201–210 of 551 posts
That being said it obviously pays off in productivity at least every 5 years. Maybe 3 is net positive? At this point i think we are climate doomed without acceleration so productivity is environmentalism
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If productivity is so important, why are people using laptops at all? Desktop processors are faster.
And cheaper! I personally run on a M1 Mac Mini (and iMac before that) I paid less than $700 for the Mac Mini right when the M1 chip came out. It’s hands down the fastest computer I’ve ever owned.
> I paid less than $700 for the Mac Mini right when the M1 chip came out. It’s hands down the fastest computer I’ve ever owned.
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> 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.
This. I lose any hope for us as a species being able to reverse climate change if the top comment about an article that goes quite deep into meaningful ways to “reduce, reuse, recycle" is that this is virtue signaling, and that we should buy Macbooks every year instead because they are "expendable tools". Guess what, their impact on the environment is very much noticeable. There is no way we are going to reverse or e…
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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…
Upgradeable hardware sounds great in theory but doesn’t work in real life, just like PCs you configure it once and it will be that HW until it is obsolete for your purpose.
Upgrades are piecemeal and old components are variously sold, given to friends, or re-used in home servers.
I often buy a ~one generation old phone for this same reason. It's just so much better value to buy someone else's phone. The folks who keep buying the newest generation tech often seem to take really good care of their gear - perhaps because they plan to resell it later. 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 ov…
But the biggest reason (for me) to replace phone is to get security updates; buying used is counter-productive to that end
“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…
I recently did the same - needed a laptop, but balked at the costs for an "occasional use" device. Even a non-shite Chromebook (so decent ram and non-awful CPU) was £500+. I got a used ThinkPad X1 from 2017 for £200 from ebay and it has been superb so far. It is modern enough for me - USB-c charging, Wifi-5, win11, 3ghz quad-core i5 etc. I feel like it is very much luck of the draw for what the condition is like when…
I don't have a shit chromebook exactly but I have a shit big-box retail HP laptop that was ~$200 new that I bought on clearance in 2016 (so in the box but not recent), wiped the windows install and put CentOS7 on it.
It got me through most of a CS minor and a geology (focus geophysics) major.
It still works pretty well for an "occasional use" device, didn't handle Office365 very well but I think that was as much firefox as it was the hardware.
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I'm not trying to make a any gotchas. Yes, if all you need is MS Word and a web browser you can use a 10-15 years old laptop, I don't think this surprises anyone here (in fact its why most people these days use phones instead of PCs to do most of their internet browsing).
I guess your superfast laptop wasn't very good at rendering the webpage of the article
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Do you actually buy a new laptop every year? I feel that's a bit delusional. Year to year most upgrades are pretty minor. An argument can be made maybe every 3 years if you're doing some incredibly resource intense stuff.
What’s delusional is highly paid engineers not investing money in essential tools to get their work done. A new laptop is 1-2% of the annual salary of many people here.
in any case, the most resource-intensive thing my work laptop does is have outlook and firefox open at the same time. the "heavy lifting" is done on a cloud instance that can be easily scaled up or down depending on what I'm currently working on.
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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…
> 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. I’m not sure if you’re using an M1/2 MacBook but if you’re using windows laptops - 2 to 3 hours is pretty poor even for an old laptop (assuming it didn’t have an H series processor which is a whole another story). My (dad’s) HP Probook with its 6th gen i5 proce…
> 2 to 3 hours is pretty poor even for an old laptop
i think it might be highly dependent on work patters/environments