How and why I stopped buying new laptops • Hacker News Board

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#191

Post by ianai » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 4:53 AM UTC

pengaru wrote: post #23

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…

> Thin, light, very portable, USB ports on each side, headphone jack and an external monitor port (in this case, thunderbolt). Welcome to ~2004 in IBM ThinkPad X-series land, IBM "solved the laptop form factor" ~4 years prior to Apple's Air. And even before that Sony's PCG-Z505 delivered most of this in a robust and lightweight magnesium package.

To some non-trivial amount, many laptops wind up being just a desktop with the lid closed 100% of the time in someone's office. It's the size of the commercial industry that makes manufacturers have little reason to actually make good laptops for laptop use.

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#192

Post by st1ck » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 4:55 AM UTC

Another nice feature of old enough CPUs is that they don't have IME.

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#193

Post by forgotmypw17 » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 5:06 AM UTC

nuker wrote: post #77

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #19

I also stopped buying new laptops. The full biological cost is hard to fully imagine, just incredible in size. If you think about it, hundreds and thousands of plant, bacterial, animal, mammal, bird, and other lives are laid down for each of these amazing powerful artefacts. If there are previously used alternatives available, I cannot in good conscience vote for the creation of another one. So I started with a coupl…

> As a coder, working on something older Have you seen Retina HiDPI displays? You'd never go back.

Yeah, I've seen them. They're nice. I'm flexible enough to use most displays, even the standard 7" raspi display in certain circumstances.

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#194

Post by forgotmypw17 » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 5:08 AM UTC

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #40

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #19

I also stopped buying new laptops. The full biological cost is hard to fully imagine, just incredible in size. If you think about it, hundreds and thousands of plant, bacterial, animal, mammal, bird, and other lives are laid down for each of these amazing powerful artefacts. If there are previously used alternatives available, I cannot in good conscience vote for the creation of another one. So I started with a coupl…

I wish more people thought like you. I love old stuff that still works for what I need it to do. My original iPhone SE and Samsung Chromebook bought for $30 on eBay (with SDSU etched on the front) work perfectly for what I need them for.

Thank you for the appreciation and validation!

I have an iPad which I bought on Craigslist and runs iOS9, and it still works great for my Web needs.

I only use it for my own websites, which I keep lightweight and accessible, and a a few others like HN.

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#195

Post by smarx007 » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 5:12 AM UTC

amerkhalid wrote: post #188

tobijkl wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in my bubble, even professional developers, video editors, and audio engineers use a desktop computer as their primary daily driver and do not rely on their laptop for computational power rather than as a medium for presenting their work. Some of them are even switching to tablets for presenting to clients. A desktop computer will always offer more computational power and a more straightforward and cheaper u…

This is exactly what I am doing now except my desktop is in cloud. For months, I was researching laptops, I am currently 13" MBP user but was debating switching to Windows laptop. However, if it was going to be able to run video games, it was turning into $2000+ purchase. Plus pretty big to be portable. Then I discovered Shadow PC. For $12 a month, I have pretty powerful machine. My MBP is now a simple thin client. W…

> [...] using the remote computer provided by Blade for business or commercial services or purposes, or even in such a way that the purpose or effect is to make all or part of the Services available to third parties, in return for payment or free of charge; or even using Shadow® as a server or with Software that has the function of a server;

I think you are pretty much in violation of ToS the moment you install Docker and start any container or start debugging your networked code. I mean, it sounds a bit too good to be true, it's even cheaper than COTS hardware from Hetzner.

> Also been using it for ML projects but unfortunately they will shutdown the VM if it doesn't receive user input. So long running processes require you to be sitting by the machine.

Ah, that makes sense. They are betting that people need sleep and under normal usage patterns you will never use the machine 24/7 and then $36 (8h/day back-of-the-napkin math) works out to something similar to Hetzner prices.

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#196

Post by toastal » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 5:13 AM UTC

scrooched_moose wrote: post #114

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?

It's because the German language is highly compound. Take any descriptive phrase, remove the spaces, and you have a new word. In English, it'd be the equivalent of taking "make worse by improving" and turning it into "makeworsebyimproving". When I was learning German, we were taught the language has far fewer core nouns than English (4000 vs 20,000 is stuck in my head, but this is going back years), but then they bas…

And we anglophones can make descriptive-with-more-readability words by comparison through the use of hyphenated adjectives.

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#197

Post by solatic » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 5:14 AM UTC

I have an old Thinkpad X200 that I love to death, but that 1280x800 display is just too low-resolution. It feels like trying to use a schoolchild's classroom writing desk as sufficiently large for multiple papers and books kept open all at once, and not a work desk of proper size. High resolution displays are such an enormous quality of life improvement that it's entirely worth it to buy new hardware to drive the resolution.

I do empathize with the author that laptop hardware quality isn't like it used to be.

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#198

Post by paulryanrogers » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 5:15 AM UTC

farss wrote: post #43

karaterobot wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We need to actually coin a word to describe "company solved their use-case wonderfully and can't resist fiddling around with it for reasons that don't align with their user-base*. Can't help coin a new word, but Ralph Caplan described this phenomenon really well. I'm a (software) designer, and I think about this all the time: > When cuffs disappeared from men’s trousers, fashion designers gave interviews explaining…

Trouser cuffs do have a function. The extra weight helps the cloth drape better.

Could extra fabric be folded on the inside for the same effect without the dust collecting?

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#199

Post by tluyben2 » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 5:19 AM UTC

The bizarre thing is that laptops have gotten cheap enough and the monthly credit buying options are a few cups of coffee (at a restaurant) for a brandnew laptop, that people keep giving me their old (2-3 years) laptops. My daily driver is a x220 from 2011 I did buy for next to nothing second hand. But after that I cannot see me needing a new one as I have stacks of nice laptops lying around. Where I can see it going wrong is if I have to travel again. These laptops are either too large and heavy andor have no battery life. But if travel does not come back, there is never the need for a new one. And I cannot see why most people do either. Especially people who are doing things that do not require massive amounts of power. I work with large applications in c#, java, js, python and go on this 10 year old laptop and I am no less productive than my friends/colleagues who jumped on the m1 hype. At some point it is just wanting the newest things just because they are new I guess.

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#200

Post by fastball » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 5:20 AM UTC

kayodelycaon wrote: post #162

jamesrcole wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The 11" Macbook Air solved the laptop form factor. That's weirdly-specific. Some people would prefer a larger screen size, for example. > Could there be some refinements to my 2015 MBA ? I upgraded from a 2015 (I think) MBA to a 2018 model (both 13" ones), and two actual improvements that I like are: larger trackpad size, and smaller overall dimensions (so there's a smaller bezel around the screen, for example).

> That's weirdly-specific. Some people would prefer a larger screen size, for example. And some people need a larger screen because we don't run the highest resolution possible. I run my 24" 4k monitors at high-density 1080p. My 16" laptop screen is at 1536x960 or 1344x840. Anything smaller than a 16" MacBook Pro doesn't leave enough screen space to work with.

What is it you're doing that 13" can't cut it?