11–20 of 551 posts
The last 3 laptops I bought were a pair of Lenovo e570 machines and a Lenovo e580. Two went to college kids and I keep the third. When I configure a laptop, I use less RAM than I would otherwise want (16 GB lately) and make up for it with a fast NVME boot drive as swap space. Intel NVME drives are fast and power efficient. That gives me a better mix of performance and battery life than would a laptop with more RAM.
This is one of the many aspects I don't like about how laptops are designed today. Even with OEM desktops like my Dell Precision T1700, it's still serviceable and fixable today without a whole lot of effort. For both my Dell and Supermicro workstations, they basically last 10+ years, and I've got a lot of options to keep them going; I wish I could say the same about laptops. I really wish I could get a new 2k screen for the old Dell Latitude E6530 I have -- it's built a lot more robustly than my newer latitude. I really would like to see our government mandate user serviceable parts (kind of like how the EU apparently mandated replaceable batteries, which is a huge win), as there's so many older designs that would continue to chug along with a few fixes, like IBM era Thinkpads or some the more robustly designed Latitudes. Lenovo has been going the wrong direction lately...I have sworn them off after having a two P1s and a P53, which were gently used and taken care of, die in under 2 years.
Nice. Now try to do the same as (some types of) programmer or 3d modeller or video editor. The newest MacBook with an M2 chip compiles and runs my projects drastically faster than the 2015 Dell XPS Skylake-i7 laptop I used to have and the GPU on the M2 is so ridiculously more powerful it's like going from 3dfx voodoo to a modern GPU.
I haven't done this as much with laptops because I do tend to keep those for such a long time that I can reasonably amortize a bigger investment over ~5+ years.
Curated marketplaces like "swappa" are a good way to purchase used gear. But anywhere you've got an escrow/guarantee should suffice.
Nice. Now try to do the same as (some types of) programmer or 3d modeller or video editor. The newest MacBook with an M2 chip compiles and runs my projects drastically faster than the 2015 Dell XPS Skylake-i7 laptop I used to have and the GPU on the M2 is so ridiculously more powerful it's like going from 3dfx voodoo to a modern GPU.
Is recent macOS accused of stealing or shown to steal personal data? Platform lock-in is not news, but that would be. This is an earnest question; maybe I'm in a bubble and missed a big story.
Nice. Now try to do the same as (some types of) programmer or 3d modeller or video editor. The newest MacBook with an M2 chip compiles and runs my projects drastically faster than the 2015 Dell XPS Skylake-i7 laptop I used to have and the GPU on the M2 is so ridiculously more powerful it's like going from 3dfx voodoo to a modern GPU.
At that point, I guess I don't understand why you wouldn't just step up to a desktop workstation?
MacBooks have a much better lifecycle.