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How and why I stopped buying new laptops

solar.lowtechmagazine.com

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Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#151

Post by giantrobot »

> When it comes to office applications, Linux is clearly better than its commercial alternatives. For a lack of experience, I cannot tell you if that holds for other software as well.

Well I am completely convinced. Linux office applications are clearly (clearly!) better than commercial suites. /s

To the point of the article, despite the last point saying the practice of using old laptops is a hack, they spend most of the article brow beating anyone that doesn't follow suit or agree with them.

Some laptops are awesome and can last for many years. These are often (not always) laptops aimed at enterprise/institutional buyers...like many ThinkPads. They are designed to be serviced and have readily available parts lists and service manuals. Internally they're fairly prosaic which makes servicing more practical. Others are just generally well built and don't have a lot of moving parts to even fail.

Everything else is just shit that can't be easily serviced and is always falling apart. It's expensive and frustrating to keep such laptops longer than a few years. If you can't avoid buying one you're better off properly disposing of them than fighting with them. If you do have a laptop with good/serviceable hardware it'll easily keep working well for years.

I think the point of software is the author's strongest point. If Linux/FOSS is a feasible platform for your work and you have a productive workflow you're going to have a much easier time with Linux on an old machine versus Windows. Even the fastest moving rolling release Linux distros change far less than just Windows 10's semi-annual releases. The requirements also aren't going to change much if at all.

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#152

Post by techolic »

I had been using a ThinkPad X201 bought second hand in late 2013 for a little over $300 until the end of last year.

There're a couple of things that are less modern: a crappy 800p display, USB 2.0, limited external display resolution. But if it's not particularly for the display I would probably still be using it. I was doing some window development work at some point, and had zero problem running visual studio with a small project and doing whatever I had to do while the model has just 2GB of RAM.

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#154

Post by thaumasiotes »

jodrellblank wrote: post #143
nuker wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germans are cheating a bit, they just concatenate existing words and "hey, we have a word!"

Is that so different from "downsizing", "television", "textbook", "wallpaper", "motorbike", "grapefruit", "agoraphobia", "airport", "manslaughter", "candlestick", et al?

The noun formation that people purport to mock in German is the same that English uses, as in your examples of "textbook", "motorbike", "grapefruit", "airport", "manslaughter", and "candlestick". It's unsurprising that German and English grammar would be identical in this respect, since the languages are extremely closely related. It's a little more surprising that so many English speakers seem to think the German words are hilarious; I assume they think so only because they were told to and never bothered to think about it.

"Television" and "agoraphobia" are different; "downsizing" is less clear than the other examples.

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#155

Post by ogre_codes »

aidenn0 wrote: post #139
ogre_codes wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is nonsense. Apple maintained the iPhone 30 pin connector for 10+ years. The Lightning port is 10 years old. Apple supported Thunderbolt for its entire life as a standard. Apple was one of the first to use USB-A and supported it for ~20 years until they switched to USB-C (another standard). Apple does tend to go all in on a bus, but they don't change them often. You won't find 8 different ports on a Mac to satis…

I think apple has this reputation because even if they keep a port for 10 years, that means 20% of the people get their first apple product within 2 years of the port disappearing

This still makes no sense. USB connectors for smartphones have gone through 3-4 different iterations in that same time depending on the make. If you bought Samsung, you likely went through a year or two with that god-awful USB 3.0 "Micro-B" connector.

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#156

Post by Const-me »

aidenn0 wrote: post #136
Const-me wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered a desktop? They are much faster than laptops, who are constrained by thermal issues. It’s hard to dissipate 500W+ of heat from a laptop-sized thing, they simply don’t have enough available surface for air intakes and exhausts. If you want a smaller one to be occasionally portable, there’s Mini-ITX. I currently use a PC I built in this case: https://www.fractal-design.com/products/cases/node/node-2…

500W? That's an absurd amount of heat. I suppose they don't make 75W GPUs anymore (I'll replace my 1050Ti when they do), but still...

500W is pretty average for a desktop PC.

In my particular computer, CPU, GPU and display are rated to 65W, 250W, and 80W respectively. That’s 400W just for these 3 most power-hungry components, under high load/maximum brightness.

Lower-end office PCs often ship with ~500W PSU. Gaming PCs typically include 700W PSU or even more. For instance, nVidia recommends 750W PSU for their released but unavailable RTX 3080, that GPU itself is rated to 320W. Display ain’t included as it has a separate power plug.

When viewed as a heater, computers are almost 100% efficient. Almost all electricity they consume becomes heat. The exceptions are light from display escaping through windows, and radio from WiFi carrying energy through walls, both negligible.

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#157

Post by bsanr2 »

rsync wrote: post #9

The 11" Macbook Air solved the laptop form factor. Thin, light, very portable, USB ports on each side , headphone jack and an external monitor port (in this case, thunderbolt). Could there be some refinements to my 2015 MBA ? Certainly - the two type-A USB ports could remain type A but be upgraded to USB3 ... you could add a USB-C port on each side in place of the magsafe and lightning ports and gain the ability to c…

More like ruined. Manufacturers chasing that form factor, even for mobile workstations, has allowed them to justify a pivot away from user serviceability, and has also introduced major thermal/battery issues which have hobbled machines used for anything more serious than checking email (and, if you're using Chrome browser, maybe even that).

I don't want a phone with a large keyboard and screen. I want a mobile desktop. If it's a little heavier, thicker, and louder, that's fine.

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#158

Post by thaumasiotes »

pvorb wrote: post #95
rowanG077 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true. You can find "verschlimmbessern" in any dictionary [1][2]. [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/verschlimmbessern [2] https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/verschlimmbessern

That is really a bad example, but in general this is true for long German words. Often there's a similar combination of words in English, the only difference being that in German everything concatenates to one word and in English there are spaces between the words which describe the same concept.

> the only difference being that in German everything concatenates to one word and in English there are spaces between the words which describe the same concept

Sure, but that's a purely orthographical difference, not a difference in the grammar of the languages. It's like saying that German is fundamentally different from English because in German, all nouns are capitalized, whereas in English, some nouns aren't capitalized.

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#159

Post by bsanr2 »

jhoechtl wrote: post #56
raunakdag wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has anyone else noticed that when conversations about “we need x word for y concept” arise, the German language nearly always seems to be the one that has something similar or already present?

I can confirm that verschlimmbessern is a perfect fit to describe the situation. Englisch took Angst and Zeitgeist. Take that one too?

Angst and zeitgeist don't decimate the American tongue. If you want us to adopt verschlimmbessern, drop one of the Ms and one of the Ses and get Muppets to sing a song about it.

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#160

Post by istjohn »

bxparks wrote: post #29

I guess I've been doing something similar. I currently use 9 laptops (2 Windows, 5 Linux, 1 MacBookAir, 1 Chromebook). Only the MBA11 and the Chromebook were purchased new. The rest were bought on eBay for $250-$600. After getting them, I max out the RAM, replace the HDD with SSD, or upgrade the SSD. A few of them needed some parts replaced (e.g. fans). The battery almost always needs replacing at some point. Fortuna…

If you don't mind, what are you doing with 9 laptops simultaneously?
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