> "I’ve been using this setup for over a month now, and it has been surprisingly adequate."
Well, I don't know about you guys, but "surprisingly adequate" isn't really enough to get me to hit the "buy now" button.
I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012
371–380 of 432 posts
Re: I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's hilarious to me is that Apple considers their own computers of this era to be "vintage" No joke, that's the real term https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201624 "About vintage products. -- Products are considered vintage when Apple stopped distributing them for sale more than 5 and less than 7 years ago." Well, not much has changed on the intel side in that timeframe. My 2013 laptop is still getting OS updates a…
Planned obsolescence is Apple's bread and butter.
no, it's not; continued innovation motivating upgrades, however, is.
(disclaimer: was an engineer with a great rank inside Apple for several years)
Re: I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012
#373I have two Thinkpad X230T 2nd Gen i5 (T stands for touchscreen, it has a swivel capacitive touchscreen and a stylus) They don't have webcams (they have space for it but these being refurbed office models they were probably sold without webcams installed. But I have a seperate 360p webcam in some drawer should the need arise. The one I'm using right now has windows 10 (no W11 support ;p), the other has chrome OS. (but…
At the risk of nitpicking, the T stands for Tablet, not touchscreen. The full product name is ThinkPad X230 Tablet, which is often shortened to ThinkPad X230t or ThinkPad X230T.
ah damn, mixed that up, sorry
Re: I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012
#374My current main laptop is a T450s from 2014 or so. It's got 12 GiB of RAM, enough to run most dev tools comfortably. The slowdown in CPU speed acceleration has meant that a PC from between five and ten years ago, or even more, is not as flagrantly obsolete as it once was, and I'd rather keep life in my old machines, especially when new machines start to grow features I don't want (like Pluton).
Re: I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
> you can at the very least assume permanent availability of RAM, SSD, Display Quite the opposite. That would only apply to a very popular laptop like some thinkpads.
It uses off the shelf RAM and SSDs. For replacement displays I'm not sure but they seem to be pretty widey available for mildly popular devices.
The Framework Laptop uses the same panel as the Acer Swift 3 and several other quite popular laptops, so should be good in that regard.
Re: I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was. Now there's 12400F which offers just slightly lower performance(few percent slower) at almost half of the price. And there's 12600k which at the same price offers slightly better performance in gaming than 5600x, but in multithreaded workloads often outperforms 5800x.
that chip can suck down 150W of cooling (which is likely the cooling setup that benchmarks will be running with). Not going to argue semantics here, but the grandparents point was that cooling the intel chips tends to be where it falls down (thus, the real world may differ significantly), even if there are paper gains in game benchmarks. Offering a chip which takes double the cooling is just leaning into their point.
12400f costs 180 dollars right now. 5600x costs 300 dollars. They perform similarly in gaming tasks(5600x does have larger L3 cache and in cache-sensitive professional applications it is faster). 12400f draws 117W(intel spec). You won't be running both of these CPUs with their stock coolers so, the difference in CPU cooler costs will be 20 dollars at most(if you are not opting for some kind of water cooling on mid range build, which would be insane). Heck, even if you buy CPU cooler you still end up spending less money than on 5600x with stock cooler.
Re: I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
Planned obsolescence is Apple's bread and butter.
This sentiment is thrown out a lot but Apple has some of the best LTS on their hardware in the business. 6 year old iPhones are still getting updates. Someone in this thread mentioned their laptop that Apple describes as vintage is still getting updates. Apple is still selling a 4 year old smart watch as new. I feel much better spending my money on Apple products trusting it will be supported for a long time than spe…
It's not Apple, it's any closed-source hardware. The moment the vendor no longer supports it, it's dead. Not counting those few rare cases where fanatics reverse engineer it.
Re: I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012
#378My experience with laptops is that the most usable ones have a low TDP CPU with integrated graphics. This avoids overheating as much as possible, which means you get full CPU power for much longer, as well as having a longer battery life. To make sure it doesn't feel sluggish, get one with a lot of RAM and (NVMe) SSDs. I dislike the lack of ports nowadays, but USB-C makes up for it. You can get USB-C dongles that pro…
About the heat-> I agree so much.
I found that disabling turbo boost caused an imperceptible drop in performance, but a very noticeable decrease in heat and fan usage.
I also used to undervolt the CPU after doing this. Shame that intel blocked this ability on 11th gen+ chips.
Re: I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not sure of what you're saying, perhaps partly because I don't own a car, and never have since I got my driver's licence at age 38 or so. I do recall a neighbour of mine saying "back when cars went rusty" to me a decade back, which surprised me. A lot. Apparently they don't now? But modern cars, and many modern motorbikes, are sealed units which are not maintainable by the end-user. I dislike electronics like th…
How often do you upgrade your phone or laptop? I ask because I sort of went the opposite road, making sure I bought something that would last a long time. Aside from screen resolution and the modern “anything” thinking we all have high resolution monitors my old 2015 MBP is still performing just fine despite its heavy usage. In the same period I’ve gone through 5 or 6 work laptops that were certainly not top end. I’m…
I follow more of this track as well...buy the highest end model and use it 2-3 times as long as you would a lower end model (but you're not paying 2-3 times the price).
My 2015 MBP made it to the end of 2021 for me - when the fans started to have to run constantly and even still caused thermal throttling - when I had 2 Thunderbolt external displays attached (thus running the discrete GPU). I think it was an OS bug introduced in Catalina or Big Sur.
I even tore down my hardware and re-applied thermal compound and clean dup the heatsinks...no joy.
Running "pmset -g thermlog" while using it sealed the deal for me. I was only getting a fraction of the CPU power when running on two displays (and this is when the ambient room temp was 68-70F). I had a day when my AC conked out for a day and the room temp jumped to 76-78F and it was unusable.
I am really enjoying my 16" 2021. Didn't realize how much of a slouch my 2015 had been by comparison.
That being said, I still rock a mid-2012 MBP for light tasks when I just need a laptop and not a desktop replacement laptop.
Re: I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012
#380A car from 1950s and up is quite serviceable today, and I think we're getting to the same place with computers.
I don't buy things on principle (freganism/volunteerism), so I'm restricted to hand-me-down computers, and I've been quite happy with this for the past 7+ years.
Of course, my work is mostly text-based, but I'm quite happy with a high-end 6-year-old computer today, and before this was using an 8-year-old computer low-end computer with some obstacles.
I think that as a web developer, I can promote this idea further by leaning hard into the accessibility and compatibility spectrum, really embracing "Any Browser" 100% and leaving no browser, client, user, scenario, network condition, etc. behind.
And I do. All the sites I develop, as well as the framework I use for them, are guaranteed compatible with Netscape 2.0+, IE 3.0+, Opera 3.0+, and pretty much everything that's come since then, including text-mode, no-JS, and screen-readers.