Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How and why I stopped buying new laptops

lowtechmagazine.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 104 posts

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#71

Post by taylodl »

At home I'm still using a 2012 MacBook Pro as my daily driver. It has 16Gb RAM, a quad core i7 and a 512Gb SSD. It runs all my dev tools, multiple VMs, and I do music production on it. All without any problems.

My work machine is a 2015 MacBook Pro that's similarly configured to my home machine. Still runs great. They offered to replace it last year and I asked why? It's still able to do everything just fine.

I say this to back up something the author said - you don't need to be so extreme and buy a machine from 2006. Buying a machine that's 3-5 years old is still a good machine to run all but the most-demanding tasks. Even then I ask why are you running your most-demanding tasks on your laptop instead of a server or EC2 instance?

Bottom line - yes: you can save a lot of money buying older equipment.

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#72

Post by taylodl »

Grustaf wrote: post #70
RikNieu wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this movement is called quarterly reports.

No. Apple is doing a wonderful job of making old hardware work for a long time. It's just that there is a limit to how far you can take this while also keep innovating and pushing the envelope.

Exactly. I'm running a 2012 MacBook Pro with all the latest patches and I'll continue getting patched for another year - then I can decide whether I want to upgrade to Catalina. I'm running Mojave by choice - I could have upgraded to Catalina but chose not to.

So, if I do nothing then I'll have had the machine for ten years before no longer receiving patches. If I upgrade to Catalina, which I probably won't, then I'll get 11. I don't think getting 10 years out of a laptop that's been my daily driver is a bad deal.

Yeah, I can't upgrade to Big Sur. So what? I'm still running on an OS that's supported and getting patched.

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#73

Post by ChrisLTD »

Grustaf wrote: post #70
RikNieu wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this movement is called quarterly reports.

No. Apple is doing a wonderful job of making old hardware work for a long time. It's just that there is a limit to how far you can take this while also keep innovating and pushing the envelope.

OTOH, MacOS today doesn't seem significantly more capable than it did in 2012.

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#74

Post by [deleted] »

taylodl wrote: post #71

At home I'm still using a 2012 MacBook Pro as my daily driver. It has 16Gb RAM, a quad core i7 and a 512Gb SSD. It runs all my dev tools, multiple VMs, and I do music production on it. All without any problems. My work machine is a 2015 MacBook Pro that's similarly configured to my home machine. Still runs great. They offered to replace it last year and I asked why? It's still able to do everything just fine. I say t…

[deleted]

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#75

Post by treesknees »

taylodl wrote: post #71

At home I'm still using a 2012 MacBook Pro as my daily driver. It has 16Gb RAM, a quad core i7 and a 512Gb SSD. It runs all my dev tools, multiple VMs, and I do music production on it. All without any problems. My work machine is a 2015 MacBook Pro that's similarly configured to my home machine. Still runs great. They offered to replace it last year and I asked why? It's still able to do everything just fine. I say t…

My employer lets us upgrade our MacBook Pros every 3 years from our start date and I always do so regardless of whether I need it or not.

The "use it or lose it" factor can be major in a large company. Similar to how departments use up budget at the end of the fiscal year, if people stop upgrading their laptop when it's offered, they'll stop offering it so often and it'll be harder to obtain an upgrade when I actually need it.

You also have to consider IT support and EoL. If 4k people hang onto their laptops until some required software/security update no longer works, now the company has to make a huge 4,000 laptop purchase instead of spreading that purchase across multiple quarters or years.

We also recycle our old laptops back into a rotation as spares for interns, loaner laptops during RMA, presentation or demo machines for customer sales opportunities, etc. It's nice to have a stock that's not 7-10 years old, and also not go out and buy a $2k laptop for an intern.

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#76

Post by viklove »

Grustaf wrote: post #70
RikNieu wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this movement is called quarterly reports.

No. Apple is doing a wonderful job of making old hardware work for a long time. It's just that there is a limit to how far you can take this while also keep innovating and pushing the envelope.

Apple's entire business model is planned obsolescence

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#77

Post by Grustaf »

viklove wrote: post #76
Grustaf wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Apple is doing a wonderful job of making old hardware work for a long time. It's just that there is a limit to how far you can take this while also keep innovating and pushing the envelope.

Apple's entire business model is planned obsolescence

Haha no.

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#78

Post by a9d34571 »

deathanatos wrote: post #14

> I grumpily ordered a replacement key for 15 euros. In the months after that, replacement keys became a recurring cost. After spending more than 100 euros on plastic keys, which would soon break again, I calculated that my keyboard had 90 keys and that replacing them all just once would cost me 1,350 euros. Am I missing something, or can an entire replacement keyboard not be had for ~32 EUR? https://www.amazon.com/R…

pro tip: go on-location to a laptop shop, that happens to repair (even for warranty) etc ringing and mailing usually isn't enough to bother, or gets 'pls pay 5-10€ for no reason'

source: worked at one, we had a full size box (1m x .5m x .5m) full of dead or half-dead keyboards, exactly for this purpose; most of them being lenovo (also lenovo has like 30 different kbds, keys are NOT interchangable)

if you're a respecting person, might as well give you one of the 50 i feel bad to say, but saying you're a past customer of them will almost gurantee a free key

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#79

Post by idlewords »

tptacek wrote: post #16
jaimex2 wrote: post #12

It's usually just Apple people cycling their macbooks every "new shiny" release. Most people on PCs run them into the ground over 6-8 years.

That's a good thing. People who want to spend money on shiny machines (I'll probably get the next M1 iteration) pay a premium they're happy to pay, while a secondary market for previous iterations grows to satisfy price-conscious users.

This is exactly the way the car market works, except you can't (yet) lease a new laptop for three years.

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#80

Post by bobbydreamer »

This been very informative. I have been using IBM Thinkpad for 9yrs(office laptop). I don't like the keyboard layout of newer ones, I may have gotten used to with the ThinkPad.

Next when I see a GoGreen or Climate change activist, I am going to ask what laptop they are using if answers Windows or Mac, I can say you are not a climate change activist.

One should make a comparison which programming language is greener. Definitely python isn't one when compare to java. My laptop starts screaming I run python and no sound effect on java same program tried switching.

Post reply on HN