I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012

My favourite example of Ship of Theseus is the joke about the axe which has had its head and handle replaced: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIdUEzQKyJo

I had similar experiences with the T14 AMD that I used for over half a year. On Linux the Trackpad would often not come back after sleep. Also, the battery would drain very quickly in S3 suspend. The laptop would take off during video calls (though the fan noise was definitely not as bad as with many Intel models). In the end it was really a thousand of paper cuts, especially with Linux, despite the laptop being certified with Linux. The hardware itself was pretty ok and worked fairly well with Windows (I just don't like Windows).

In the end I went back to MacBooks. First an M1 Air, now a MBP 14" with an an M1 Pro. They are insanely fast, while staying cool. The fan on the Pro only spins up during long builds, but even then it's barely audible.

If you don't like macOS, getting an old(er) ThinkPad is probably the best option.

> The CPU innovation stagnation between 2012-2017 has resulted in 4 cores still being an acceptable low-end CPU in early 2022

I recently got M1 Max MacBook, and I was expecting a huge jump from my 2010 Mac Pro, but on my day-to-day work. It is barely noticeable, despite the raving reviews of M1. Perhaps for me it is not about things getting obsolete, but more of that my own needs on CPU/GPU performance were pretty much fulfilled in 2010. I am a programmer, so my needs are not that high. Or perhaps it is that after 12 years, the laptops are now on bar with desktops. I think the biggest improvements for me in last 20 years have been the SSDs and then the NVMe.

I'm all for frugality but that seems like a lot of compromises for what is this person's main work laptop. Cool that it works; but why have a slow workhorse like that?

I picked up a Samsung Galaxybook a few weeks ago. Nice core i5 system on a chip thing with Iris XE gpu. Runs cool including when under load and it's fast enough. Driver support seems decent in Linux. Even the graphics are quite alright. I played some steam games with it even. Nothing recent though.

The touchpad is a multitouch thing that sort of replicates what a decent macbook would be capable off (but with way less precision). The keyboard is alright and they even squeezed in a numeric pad. It has 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD. Decent battery life too. With Manjaro it's quite a nice work laptop. Not bad for 700 Euro.

At that price (which was a black Friday discount), why bother patching up a ten year old laptop. Not worth the expenses on the parts IMHO.

A couple months ago I pulled my x220 that I hadn't used in 3 years out of the closet and got it all updated to do some hobby programming while visiting parents. My only other laptops were a work machine (X1 Carbon, I want to say from 2019) that I didn't want to travel with and a Surface Go that I didn't want to wrangle into having a decent dev environment.

When I booted it up, I checked the most recent entry in pacman's logs:

  $ tail /var/log/pacman.log -n1
   [2018-08-24 12:40] [PACMAN] Running 'pacman -R aur/ino'

Somehow the upgrade didn't completely hose everything. It just took a bit of finagling in the form of looking through any packages that gave errors (errors like cyclic dependency stuff and conflicts from bad use of pip) and uninstalling those that I didn't see a need for or switching them to the package manager instead of pip. About an hour of babysitting it and I had a completely updated and working Arch setup.

Using it was surprisingly pleasant, I think the most painful thing was initial builds for some large Haskell projects were slow but subsequent builds were tolerable. Also the original screen, while nicely visible with the matte surface, has a painfully low resolution of 1366x768 and so few websites are happy with half of that width now that everything has huge margins.

Probably the most important thing was that it was mine (even though I haven't done the sorts of mods in TFA) in a way that my work laptop and the windows machines I'd been using outside of work could never be.

(I do love how sturdy it is. Especially with the slice battery that almost doubles the thickness and gives it enough juice for hours)