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I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

solar.lowtechmagazine.com

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Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#111

Post by tyg13 »

redroyal wrote: post #37

“Laptops don’t change” Really? because a few years ago battery life was maybe 7 hours and now it’s 18. And with faster processors, thunderbolt 4 and USB C charging, wifi 6, better screens and lighter. I keep hearing this argument for not buying a new laptop every year and it just doesn’t hold water. I say buy the latest MacBook, expense it, factor it in as a monthly cost. These are expendable and essential tools. The…

> The main product AFAICS is virtue signaling.

Friendly reminder that people do care about things you don't care about. Claims of virtue signaling say more about you than them, quite frankly. And really, you should care about the massive amount of e-waste generated every year.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#112

Post by tengbretson »

chasil wrote: post #85
redroyal wrote: post #37

“Laptops don’t change” Really? because a few years ago battery life was maybe 7 hours and now it’s 18. And with faster processors, thunderbolt 4 and USB C charging, wifi 6, better screens and lighter. I keep hearing this argument for not buying a new laptop every year and it just doesn’t hold water. I say buy the latest MacBook, expense it, factor it in as a monthly cost. These are expendable and essential tools. The…

It is well-known that planar transistors are more reliable than FINFET. It is usually agreed that the end of planar transistors was the last process node of 28 nanometers. Everything below this (14, 10, 7, 5, 3, and 2 nanometers so far) is less reliable. The fastest, lowest power, and most reliable CPU in a laptop will be on a 28nm process node. Everything beyond this sacrifices reliability for speed and lower power.…

The failure rate of CPUs could go up 10x and it would still be a rounding error when quantifying what causes laptops to be decommissioned.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#113

Post by InvaderFizz »

mholm wrote: post #33
YZF wrote: post #20

Typing this from my `MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013)` ... Also have two working ThinkPads in use in my household that are older where I've had to replace the CPU fans, at some point they just crumble, but otherwise work OK-ish (but maybe getting to a point where I should really retire them).

The Pre-touchbar Retina Macbook Pros were the perfect laptop for the era. They could run a bit hot (but what didn't, back then?). Excellent hardware quality, and can generally still run well today if you don't do anything demanding. I've got a 2013 13" that doesn't have a single issue other than age.

The heat and constant fan noise was a real problem.

That's the entire reason we upgraded my wife from a 2015 15" MBP i7 to a 2020 MBA M1. The extra hours of battery was a nice bonus, the main gain was the lack of noise.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#114

Post by rospaya »

kibwen wrote: post #83
redroyal wrote: post #37

“Laptops don’t change” Really? because a few years ago battery life was maybe 7 hours and now it’s 18. And with faster processors, thunderbolt 4 and USB C charging, wifi 6, better screens and lighter. I keep hearing this argument for not buying a new laptop every year and it just doesn’t hold water. I say buy the latest MacBook, expense it, factor it in as a monthly cost. These are expendable and essential tools. The…

> a few years ago battery life was maybe 7 hours and now it’s 18 At what point do battery improvements become completely unnecessary? Who's out here using their laptops for 18 hours continuously? It's like an electric car that can go 2,000 miles on a single charge; YAGNI. The vast majority of people would be perfectly well-served by a smaller, lighter, less expensive laptop that cuts down the battery to just 10 hours…

> At what point do battery improvements become completely unnecessary?

A week of heavy CPU/GPU use, on full brightness. We should strive for better. I want to go on a trip without carrying my charger.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#115

Post by tebruno99 »

redroyal wrote: post #37

“Laptops don’t change” Really? because a few years ago battery life was maybe 7 hours and now it’s 18. And with faster processors, thunderbolt 4 and USB C charging, wifi 6, better screens and lighter. I keep hearing this argument for not buying a new laptop every year and it just doesn’t hold water. I say buy the latest MacBook, expense it, factor it in as a monthly cost. These are expendable and essential tools. The…

I like my framework and the 2 mini pc made from upgrading the internals. The slots are pass through thunderbolt 4 just like laptops with only USB’s ports. Not sure why they offended you. Get 4 usbc inserts and pretend they aren’t changeable if that’ll calm you down. Battery life does suck though I’ll give you that. It’s good overall at the cost though

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#116

Post by ripply »

redroyal wrote: post #37

“Laptops don’t change” Really? because a few years ago battery life was maybe 7 hours and now it’s 18. And with faster processors, thunderbolt 4 and USB C charging, wifi 6, better screens and lighter. I keep hearing this argument for not buying a new laptop every year and it just doesn’t hold water. I say buy the latest MacBook, expense it, factor it in as a monthly cost. These are expendable and essential tools. The…

The framework laptops definitely run hot, I gave up on mine because it would overheat several times a day throttling down to 200Mhz. It sits in a box unused now and I consider it ewaste, I don't have the time or patience to bother with it anymore. I reached out to support maybe 6+ months ago but I haven't finished following their instructions because the laptop was just so bad and I wasted so much time dealing with it that I don't care anymore.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#117

Post by mahogany »

YmiYugy wrote: post #78

I used to think that as long as all you needed to do was some web browsing that older or underspeced machines were fine. But in the last few years websites have become insanely resource intensive. Even using something as seemingly simple as Gmail is a frustrating experience on older laptops (speaking as someone who just upgraded from a 2017 dual core MacBook Pro). I also have a hard time believing that the same hardw…

Huh, I have a Thinkpad t450s from 2015 which I’m sure has less power than a 2017 MBP, and I use it for email and streaming YouTube just fine. It runs Linux and I use an adblocker, so maybe that’s a difference? Or maybe I don’t mind the decreased performance as much.

I don’t do my programming on it, so I can’t speak to that.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#118

Post by mitchell209 »

stetrain wrote: post #108
kibwen wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a few years ago battery life was maybe 7 hours and now it’s 18 At what point do battery improvements become completely unnecessary? Who's out here using their laptops for 18 hours continuously? It's like an electric car that can go 2,000 miles on a single charge; YAGNI. The vast majority of people would be perfectly well-served by a smaller, lighter, less expensive laptop that cuts down the battery to just 10 hours…

18 hours advertised is usually running a locally stored video file on loop at medium to low screen brightness and some light web browsing. My 18-hour laptop is more like 8-10 hours of real work usage, which is still fantastic compared to the 2-3 hours I would get at similar tasks 6-7 years ago. Another big change is improvements to sleep and standby time. I can use half the battery, close the lid, and be reasonably c…

I want my EV to last a month on a single charge and yet some people are arguing against battery improvements. Crazy.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#119

Post by coldtea »

Atotalnoob wrote: post #50
redroyal wrote: post #37

“Laptops don’t change” Really? because a few years ago battery life was maybe 7 hours and now it’s 18. And with faster processors, thunderbolt 4 and USB C charging, wifi 6, better screens and lighter. I keep hearing this argument for not buying a new laptop every year and it just doesn’t hold water. I say buy the latest MacBook, expense it, factor it in as a monthly cost. These are expendable and essential tools. The…

So if framework can let you reuse the "shell" for 2-3 upgrade cycles until they have to change the motherboard, that's a lot better than having to buy an entire new laptop. It's not about keeping the same form factor forever, that's unrealistic. It's about reducing the amount of stuff you have to buy for each upgrade. Opening and closing stuff is realistic, if it's easy. I've opened and upgraded various components of…

>It's not about keeping the same form factor forever, that's unrealistic.

It's not that unrealistic, if we constraint forever to like 10-15 years.

In a lot of laptops I'd rather they keep most of the ports (and just e.g. update USB2 to USB3, and add a few new ones) but keep the form factor the shape.

Often new keyboards (Apple is notorious, but holds for others) are worse than in the previous form factor.

And when they go and "make it thinner", beyond some point, I'd often rather they added more battery, or added a space for an extra use installable SSD, or put bigger speaker cones, or just leave the space inside for better thermal dissipation...

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#120

Post by kiratp »

pshirshov wrote: post #89
gghffguhvc wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do a lot of Android and iOS app compilation (Lots of flavors/schemes of apps). So lately the upgrades in cores has meant a faster upgrade cycle for my work dev machine than for the intel based MacBook Pro era. I’m sure Apple can’t keep up this pace of the last few years though. Back in early 2000s we used distcc for distributed compilation of QT apps and reused old workstations in a server room. But with XCode and…

Why don't you buy an EPYC/Threadripper workstation then? Even best M2 laptops still can't compete with hackintosh on dated 3970x

Because it’s not faster. Well at least the 3990x wasn’t.

Compilation rapidly drops from parallel to single thread bound for most workloads.

https://twitter.com/kiratpandya/status/1457438725680480257

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