply wrong with search. Devs should be required test against machines hobbled to run at most 10% of rated speed, and to make it buttery smooth. Would also be nice to have all my screenspace back by being able to turn off what appears to be Simply Enormous Margins & Padding mode…
gldrk 11mo ago
I’m actually happy about DRAM prices and hope more people share your mindset. This is the only thing that can force developers to start optimizing memory usage instead of externalizing the costs onto the poorest users.
- tyjen 11mo ago
  I sincerely hope it works out this way instead of pricing out open sourced development. A couple open sourced projects changed their licensing to help mitigate the increased cost burden from skyrocketing hardware costs. It'll be a sad and potentially dangerous day if most people are permanently priced out.
- doctorpangloss 11mo ago
  the #1 computing platform is the phone, 99.99% of users experience no memory pressure on iPhones
  - anthk 11mo ago
    Meanwhile Android rules the rest of the world. And current iOS is not light, ever.
pwg 11mo ago
> Why would anyone want to buy a new computer now unless the old one is worn out? There is no price/performance improvement. Which is exactly why MS is pivoting to begging you to buy a new computer by harassing you with an apparently undismissable "upgrade" dialog. They have to keep the upgrade treadmill running, and lacking "better performance" as the bait, they have resorted to outright harassment.
stainablesteel 11mo ago
so my linux installation can be even faster
the__alchemist 11mo ago
More faster. I experienced huge performance boosts from upgrading CPU recently and GPU a bit back. (As always) Compile times, game frame rates, computation time for simulations.
johnnyanmac 11mo ago
I'm getting to that point where I may need to upgrade. Now I need to delay it more because AI is gonna make electronics even more expensive than the tarriffs in 2026. 2026 seems to just be becoming the "please don't break" era unless I can find some proper work this time. Car is on its last legs, a variety of housing appliances to repair, computer I use professionally. If nothing else, I upgraded my phone this year so that should get me through 2028 at least.
j2kun 11mo ago
I had to upgrade to get DDR5, for one.

by Animats 11mo ago

markus_zhang 11mo ago

My only complain is that nowadays laptops are usually poorly built, so unless one purchases an expensive guarantee, anything beyond the default guarantee is not guaranteed.

cm2187 11mo ago
And the manufacturers are in a quest to remove as many keys as they can from the keyboard. Like you can hardly find any light laptop today with page up/down keys anymore. Why?.... Haven't these guys heard of keyboard shortcuts?
- arccy 11mo ago
  don't you like doing finger contortions to use all the modifier keys?
  - cm2187 11mo ago
    I think it is the single most convincing proof that we are being secretly replaced by lizard people with 8 fingers!
    - AdrianB1 11mo ago
      8 fingers to each of the 4 hands, to be clear :)
  - gerdesj 11mo ago
    You probably didn't grow up with horrors like the WordPerfect function key strip or being faced with a keyboard like that on the ZX80/81/Speccy etc.
    - sixtyj 11mo ago
      Yes, it's a miracle that after 40 years of typing every day, my fingers still work. But that may be a biased view on my part; there may be lots of programmers out there with arthritis in their fingers, carpal tunnel syndrome, and other occupational diseases.
  - OptionOfT 11mo ago
    They aren't always the same: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20110809-00/?p=9943 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20110809-00/?p=99... Also, even when they are the same, on certain laptops you literally hit the key-rollover problem.
- markus_zhang 11mo ago
  Oh yeah, they sometimes put page up and down on up and down which infuriates me very much. There are other issues like less USB ports, but overall quality is poor comparing to MacBooks.
- userbinator 11mo ago
  I suspect it's gradual cost-cutting. At the manufacturing scales they're operating with, even one keyswitch adds up.
- ack_complete 11mo ago
  Worse than that, there's no consistency in Fn+key shortcuts. Recently acquired an HP Ergonomic Keyboard as a replacement for a broken Sculpt, only to find out that it literally cannot send Ctrl+Break -- there's no key for it, no Fn+key shortcut for it and the remapping software doesn't simulate it properly.
  - intrasight 11mo ago
    Buy the keyboard you want. There are plenty of good ones.
    - OJFord 11mo ago
      They're talking about laptops, rarely any choice besides ANSI/ISO; maybe a few countries' accents and layouts of the latter.
      - ack_complete 11mo ago
        The keyboard I was mentioning isn't a laptop keyboard, actually, but laptop keyboards tend to be in a slightly better spot as the major vendors typically have Fn shortcuts for the missing keys, like Fn+B for Break, and they also document them in the user guides. Detached keyboards seem to be more of a wild west, especially when they target multiplatform -- and it's always the stuff they don't document that screws you.
- VerifiedReports 11mo ago
  Nothing tops Apple's infantile refusal to put a (real) Delete key on their laptops. Instead, they have a Backspace key mislabeled "delete." When the Eject key became obsolete, Apple had a perfect opportunity to fix this omission with essentially no effort. NOPE. Meanwhile, everybody else managed to have a proper Delete key on their laptops.
  - joshka 11mo ago
    A hill that I'll die on is that Apple's terminology is more correct than PC terminology for this. Backspace makes sense if you see the computer as a fancy typewriter. Delete makes sense if you consider the actions from first principles. Consider the various forms of deletion (forward, backward, word, file deletion, etc.) Each of these just has a modifier key in Apple's way of thinking. (None, Fn, Option, Cmd) which makes complete sense when viewed against how consistent it is with the whole set of interface design guidelines for Apple software. The only reason that this doesn't make sense is that it's incompatible with your world view brought from places with different standards. They will never "fix" this as there's just nothing to fix.
    - Findecanor 11mo ago
      > Backspace makes sense if you see the computer as a fancy typewriter. Backspace on a typewriter only moved the position (~cursor) back one space. Hence why its symbol is the same as the left arrow key's. Backwards Delete was a separate additional key, if the typewriter even had one, and its symbol was a cross inside an outlined left-arrow: ⌫. Current Apple keyboard has this symbol on the "Backspace" key in some regions instead of the text "delete", but older ones did have the left arrow. Apple calling it "Delete" goes back to Apple II. Many other older computer platforms also called it "Delete". DEC used the ⌫ symbol.
      - rzzzt 11mo ago
        At least you don't have to type the same letters while holding a thin tape over your screen to erase them! Apple also had separate Return and Enter symbols on keyboards for a while, which also sounds like typewriter territory but their intended use was a bit different: https://creativepro.com/a-tale-of-two-enter-keys/ https://creativepro.com/a-tale-of-two-enter-keys/
- crazygringo 11mo ago
  I dunno, I actually prefer Fn+Up/Dn. I just find it more logical, and it feels standard to me now. I press them surely hundreds of times a day and have no problem with it.
- devilbunny 11mo ago
  It’s been a while since I shopped for one, but a Thinkpad X1 Carbon gen 13 starts at about 1 kg and has a pretty full keyboard.

rob74 11mo ago

Yes. So Microsoft (which manufactures hardware itself and has close ties to other hardware manufacturers) needed to find... other ways to, er, motivate people to buy new hardware anyway. Which brings us back to the blog post we are commenting on. Not sure Windows as a subscription service is the end goal though. But maybe we should all wish for M$ to do that, maybe that would be what's needed to finally bring about the Year of The Linux Desktop™.

kgwxd 11mo ago
> motivate people to buy new hardware Open source drivers, and a sense that Linux support will forever be top priority, would be a motivator for me. Most of my tech spend has been with Valve in the past few years. I'd love if there was another company I actually enjoy giving my money to.
- kalaksi 11mo ago
  May I suggest Framework (https://frame.work/linux https://frame.work/linux).
CrossVR 11mo ago
I don't think selling more hardware is the primary motivation. The motivation is ensuring everyone has TPM 2.0 enabled on their device. This allows Microsoft to protect parts of their software even from the user that owns the hardware it's running on. With TPM enabled you finally give up the last bit of control you had over the software running on your hardware.
- sixtyj 11mo ago
  And clever people found out the way - https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/bypass-windows-11-tpm-requirement https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/bypass-windows-11-tpm-re...
  - bitwize 11mo ago
    Windows 12 will close the loophole: your CPU will require a signed code path from boot down to application level code. No option to disable Secure Boot or install your own keys. But there needs to be an installed base of secure hardware for this to happen, hence the TPM 2.0 requirements for Windows 11.

chocochunks 11mo ago

Any computer that can't run Windows 11 is almost a decade old. There has been plenty of improvement. Compare a laptop with a high end Intel i7 7920HK to even a lower end part like the Core Ultra 5 226V. Right now prices on pre-builts and laptops aren't totally reflecting the craziness at least.

detritus 11mo ago
Cool, but my decade-old machine works perfectly well for my needs, as too I imagine a million other such machines.
- chocochunks 11mo ago
  I'm sure it works, but that doesn't mean there hasn't been improvements.
  - ErroneousBosh 11mo ago
    Not really. Improvements like what? I have a brand-new work laptop which absolutely crawls compared to my nearly-15-year-old Thinkpad T430. Is this slowness the Windows 11 advantage? My personal laptop runs plain ordinary Ubuntu 24.04 perfectly, and everything works.
    - makapuf 11mo ago
      In my experience, i don't consider work laptops as worth anything performance wise since they're loaded up with antivirus, scanning and compulsory work sync software accessing the network for every mouse click that means it crawls and has half second latency for anything.
  - jazzyjackson 11mo ago
    Not a lot of people benefit from having 20 cores to hit.
  - LtWorf 11mo ago
    If by improvements you mean that suspend works like shit on newer machines, yes there have been.

horizion2025 11mo ago

Well it also means it could be a good time to buy so you won't have to pay even more overprice for the same performance years down the line. I just bought one a good month ago. My old one was over 10 years old, not worn out, but not upgradeable to Win 11. I had been thinking waiting one more year before the security updates to Win10 are out... But I bought in when the first stories hit of the DDR5 price rises - at that time there had 'only' been a doubling, now the price is a further 3x of what I paid a good month ago. I thought it might be a good time to buy given the machine was so old and component prices were going up, and might for a long time. But yeah, performance improvements aren't what they used to. Part of the reason is that normal things were already felt so fast on the old one ;-) But I did get a much better gfx cards allowing some games that were unplayable before, and I think the CPU upgrade was needed for that as well, and then you might as well overhaul the machine. I also went from 16 to 64 GB, and the 16 GB had been a bit too little for some things.

JoshTriplett 11mo ago

> There is no price/performance improvement. Both performance and performance-per-watt continue to improve with each new generation of CPUs.

VerifiedReports 11mo ago
But that is squandered by piss-poor programming and stupid visual gimmicks. I had to return to Windows as a daily work platform after a long time away (on Macs). I already knew that it had devolved into a grotesquely defective, regressive parade of UI blunders and deleted functionality... but its actual performance is TERRIBLE. I'm waiting for simple operations that I wouldn't have expected to wait for 20 years ago, even on bog-standard office desktop machines.
- RickyLahey 11mo ago
  it really depends what you are using your computer for a 128GB SoC m4 pro max can do pretty wild data science with close to a terabyte/second speed without the latency of typical offloading/back-and-forth
  - VerifiedReports 11mo ago
    I don't think many people are running Windows on that...
- IIsi50MHz 10mo ago
  Yes, occasionally using old systems from decades ago can drive this home. Copying a tiny file at 1.1 MB/s should feel instantaneous. But on Win 10 and Win 11 with an SSD, you can get a multisecond progressbar. And if you dare to cancel this tiny operation (because you chose the wrong destînation or wrong file), you get another progressbar. Opening a folder window for a local directory with only a few items in it should never trigger a "Working on it…" message. It should be instantaneous. Searching for filenames with a substring "foo", when an item "foobar" was already visible on the screen, should never result in failing to find "foobar", nor in a long delays before showing any items. VoidTools Everything displays live results as you type. Windows 10/11 often fails on both counts even when searching "indexed" locations; Outook also seems to also suffer from this inability to reliably include in search results items that were already on display. Something is deeply wrong with search. Devs should be required test against machines hobbled to run at most 10% of rated speed, and to make it buttery smooth. Would also be nice to have all my screenspace back by being able to turn off what appears to be Simply Enormous Margins & Padding mode…

gldrk 11mo ago

I’m actually happy about DRAM prices and hope more people share your mindset. This is the only thing that can force developers to start optimizing memory usage instead of externalizing the costs onto the poorest users.

tyjen 11mo ago
I sincerely hope it works out this way instead of pricing out open sourced development. A couple open sourced projects changed their licensing to help mitigate the increased cost burden from skyrocketing hardware costs. It'll be a sad and potentially dangerous day if most people are permanently priced out.
doctorpangloss 11mo ago
the #1 computing platform is the phone, 99.99% of users experience no memory pressure on iPhones
- anthk 11mo ago
  Meanwhile Android rules the rest of the world. And current iOS is not light, ever.

pwg 11mo ago

> Why would anyone want to buy a new computer now unless the old one is worn out? There is no price/performance improvement. Which is exactly why MS is pivoting to begging you to buy a new computer by harassing you with an apparently undismissable "upgrade" dialog. They have to keep the upgrade treadmill running, and lacking "better performance" as the bait, they have resorted to outright harassment.

stainablesteel 11mo ago

so my linux installation can be even faster

the__alchemist 11mo ago

More faster. I experienced huge performance boosts from upgrading CPU recently and GPU a bit back. (As always) Compile times, game frame rates, computation time for simulations.

johnnyanmac 11mo ago

I'm getting to that point where I may need to upgrade. Now I need to delay it more because AI is gonna make electronics even more expensive than the tarriffs in 2026. 2026 seems to just be becoming the "please don't break" era unless I can find some proper work this time. Car is on its last legs, a variety of housing appliances to repair, computer I use professionally. If nothing else, I upgraded my phone this year so that should get me through 2028 at least.

j2kun 11mo ago

I had to upgrade to get DDR5, for one.