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Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

geoff.greer.fm

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Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#91

Post by teekert »

markvdb wrote: post #9

2011 Lenovo Thinkpad X220 daily user here. Really nice machine really for my needs, running the latest Debian smoothly. I do have a spare ready to take over if needed. Old hardware could always die very suddenly. It's a frugal solution, both cheaper and more ecological than buying new.

Up until last month I used a MBP from early 2011 daily. I did get (over time) 16 GB ram, an SSD, new battery, GPU replace (by Apple for free due to an issue) and a new charger. Lost month it really died though, no idea what it is (not the ssd, not the ram).

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#92

Post by shereadsthenews »

Not sure it's really true that a 1997 laptop would not have been OK for 2007. I nursed a PowerBook G3 "Pismo" along until at least 2007. It had Rage 128 graphics and 1024x768 display just like this ThinkPad. Yes it had an upgraded G4 CPU and replacement batteries, but the X60 on which I am typing this message has a $$$ SSD in it, too.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#95

Post by saagarjha »

Anarch157a wrote: post #16

> 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…

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

I don't think this is true, especially with the growing trend towards web apps being repackaged as desktop applications.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#96

Post by tjr »

wwweston wrote: post #88

My daily driver is mid-2012 pre-retina MBP. It's entirely adequate. I fear the day it dies because there are no more non-glossy MBPs, and I'm either going to have to make the choice to give up a matte display or give up macOS. It did recently go down and I pulled out a 2008 MBP. Mostly adequate, lag does start to show, though. My guess is that it's an issue of constrained memory (max 4GB?) as much as processor. Tops…

I still use a 2010 MBP. I think it's at the end of MacOS X support. The battery doesn't last long. Rather than spend money buying a new battery, I should probably replace the whole laptop.

But it still works!

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#97

Post by alkonaut »

floatboth wrote: post #83
alkonaut wrote: post #63

Most 8-10 year old laptops are perfectly fine if you put an SSD in them. I just upgraded a 2011 mbp from 4GB and spinning disk to 8GB and SSD. The difference is remarkable. It wasn’t usable at all (as in trivial things like logging in could take minutes) and now it’s snappy. Old laptops without such upgrades aren’t really viable these days unless you work all day in a terminal.

ehh, 10 year old CPUs kinda suck. I upgraded from a 2010 MBA to a Thinkpad X240 in 2015, and it's been much better. The Penryn Core 2 Duo made the Macbook warm and noisy (the joke was that it's called Air because the fans push a lot of air all the time), while the Haswell-ULT chip literally pulls ~1W for the whole package at idle, and the fan often just stays off, and even when it's on it's very quiet.

Yes the key is that at certain points in the past there is a nice jump in perf followed by a long plateau. One recent example is in high perf intel laptop CPUs. If you got an i7 laptop 4 years ago and and then again 1 year ago (an i7-7xxx), there was little difference. If you had waited just a little longer for the i7/i9 8xxx gen, it’s suddenly a huge jump.

And one other (but not as extreme) example was the 2011 Sandy Bridge laptops such as the mbp. Several years later if you got a new dual core the difference wasn’t that big.

(I’m now talking perf only, not temp, noise, idle power,... - I typically don’t even use laptops witiut the power cord attached)

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#98

Post by ggreer »

lqet wrote: post #38

As I mentioned in a previous thread [0], I upgraded an old X61 with a custom mainboard produced by a group of enthusiasts in China 1.5 years ago and never looked back. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18273305

I'm the author of this blog post. Soon after I wrote it, I got an X62 and did the daylight LED mod on it: https://geoff.greer.fm/2017/07/16/thinkpad-x62/

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#99

Post by saagarjha »

0utbreak wrote: post #82
js2 wrote: post #42

For reference, a 2007 era Apple laptop would be one of these: - https://everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook_pro/specs/macbook... - https://everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook/specs/macbook-cor... And you'd be able to run up to 10.11 (El Capitan) on the Pro or 10.7 (Lion) on the MacBook.

You can hackintosh some old Macs to run Mojave using http://dosdude1.com/mojave/

This isn't really a Hackintosh, since you're running the OS on genuine Apple hardware.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#100

Post by JonathonW »

wwweston wrote: post #88

My daily driver is mid-2012 pre-retina MBP. It's entirely adequate. I fear the day it dies because there are no more non-glossy MBPs, and I'm either going to have to make the choice to give up a matte display or give up macOS. It did recently go down and I pulled out a 2008 MBP. Mostly adequate, lag does start to show, though. My guess is that it's an issue of constrained memory (max 4GB?) as much as processor. Tops…

Recent-ish (10.7 and later) versions of macOS tend to fall apart under memory pressure with traditional hard disks-- more so than previous versions did or than Windows does on similar hardware. My hunch is that they changed something in their virtual memory subsystem to takes advantage of characteristics of SSDs that isn't quite so friendly when your drive has significant seek times.

A consequence of this is that an SSD upgrade in machines of that era can be quite dramatic, especially if you're memory-constrained. Might not be too helpful in the 2008-era machine (an SSD might be bus-limited there, not sure what generation of SATA those machines have), but the impact on a 2012-era machine (if it shipped with a traditional hard disk) can be huge.

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