Oldest Viable Laptop (2017) • Hacker News Board

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#11

Post by davio » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 4:56 PM UTC

sverige wrote: post #8

larrik wrote: post #7

I'm genuinely surprised it doesn't have a touchpad. I don't think I've ever seen a laptop without one, and I used laptops back in the early/mid 90's.

It has the TrackPoint, which is sort of a famous love/hate feature. (I love it.) The ThinkPad is my favorite all-time laptop design. No surprise to me that the author is still using it after getting his MacBook back from the shop.

The TrackPoint is the Vim of pointing devices. Need a couple thousand hours to get proficient and then everything else is inferior.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#12

Post by bandrade » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 4:57 PM UTC

I use a 2012 Dell XPS 15 daily. I got it as a warranty replacement when my XPS 14 broke. I've given it an SSD and swapped a new battery once. Otherwise it does everything I ask of it except having more than 2 hours of battery life. I've wanted to buy something lighter (the XPS is 5+ pounds) for years but I can't justify it when the 7 year old laptop still works fine.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#13

Post by Deinos » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 4:57 PM UTC

Still running a Thinkpad x230t here. Outside the screen resolution while not docked, it has been great! It even survived a hard tumble down a flight of stairs 3 yrs ago; the only damage was a small gap along the seam of the external battery.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#14

Post by seiferteric » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 4:57 PM UTC

I have my ~2008 T61 as my pfsense router now. I was using it until about 2-3 years ago, but I felt it was barely usable anymore. I think anything with a Core 2 duo is past its useful life. Anything just slightly newer with Nehalem? I think would still be usable today.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#15

Post by zwieback » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 4:58 PM UTC

At work we get new corporate PCs every few years and I've rejected the offer twice now because the build quality of my Elitebook 8560w is better than the modern alternatives. I put in an SSD and lots of RAM so now I don't want to deal with the hassle of a new one.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#16

Post by Anarch157a » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 5:00 PM UTC

> Either laptop improvements are well into diminishing returns, or progress in hardware has stagnated, or both.

Sort of. The part about diminishing returns is arguably true, but hardware didn't stagnated.

What happened is that _software_ stopped bloating and inflating like a balloon, as was the norm through the '80s, '90s and early '00s.

When a Microsoft OS requires _less_ resources than it's predecessors (like early Win7 compared to early Vista), you know upgrade cycles will be much longer than before.

Unless you're handling high definition video or playing AAA games, of course. But for any other "mundane" task, the only reason to upgrade from a 5 or 6 years old machine would be an un-repairable hardware malfunction.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#17

Post by dsfyu404ed » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 5:00 PM UTC

I SSH into VMs and write email all day. I could get by with a text web browser at a slight loss of productivity during the steep part of the learning curve.

I could do my job on a laptop from the 90s if I really wanted to. I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#18

Post by initself » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 5:01 PM UTC

Still rocking T60p, with the NMB keyboard. If you haven't touched an NMB Thinkpad keyboard, you haven't actually used a proper Thinkpad.

One thing I found absolutely necessary to make my machine usable in 2019 was upgrading all the specs to the max.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#19

Post by initself » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 5:02 PM UTC

initself wrote: post #18

Still rocking T60p, with the NMB keyboard. If you haven't touched an NMB Thinkpad keyboard, you haven't actually used a proper Thinkpad. One thing I found absolutely necessary to make my machine usable in 2019 was upgrading all the specs to the max.

I do most of my work in a shell. But I love YouTube also! :)

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#20

Post by Anarch157a » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 5:04 PM UTC

sverige wrote: post #8

larrik wrote: post #7

I'm genuinely surprised it doesn't have a touchpad. I don't think I've ever seen a laptop without one, and I used laptops back in the early/mid 90's.

It has the TrackPoint, which is sort of a famous love/hate feature. (I love it.) The ThinkPad is my favorite all-time laptop design. No surprise to me that the author is still using it after getting his MacBook back from the shop.

I used to love it, back when Thinkpads still had real buttons to go with it. Then they replaced them with trackpad clicking, which makes using it a pain, because it'd usually register movements besides the click, completely defeating the best feature of the TrackPoint, it's pixel-perfect precision. It was never as quick to use as a mouse, of course, but I could always position the cursor exactly where I wanted before clicking.