I'm glad that Framework exists for the primary reason Kris mentions in this article. Though on a side note, I think the chassis is ugly but for some reason I like the XPS laptops which aren't all that much more attractive. Maybe it's a branding thing. I digress. I'm typing this on a desktop that is a decade old, and I just Ship of Theseus'd it over the years.[1][2][3][4][5]
I hope that this becomes more common for laptops soon. I think there's potential for an ATX-for-laptops layout, though I admit that would probably lead to slightly chonkier notebooks than what we use today. Maybe not though! Framework did it.
I still have to 3d print the enclosure for the gen11 motherboard to become a headless low power consumption server in my home, but I test booted it and it worked :).
Note: my previous laptop was a Dell 7480 but the soldered USB-C port and the ethernet port are now unreliable, hopefully the design of the frame.work will allow a much longer lasting hardware (and reusable motherboard :)
Also because of working most of the time in the same place, I have decided to not invest in a new laptop.
However the solution that I have chosen for travelling, when that is necessary, is different.
For my work, I need a large number of peripheral ports, as many Thunderbolt, USB Ethernet ports as possible and enough ports for multiple monitors. I also need at least 64 GB of DRAM, which excludes a very large number of the current laptop models, especially among the AMD models, which cannot be configured with so much memory.
Also, after becoming older, I strongly prefer a larger display, so I would want a laptop with a 17" display.
While there are a lot of laptop models that match my requirements, they are also very expensive and quite heavy.
I have realized that I can get all the features that I want at a much lower price and even at a lower weight, by using an Intel NUC or similar computer, together with a portable 17" monitor and a compact keyboard for the occasions when I have to carry it.
Even when I have used laptops, I have never used them on my lap or in any place where there was no power plug, so their advantages for such uses do not matter for me.
Besides the lower price and weight, the NUC solution also has the advantage of a better performance than most laptops using the same CPU, due to a better cooler that allows a high steady-state power dissipation without thermal throttling (e.g. in the current Wall Street Canyon Intel NUCs, the Alder Lake P CPUs with a nominal TDP of 28 W are configured to dissipate 35 W for an indefinite time, while many thin laptops with Alder Lake P cannot dissipate even 28 W without throttling).
I can't really make up if this is a joke or not. Assuming it isn't, seriously ? If someone needs a laptop the pre-requisite is to be portable. This solution is not a laptop replacement. Why not simply move around with your desktop ? Actually this is what is suggested, monitor et al.
When you have monitors at the destination, e.g. when commuting between home and office, it is much easier to carry in the backpack or in the briefcase a NUC than a laptop. A NUC-like computer weighs much less than 1 kg, typically between 0.3 kg and 0.5 kg.
Even if you go e.g. in a business trip and you carry with you a portable 17" inch monitor (weight around 1 kg) and a compact keyboard, the weight is less than that of an equivalent 17" mobile workstation, which weighs between 2.5 kg and 3.5 kg.
So yes, a NUC is much easier to carry than a large laptop, and when you already have a monitor at the destination it is much easier to carry than the thinnest and lightest ultrabook.
I have carried NUCs daily to the office for years, because it was much more convenient than carrying the laptop, but previously I have not also used them for most business trips, because I did not have a portable monitor.
A NUC can be also battery-powered like a laptop, e.g. by using a laptop charger from Anker or similar, but I have needed this very seldom.
I understand. Just talking about weight a Macbook 16" is 2 Kg. So it would be much lighter, more integrated then carrying around all these pieces. If you go in a business trip you need the integration and battery of a laptop. Allright, this is not a 17" inches but you can easily increase the text size if needed.
Of course to each its own and is perfect that this solution works for you. But suggesting that is a lighter alternative to a real, modern laptop is incorrect. As it is the article that seems to advocate using obsolete browsers, obsolete editors and no modern software for the sake of saving money or the World.
The truth is that whomever depends on a computer for paid work needs performance. New processors (like the apple M1) are much faster than a 6-7 years old laptop. And, if the green cause is important, much more efficient energy management and longer battery life.
If you need power and quality (think images/video editing) you can't work with software and hardware of a decade (of two decades ago).
Yes, it's the performance standards that keep me in the market.
While the embedded energy cost in new devices is noteworthy, I've run through the causes and consequences, and we still have a rationale to keep pushing up performance and energy at hardware level before trying to gut features.
And once you get on that treadmill, you're generally stuck buying at the same price points because when you go downmarket, the manufacturers will remove I/O and BIOS settings, solder the flash drive, etc.
That said, buying slightly old(even refurbished with no wear) is a great savings and I always tend to opt towards that for computers.
I think the trend with macbook pros without a display ( will swap over to us) with monitors at different places or a virtual reality device with some tool like immersed.
its lighter without a display, everything else is included ( keyboard, trackpad, batteries, sound and so on)
I guess you cannot call it a 'luggable' like in days of yore, since it is not heavy, but I wonder if there's a snazzy term for a portable headless computer...
I guess "portable" can mean many things. A laptop is nice to have while traveling, in the car, on the train, or when I just want to sit on the couch or on the terrace while working on hobby stuff.
And a NUC is great when I visit my parents for two weeks but want to keep working remotely. That way I don't have to disassemble my gaming setup (thinking of cable management), or worry that something happens to the PC. It's still a great remote working experience, and cheaper than a capable laptop.
I see the appeal in both. But to be honest, I'm not in need for a high end machine for my work, nor hobbies, so I just use a work laptop for work, and spin up gitpod for my own stuff, which a chromebook could run.
Thanks for sharing. I feel that this is the point of the article too "if you don't need a high end machine...." but if you do you can't really afford to change your laptop after 10 years when most of the software won't run anymore and no securities updates are circulating for 5+ years.
I find this type of advice (change your laptop only every 10 years to save the world) irresponsible to say the least.
Imagine visiting a medical doctor with obsolte X-Ray technology, lab analysis tools etc. I wouldn't feel comfortable with that regardless of the money they saved or the illusionary "save the world" green footprint.
Of course none of this matter if one doesn't require the latest technology or software (e.g. Adobe etc.).
> no securities updates are circulating for 5+ years
I don't understand this one. My laptop was born with Ubuntu 14.04 (actually it came with Windows 7, I formatted it with Linux out of the box) and software still runs and I'm still getting security updates. I'm on Ubuntu 20.04 now. Would it be different if I was on Windows? I think I would be on Windows 10 now.
The only problems I could think about are: software needs some new graphic card or more memory that could fit into the laptop. Add the lack of spare parts, but this is another kind of failure.
I've done a lot of med tech, and I can assure you, outside of most large hospitals (and even many of those.) The tech is staggeringly out of date by most standards.
Getting things approved as a medical device, and then updating the software, operating system, etc.. for it is a huge pain in the ass.
I know that wasn't the point, but just wanted to mention it.
> In the 1990's the Ergo Brick achieved significant acclaim due to its unique design. Before powerful notebook computers came along, Ergo defined the category "transportable computer" with grace and power. You used a Brick if you wanted portable horsepower (in contrast with wimpy early notebooks).
Buddy of mine sent a picture years ago of a guy who brought his iMac into the local Starbucks and did his work there on that machine, at a table, for hours.
I’ve gone the opposite way. After having used the MacBook Air with the M1, I don’t want anything bigger. I have a 16” MacBook Pro and that’s honestly to big for me to get any real use out of it as a laptop. I’d like to move around more, but not with something of the size.
If I need the big screen, or keyboard I just “dock” it to a USB-C monitor.
I've been thinking about doing that but what do you do about the monitor? I imagine you're not bringing one with you (maybe you're moving one around your home), but what happens when you move to work in other places? Customers, friend's places, restaurants, etc.
I use the m1 air for web development and the 16:10 aspect ratio combined with the retina screen and the gestures to easily swipe between full screen applications makes it feel less cramped than the 14 inch 1080p thinkpad it replaced. I never feel the need to hook it up to external displays. Of course, YMMV.
I don't want to sound dimissive but if you code anything more than 90's stuff an 11 years old desktop won't cut it. Especially if you have an apple computer. Such a model is not just obsolete but would open a lot of security issues.
Invest in a laptop? With the current prices pretty much everyone that uses a computer professionally can afford a laptop.
Until last year I used a 2011 iMac with Linux, 24gb of RAM and an SSD. Quite a bit better in performance and security than laptops I've seen engineers issued last year.
the key is "with linux". Try developing iOS apps or do anything within the apple ecosystem (e.g. check your photos?). Not viable for 99.9% of mac users.
My computer was too old for Apple, a characteristic similar to saying 90% of brand new laptops are too blonde. There are very few modern Apple development machines but anyone with an old desktop can make most modern software. (There are also plenty of exceptions where an Arm laptop isn't usable in software development, so nothing is universal.)
Thanks, I didn't know much about that and it could be helpful with relatives, etc.
Most of the Apple hardware bought for me has been by employers who understood I wasn't going to use Apple software. In the big scheme of things, it is better to have a reduced set of drivers and pay a bit more than have an employee fiddling on drivers because Acer skimmed another $1 off their motherboard cost.
My 2011 desktop has a 3.5GHz 4-core i7 processor, 32GB of RAM and of a 1TB SSD.
In the interim there's been the adoption of USB-C, improvements in energy efficiency and widespread 4K display support - but raw performance numbers aren't much changed. Go to Dell with $2000 and with the laptop performance penalty they'll offer you... pretty much the same specs, except the CPU will have some extra 'efficiency' cpu cores and be called '11th generation' instead of '2nd generation'.
Are you perhaps thinking of some previous decade, where 10 years meant 20x the clockspeed and 2x the cores?
I do all my development on a remote server, so I really just need a terminal emulator and an internet connection. I could work with a raspberry pi if I needed to. Sure, fundamentally it's just moving the problem of where the expensive computer is, but now there's only needs to be one of them.
This is what finally convinced me to move from a 2011 MBP. The trend of offloading everything to the GPU on a system that has the weakest of GPUs killed that computer as useable.
Excellent article! I too have moved towards buying refurbished laptops only and using them for as long as I can. Thinkpads are a decent line for this as they're built to be user-serviceable and have a great market for parts.
The hard part is actually the software. Many industry developers will definitely choose convenience and ease-of-development over most other priorities like efficiency. Operating systems as well.
The problem is that the last ThinkPad really was happy with was the X61s . Once I switched away, I now see myself buying newer models in the hope they get their thermal issues fixed.
I used a laptop made in 2004 that I bought in 2005 as my daily portable driver till 2018 lol. I still have it. It's a Toshiba Portege 3110ct that I added a USB2.0 PCMCIA card to, IDE SSD, and bumped the ram to 192MB. Ran a customized stripped down debian based distribution with a lot of customizing on my part. A USB wifi adapter. Has a 300mhz pentium 2 CPU. Did literally everything I needed on a laptop perfectly fine (ssh sessions, IRC, pandora streaming, light web browsing, note taking etc).
My current laptop is a ~10 year old Dell. Has a 4TB SATA SSD in it, 1TB secondary SATA SSD in the media bay using an adapter. I have two mediabay batteries as well as a BDRW drive I can hotswap whenever. Extended primary battery. 16GB ram, i5-3360 CPU. Express Card slot that I use with several adapters, USB3 ports, onboard gige, WWAN card, Wifi, BT, backlit keyboard..
If you aren't /needing/ the extra grunt of newer chips for gaming, video work, low latency realtime audio work, CAD, etc, or want the absolute best size to battery life possible, then there is no reason to not use an older system.
Oh, it has an NVidia 5200M 1GB discrete GPU as well as the Intel IGP and the NVS has taken a massive overclock without blinking when I do want to game and runs stuff like Minecraft and older AAA and even new independent games at playable frame rates without any issues.
Now, for /work/ I have a newer MS Surface Book that I absolutely adore. The battery life and display and portability are fantastic.
But it is my work laptop. Not personal. I refuse to buy a brand new laptop for home use lol.
I'm completely on board with getting a long, full life out of a laptop.
The only problem is that we've got plenty of thought-to-be-durable laptops around that are complete garbage, including a high-end Thinkpad. It's really sad to see.
That said, our M1 MacBook Pro, an X1 carbon, and (very surprisingly) a Microsoft Surface Laptop Go (the cheap one that had terrible reviews - but with the SSD) are looking excellent in terms of long-term durability.
I've got a bunch of Surface Gos (goes?) in warehousing and they have outlasted everything else I've tried for the application, including the purpose built industrial devices from Zebra and Caterpillar.
We have a bunch of Surface Laptops and Surface Books (looove the books) where I work (auto parts factory) that have survived better than they have any right to. I dunno wtf the previous IT was thinking getting them. They have 8 million magnets and are constantly covered in weld dust. But they keep right on working... shorting out power bricks and docks as they go though. In the process of retiring all of them but I have already cleaned up and let several people take their units home as they still get 5-10 hours of battery out of them and have no other issues. It is kind of wild how durable they have been.
The Surface Go was not a performant computer when it was released. At least the Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz Dell with 8GB RAM that was introduced in 2011 that I mentioned earlier was top of line when it was introduced.
Anything >= 1995 is enough for word processing offline. Maybe even anything 10 years older. The big problem here is that laptops from that era have clumsy screens and are loud as a jet. Battery life might be a problem too.
The real problem is exchanging data with the rest of the world. My old backup laptop from 2006 (Core Duo 2 7xxx) is probably still OK to browse with an adblocker. I'm not sure it would be OK to edit on a site with a SPA frontend (Medium, etc.)
My current laptop is from 2014 (i7 4xxx) and it's still perfectly OK to do anything I care about. It was never OK to do other stuff (e.g.: gaming or ML, which was not a thing back then.) Of course it's slower than more modern hardware but not by so much for what I have to do () Certainly not for browsing or word processing.
() It's slower than my customer's M1 on Rails test suites (5 s vs 8 s on a project and 50 s vs 75 s on another one). To be fair, my customer is handicapped by running docker on his Mac but docker and the M1 are their choices.
I’ve owned a laptop since I was remarkably young mostly for typing documents on initially.
Yes older laptops can do an okay job, but they’re heavy, bulky, have low battery life, and dim low-ppi screens. Something like a 1080p Chromebook even with Linux installed is not that expensive and a nice experience. I’ve seen some people who will retrofit the old shells with modern components, I can see the appeal in these, but honestly these old computers really aren’t that good at just typing. There’s something to be said about the waste of the extra cells of batteries you will burn though lol.
I appreciate the environmental concern but I want to be real bout this aspect, because I HAD to use these computers for the purposes the author talks about. I have two of these old thinkpads that people rave about, both have fallen into disrepair and I keep one body around because I’m sure some modder will eventually be interested.
Old computers also have LOTS of issues with things like video playback.
I feel like video playback is something that very rarely pops up in these discussions. Yes your old laptop boots up and runs Linux and you can write emails and browse a forum, but video streaming is pretty much off the table at anything above 480p since these older laptops aren’t likely to support modern codecs.
They’re pretty useless to me on a daily driver perspective as things like Google Meet or Zoom similarly grenade the CPU and deliver a subpar experience in that regard.
I wish the lifespan of these machines were longer or had some form of an upgrade path like the Framework, as they’re contributing a pile to e-waste, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
I do keep a couple of old notebooks around for nostalgic purposes and occasional vintage gaming, but I wouldn’t want to use one as my daily driver.
Most people won't use a random distribution of Linux that nobody has heard of or knows how long support will continue for. Security is a big issue for older tech that is left behind. Make sure to back up your files from older tech as there might be no way to get your data off the old storage devices that have been cast adrift.
There's one thing new laptops have which old laptops don't:
Warranty.
If you depend on your laptop for work, and one day it suddenly stops working, with the manufacturer's warranty (assuming you checked the correct boxes when buying the laptop) you can have a technician with spare parts the next day fixing it, and it'll be as good as new (and unless it was the storage device which failed, you won't even need to reinstall anything). After the warranty expires, things are more dicey; you might or might not find spare parts (assuming you know which spare part you need; a technician can come with several sets and take back the ones which weren't needed), if you do they might take some time to arrive, and if you don't, you have to buy a new laptop on a short notice (which might also take some time to arrive).
Unfortunately, the longest laptop extended warranty I've seen so far is only 5 years. Which means that, after 5 years of use, it becomes riskier to rely on it. It also means that the manufacturer expects it to work fine for 5 years (otherwise, they'd lose too much money on the technicians and spare parts), but not much longer than that.
Warranty is like the extended warranty on cars. Largely you are overpaying for it and not gonna use it. Vendors use scare tactics to force consumers to keep overpaying for warranty (what if it breaks?), just like car stealerships do.
Meanwhile there is pretty significant chunk of people live just fine with laptop outside warranty. I have never ever used warranty on any of my laptops. If anything breaks - I just go to my nearest indie laptop repair shop, or just fix it myself (watch youtube video and order spare parts on ebay)
Lenovo and Toshiba screwed me over on a warranty. I had a power brick on another laptop die the day after it went out of warranty, only to find the replacement was > $100 (in the early 2000's).
I've heard other PC manufacturers are similarly bad. Do you know of any with a < 48 hour turn around time and a > 95% repair success rate?
As I sit here using my 2021 MacBook Pro 16” that is twice as fast as my old Mac, with 16 hours of battery life, can run Chrome and Slack without dispersing enough heat to fry an egg all while not sounding like a 747, I can definitely say laptops have changed immensely.
I also have a 2009 Dell Laptop 2.66Ghz Core 2 Duo with 8GB RAM running Windows 2010 that I just cleaned up to give my parents. None of the above is true.
Chrome and Slack are both resource hogs from hell. No one is arguing that the specific innards haven't changed a lot. They are arguing that for a lot of people, depending on what you are doing and what you need, can get by just fine on a laptop that is few years to 15 years old and be perfectly happy.
You are also trying to compare a laptop an entirely different architecture that literally just came out to the other.
I mean, honestly, there were plenty of "arm laptops" the past 20 years and a lot of them ran cold to the touch and got 16+ hours of battery life. I know as I had several (Psion netbooks etc). The new Macs are latest evolution of H/PCs that have been around for decades. They just happen to be much faster ;)
I didn’t choose an obscure use case like compiling the Linux kernel while editing 4K video. Chrome is a popular choice among Mac users.
On the other hand, you would be surprised how well Office365 runs on Windows 10 on my old Core2Duo 2.66Ghz Dell. It also has a beautiful 1920x1200 display before laptops went 16x9 and Gigabit Ethernet.
It was originally a company laptop for a failed startup I worked for and was to use to run Windows CE emulators while developing using .Net compact framework.
I've never seen people refer to processors by their ghz without giving a generation designation. I think stating what generation/model of c2d it is would be a far more effective means of communication that stating its ghz.
I had a dell studio with a t9660 that was a pretty good machine way back in the day. But you should refer to the cpu by its model number rather than by its ghz performance, since nobody will be able to identify it from that.
I haven't bought a computer in I don't know how long.
Mainly, I just get the cast offs from my extended family. I let them buy the newest and best and just use their old stuff. I have 2 desktops and 2 laptops, all cast offs. It's fine for my purposes. 99% of what I do is internet browsing, word processing, spreadsheets, VOIP and a few other low resource apps. Why do I need a brand new computer? What do I care if the chassis is ugly or not? Who cares about the "looks" of it? I mean, sure, if I worked in some area with intensive CPU stuff, like graphics, I can understand that. But I don't, and 90% of the world does not. My parents got a new computer last year, they went from an i7 to an i7, their old computer is 8 years old, everything works in a flash, still super fast.
A freaking i5 from 10 years ago is just fine. It's how I've always done it. I mean, if I purchased the two towers and two laptops brand new, in cash money, that would be $6000 or something like that. That would get me a lot of blow and hookers in Vegas. Let's keep our priorities straight, folks. For women..it would buy one little container of high-end mascara, so that's all to the good. Priorities.
I bought a 16 year old car because the price suits how rarely I use it.
It's good to me because it's the newest car I've ever owned. However sitting in someone else's car I realise that I could get an extra 50 horsepower for the same fuel consumption, as well as working air conditioning, and a few other creature comforts.
Yes, this car is simple in an almost brutalist fashion, and very easy to work on. There's also plenty of spare parts. But it's 16 years old and the bi-yearly inspections are getting scary. The last inspector pointed out that I'll need a new exhaust system soon.
I'm not sure what is a fitting death for an old, dependable car once its maintenance becomes impractical.
I feel the same way about an old laptop. My T510 is heavy, the battery life isn't great, and it's slow as molasses. I can't imagine carrying that behemoth around when I got used to a Macbook 12.
Interesting article but it looks a bit too focused on ecological impact of manufacturing one laptop (its pointless if one person will skip buying it, they make them in hundreds of thousands of exemplars) and the use case of "only using webrowser as light as possible and notepad for text, thats it"
I don't think cow anology is very appropriate. Technology is moving fast (well not as fast nowadays but still pretty fast) and if you don't update your tools your work will be as obsolte as your hardware. If any of your hardware is touching the internet running obsolete stuff is a big security risk. Vivaldi browser ? Notepad? seriously...
well said! I read it but the "only using webrowser as light as possible and notepad for text, thats it" gives it away. I am just surprised how many experienced coders don't realise that technology is moving fast and, if you use obsolte hardware, your work and code will be as obsolete.
Imagine having to do any testing for a mobile app or a new website and you go like "oh sorry I only use a light web browser" or having to code anything more complex than 90s cgi scripts "oh no I use only notepad" .
Or receiving an excel or word document to edit, notepad is not going to cut it.
> I am just surprised how many experienced coders don't realise that technology is moving fast and, if you use obsolte hardware, your work and code will be as obsolete.
I think the reverse: Silly to build software on a bleeding-edge machine then act surprised when it runs like trash on customers' hardware. Instead build it on a trash machine and it will fly on better hardware.
I expect it is not such a good strategy for those whose code can't stand on its own legs outside of a Chrome distribution or VM, though.
Most people have faster machines that they could RDP into when needing to test with a fully-featured browser. The key however is that this is a pretty rare need; you can do plenty of useful things without opening up a web browser at all. Even editing Office documents is a comparatively light workload these days.
You can do plenty of useful things without a computer too :-) but that is beside the point.
For business use you do need a browser. Fast, with security updates etc. For some people doing web development having access to professional products e.g. Adobe suite is a must too. And no, you can't do that on linux.
My new favorite laptop is my 11" ThinkPad 11e. It cost around US$200, it has 4 cores, 8GB of RAM, and a (small) NVME SSD. The battery lasts a full work/play day. The screen resolution is satisfactory for its size (1366x768), however I do wish the panel had better viewing angles.
On top of that it has 1Gb ethernet, full size HDMI, mini-SD card, USB-C charging, and a great little keyboard.
As a longtime "mac person" this capable, but ugly little laptop feels a bit freeing. I don't have to dote over it, worrying about breaking a $2k laptop, I get all the ports I need, and linux just works.
The article says building a new laptop uses between 3-4.3 megajoules. For reference, 4 megajoules is 1.1MWh, which is roughly 1 month of per-capita energy usage in the US/Europe:
These numbers seem suspiciously high. In the paper (from 2011), it estimated that laptops contain 871 grams of steel and 244 grams of epoxy, among other things (the total weight is 2kg more than a modern dell xps). The steel figure is from a teardown so that's believable to me, but definitely out of date. The epoxy is an estimate but seems incredulous to me, even for 2011. Does it really take 30-60 MJ to make a handful of glue?
My father in law said this about his last pickup truck:
"This is the last new truck I'll ever buy!"
"This truck does everything I don't need anything more!"
"Older trucks are better, I can work on them!"
He just took delivery of his 4th new truck since saying this.
While he does get good value from his truck (150K+ miles each) they don't last forever, they do improve (slightly) and despite his claims that "older trucks are better" he keeps buying new.
I used a Thinkpad 765d with Rhapsody (early developmental 'OS X' system from Apple that was not commercially available) from 2001-2006, then QNX on the same machine until 2012. My data was on a PCMCIA card.
At work I was using a Macbook Air by the time I gave up on the Thinkpad, and my Android phone was taking over a lot of my use. The Thinkpad was hardly deficient even ten years ago; the hinge was the biggest problem.
My understanding of Thinkpads is the big keyboard change happened with the upgrade from the X220/T420 to the X230/T430. I picked up a used X220 back in 2014 for school and it's still kicking today. I usually end up reinstalling some flavour of lightweight linux on it whenever it dig it out of storage again, and it's a joy to use.
x220 was amazing, can confirm. had it for 10 years and finally sold it after the 2nd battery that i replaced needed replacing. one of the best keyboards in a laptop, great solid case that was dropped countless times without an issue. i even took it for djing in clubs. what a machine.
In 2010 I bought an Acer 4810TG with Windows 7, I choose it for the battery, I was again at university far from home, once I have been able to run 7 Debian VM with 256MB RAM each for a network course.
It lasted 10 years upgrading hdd to ssd and incresing RAM.
But in the end I had to change PC, it couldn't run any browser, CPU was just too slow, even for Pale Moon.
An M1 Macbook Air is still the best laptop money can buy for general use, and they are easily had under $700. I cannot comprehend who is buying a $2000 laptop at this point outside of gamers and video editors.
I’m rocking a bit newer machine - but still eight years old. Glad I got it with maxxed out RAM and over the years I upgraded to a larger SSD. Had to replace the battery (it was bulging bad) and a few keys - but those costs were a fraction of buying a new machine.
Amazingly durable hardware that just works. Unfortunately new major Mac OS versions are no longer compatible. I figure when it breaks, if it’s gonna be more than $250 to fix it, that it might be time to move on.
It will be sad when it dies. It’s been around the world with me. Helped me accelerate my career, beachball during an interview which I think caused me to not get the job, and helped me for dozens others. In the end, it’s a tool, like many others, just with my memories attached.
Mine died last year and I upgraded to the 16" m1max. I was not happy to spend the money, but I think I can easily get another decade out of this new beast
My 2013 MacBook became so unreliable that it was unworkable. Getting 8 years from a laptop is pretty good, but in terms of speed I could have gone another two years, no problem.
My main concern buying old PC laptops is screen quality. It still possible to buy a laptop with a shitty screen in 2022, even a brand new one.
Company issued laptops are also weird. If you replace laptops every two years, the why buy the top of the line model? Sure some jobs just benefit from the exstra resources, but even many developers could easily do with less.
Because the hardware is very rarely the most expensive part of a business, especially in tech. Software developers are paid 50-100x what a laptop costs per year. And if the employee leaves, the laptop goes to a new one. In the meantime, those 2yo laptops the devs had often get passed on to HR, sales, etc. It's not like they get tossed out with the trash.
If getting new hardware makes an employee happy and/or allows them to get a job done even slightly faster, it's basically free to the company, so why not?
A personal machine is a very different cost/benefit calculation to a work box.
I have a 8-core 2008 MacPro (desktop) which is still going strong. I replaced the video card and it’s easy to swap in new hard drives. Only issue with Macs is apple stops allowing so upgrades.
going strong? you don't have security updates since..a decade. The browsers (I have such a machine too, for museum purposes and occasional fun) won't load most of the sites and will be super slow. I absolutely accept and respect whomever wishes to live in the past but technology is in the now. I do not understand people talking about "saving money". New hardware allows you to be faster and more efficiently. That is worth so much more than the machine cost.
You may want to spend some time researching the "hackintosh" community. I, too, have a 2012 Mac Pro that's running strong (hexacore, 48GB memory, 1TB NVME drive, 8GB video card). Courtesy of OpenCore (https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Install-Guide/) you can install new(er) versions of macOS on older hardware. I have all the security updates and don't need to update to newer hardware (albeit I did update the GPU and NVME drive, which for my purposes further extended the life of the machine).
Thanks for the hint. I am aware of this afecionados community. More power to them but none of this will make your old Mac grow an M1 processor.
My previous laptoop was an Macbook pro intel 64gb ram full specs. The M processor is much faster, even with just 16GB ram. Now if going strong means use the terminal, Vim etc. all is good.
If you use a laptop professionally you do want the latest updates from apple, not a Github repository.
>I absolutely accept and respect whomever wishes to live in the past but technology is in the now.
>Advocating obsolte hardware is just wrong.
I disagree; technology is simply a means to an end. If the user, being informed of alternatives, is satisfied with the experience, it's the right tool for the job.
I understand your point but I can't see a decade old laptop to be the right tool for the job unless you really don't use photos, videos, imag editing of any sort (adobe suite), office, etc. and your job is just on the terminal.
Of course there are (obsolete) alternatives to all these commercial "ecosystem" sofwares. I feel that some people don't upgrade (latops, phones) under the excuse that "it works for me, is the right tool for the job". Or worse: are simply afraid of learning new things and using new software.
I have a feeling that many reader feel like not updating the hardware is a sort of protest against big companies. It isn't as Apple is continuously selling more phones and laptops. My guess is that the younger audience wants to be updated, the older not so much.
This is entirely fine for a subset of people but not fine if you want to be competitive in the IT business.
If you do commercial work you need to be up to date and in line with your team and company demands. If time is important, a faster processor and software optimised for it, can save you many hours. This to me is worth fare more than the price of the hardware.
Of course there will be exceptions of coders being as efficient or more efficient with basic software and older hardware but why limit yourself?
Sure, if it meets their needs all is fine. But why limit knowledge but what you need/ed a decade ago when there is so much more in the new processors, software etc.? to save money? For what ?
My point is that the article seems to suggest that is a good idea to stop buying new laptops. It isn't.
They're still excellent laptops, even if the M1 models are ridiculously good. My 2017 rMBP still flies. Even my 2017 Macbook 12" is a capable tiny laptop.
3 month old account, 57 karma, strange name, history is full of aggressive comments, many of them downvoted and flagged. Somehow I don't think you're going to like his response.
EDIT: I took a deep dive and I no longer think this guy is a troll, just a complete weirdo. His favorite topics seem to be Apple computers and eating people, and that is not a joke or an exaggeration. Hilarious lunchtime read.
I hope that this becomes more common for laptops soon. I think there's potential for an ATX-for-laptops layout, though I admit that would probably lead to slightly chonkier notebooks than what we use today. Maybe not though! Framework did it.
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