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Mine: > More to the point, this is why the soi-disant-designer snob ... comes across as such a douchebag. It’s not “minimalist” if you buy a new one every two years; it’s conspicuous consumption with chamfered edges.
Weren't we also buying a new laptop every 2 years back when they had removable batteries?
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Design as crafty/minimalism/apple's aesthetic is irresponsible in that it refuses to acknowledge that things can break. Design which pays attention to the reality of a thing's environment and usage patterns, and which does not prompt conspicuous consumption of every brand new version after even the slightest failure of the old, is better.
Nah, it’s just realistic about the extent to which most users will want to repair their devices …
Can today's Thinkpads still hang with the best of them? (typed on a recently-upgraded late 2006 MBP)
I'm on my 3rd thinkpad. First one was a T30 that I got 12 years ago. I used it for 4 years and my mother for 4 years after that. I still have it and it still runs but it is now made out of parts from two T30s, the original, whose screen died, and another that had a bad hard drive. My T60p I used for 4 years and then my mother for 4 more years, it had to have its cpu fan replaced once about 6 years into its life, othe…
Oh, and you can only get ~6 hours of battery out of it with very particular settings and a specific power management driver in Windows 8. Otherwise it's 3-4 hours at best.
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Weren't we also buying a new laptop every 2 years back when they had removable batteries?
I'm still rocking my 2009 Thinkpad after passing on my 2007 model (too heavy for my tastes) to my kids.
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But CPU spring connectors don't last forever. If you want to ensure the CPU stays reliable for a good long time (at today's clock rates), you're going to have to solder it down.
source for that claim? Never heard of that, and outside of laptops or SFF boards it's really unusual to solder CPUs in.
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Nah, it’s just realistic about the extent to which most users will want to repair their devices …
Well, let's call that out then--folks should be honest that they buy un-repairable hardware at least partly because they enjoy having an excuse to get the latest model two years down the line.
Mechanically the devices are very solid and will survive for many years.
The biggest issue is the battery, really, and probably the power supply, both of which are costly (maybe 25% or so more than a replacement battery for another laptop, plus you have to bring in the MacBook to get it replaced, you can’t do it yourself), but can be replaced. Most people will just not do that, though, and live with diminished battery life and fraying power supply cables.
I think you are stuck in your filter bubble if you think people want to buy a new one quickly. Many will live happily with a current MacBook for many years. A decade ago the situation was a bit different (and performance crummy), but nowadays the speed is there.
The expense account is a reptile fund over drafted by senior management for spurious expenses, he travels, but to cold and boring places, usually on a budget and staying out of sight in cramped hotels and safe houses.
Instead of sleeping with beautiful women, he spends most of his time working, and being cheated on by his detached wife.
And when he actually makes it to the top, he just finds himself overburden with political machinations, stakeholder management, and longing for the time when he'd actually get something done.
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CPU's have been soldered to the motherboards of most laptops for an age now. Memory is beginning to be soldered to the motherboard too- I'm dubious as to how upgradable or modular the next generation will be.
The “soldered to the motherboard” memory on a $400 computer today costs 10,000 times less than the same quantity of memory in 1995. What’s the point of making something repairable generations down the line when nobody is going to still want it because you’ll be able to buy 10 new ones that are each 100 times better for the same price. The only computer parts from <2000 that are still worth keeping around today are th…
And yet I have a Dell Latitude CPx laptop from that era that is perfectly usable, and common parts are readily available via eBay (RAM, hard drives, battery, screen, etc). No, it's not going to play any modern games and no, it's not a good choice for compiling software. But OpenBSD, Slackware, and Debian all run surprisingly well on it given a light weight window manager. It's a good backup device for when my main laptop (also a "relic", a Dell Latitude D400 from 2003) is unavailable.