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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

#251

Post by flagrant »

krageon wrote: post #238
fastball wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Small screens have small letters, small icons, etc. My eyesight is very good, but working on such a screen is uncomfortable after an extended amount of time (unless you lower the resolution significantly).

You can have a small screen with large letters and a big screen with small letters. You're conflating screen size and feature size. If you have a 4K screen and the features are too small, increase the UI size, don't decrease the resolution. If you're running a 4K screen at 1080p all you've done is waste a lot of money.

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#252

Post by ja27 »

andrei_says_ wrote: post #211
ogre_codes wrote: post #22

This story works well for a professional writer. If you are a professional developer/ video editor/ audio professional, or any number of other professions that lean heavier on the hardware they use, it's quite different. If buying new hardware is going to substantially improve my work-day, I'm going to buy new hardware. With the pace of modern hardware improvement, the time between purchases is longer, but there is s…

Pro dev rocking MacBook Pro 2015 here. I use it for full stack rails, js, front end design including photoshop. And for photography - capture one photoshop Lightroom etc. I use MagSafe, SD card slot, USB ports daily, and the full size hdmi port weekly. The keyboard is wearing out, and the battery cycles are in the hundreds but everything just works. That feeling that you get when you accidentally walk at full speed t…

2 years ago I went from a 2011 MBP to a used i7 2015 15" MBP and it was a great machine. I liked the ports and it was really handy to stash a 400GB microSD in the slot for more space. I upgraded the stock SSD to an NVMe and it really made a difference.

I went to the i9 16" MBP a year ago and yeah it's new and shiny and faster but not a world-changer. Managing to skip the butterfly keyboard was the big win. The better speakers are surprisingly the best feature upgrade from the 2015 to 2019.

Except for the lure of the M1 Macs, a used i7 15" 2015 MacBook Pro is probably the best bang for the buck in the Apple world.

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#253

Post by ja27 »

prvc wrote: post #16

There are only so many 2006-2012 vintage Thinkpads in existence, as he mentions in the last section. This certainly relevant to his "this is a hack" point, however, one should note that prices for these items used has been going up lately, a very unusual trend for used PCs. I hope manufacturers notice this latent value in the PC market.

Despite my daily driver being my i9 16" MacBook Pro, I've started falling for the Thinkpads. Had a couple E-series before but right as the pandemic started I grabbed a used i5 X270. Swapped in a 1080 IPS screen, an SSD, and eventually 16GB of RAM so I'm at about $500 for a machine that can do everything I _need_. Charges with IBM chargers or USB-C. Has enough ports. Can run macOS in VirtualBox and I've even built iOS apps on it. Handles light gaming. Matte screen. Cheap enough that I'm not paranoid about damaging it.

Yeah the used market prices crept up, probably due to families buying up laptops for online school students, but you can still catch bargains.

Unfortunately much past the X280/T480 generation and you stop being able to upgrade things yourself. It's like I see in the used Mac Mini market where there are a ton of otherwise useful machines from 2014 but they're crippled with 4GB of non-upgradable RAM.

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#254

Post by paleogizmo »

jamesrcole wrote: post #87
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…

> 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).

> > 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).

I'll agree that 13" rather than 11"seems to be a sweet spot for size, and the air deserves credit for popularizing that size. 13" is as small as you need to fit in a backpack, and still stupidly light. I suspect the air and it's competitors (surface book, xps, spectre) are what killed off the sub 10" netbook/palmtop form factor.

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#256

Post by joycian »

cgag wrote: post #118
amelius wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read somewhere (on HN?) that Italians speak faster than Germans because their words contain less information, so in the end they still communicate the same amount of information per minute. Italians and Germans were used in the example because they were the two extremes.

Nice graph of syllables per second vs bits of information per second here: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/09/28/why-are-...

What's with the bimodal distributions for German there?

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#257

Post by pnutjam »

pwdisswordfish0 wrote: post #236
scrooched_moose wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As a German I’ve always found “verschlimmbessern” very clunky and awkward, but it is pretty widespread, so you get used to it. That’s usually not the case in discussions like this, for example the famous “Wanderlust” isn’t really a thing in German, although it is a feasible, natural sounding compound. An English neologism might be something like “imporse(n)” or maybe “imperiorate”. Personally that sounds more sophist…

In English, is suggest unimproved or updegraded.

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#258

Post by kayodelycaon »

flagrant wrote: post #251
krageon wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Small screens have small letters, small icons, etc. My eyesight is very good, but working on such a screen is uncomfortable after an extended amount of time (unless you lower the resolution significantly).

You can have a small screen with large letters and a big screen with small letters. You're conflating screen size and feature size. If you have a 4K screen and the features are too small, increase the UI size , don't decrease the resolution. If you're running a 4K screen at 1080p all you've done is waste a lot of money.

I’m running 24” monitors at double density 1080p. MacOS is rendering at 4K and the monitor is getting a 4K signal. The way macOS handles scaled resolutions make any scaled resolution look native, on top of making everything more clear.

Increasing UI size often breaks application across all operations systems.

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#259

Post by bserge »

lowtechmagazine wrote: post #239
bserge wrote: post #30

I too, try to get 2 identical laptops - if one goes down, the other can take over, if both break, I can most likely use parts from both to make a functional one, while waiting for parts to arrive or for the service shop to fix the broken machine. All because it can take freaking weeks in my experience, and they can mess up and not fix it at all... Of course, I only buy used/refurb, so they're really cheap - cheaper t…

Author here. That sentence will be deleted when the website regenerates, cause it doesn't seem to have the effect that I was aiming for. Thanks for pointing it out. That said, I was impressed by the man's repair qualities. I asked him how he was going to repair my 2006 laptop without access to spare parts. He said he would just repair the fan by replacing the copper wire. Don't see that happening in an official repai…

Sorry, it's just that it really threw me off, sounds out of place. And considering pretty much everything from high end to the cheapest stuff has Chinese components (or is completely made in China) these days, it doesn't make much sense.

Also, that's the kind of repairs I would do, I've actually fixed quite a few fans that started grinding with simple automotive grease, they last for years :D

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#260

Post by andrei_says_ »

ja27 wrote: post #252
andrei_says_ wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pro dev rocking MacBook Pro 2015 here. I use it for full stack rails, js, front end design including photoshop. And for photography - capture one photoshop Lightroom etc. I use MagSafe, SD card slot, USB ports daily, and the full size hdmi port weekly. The keyboard is wearing out, and the battery cycles are in the hundreds but everything just works. That feeling that you get when you accidentally walk at full speed t…

2 years ago I went from a 2011 MBP to a used i7 2015 15" MBP and it was a great machine. I liked the ports and it was really handy to stash a 400GB microSD in the slot for more space. I upgraded the stock SSD to an NVMe and it really made a difference. I went to the i9 16" MBP a year ago and yeah it's new and shiny and faster but not a world-changer. Managing to skip the butterfly keyboard was the big win. The better…

Is the screen perceptibly larger on the 16”?
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