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I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

solar.lowtechmagazine.com

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Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#351

Post by RulerOf »

kylec wrote: post #347
turdprincess wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotal, but my M1 MacBook Pro doesn’t have amazing battery life. The other day I went to a coffee shop with 60% charge and only made it about 2.5 hours doing iOS development.

Do you have a 13" MacBook Pro with M1 or a 14+" MacBook Pro with M1 Pro/Max? If the latter, it has decent battery life, but it's nowhere near as efficient as the regular M1 MacBook Pro. If it's the former, I guess I'm surprised, I own one (I'm writing this comment on one) and I've loved how the battery seems to just last forever on mine.

I have an M1 Max and while I admit that I find myself sometimes disappointed by the battery life, it’s still often getting more than three hours while I expend precisely zero effort to ensure I’m getting the most out of my limited battery life.

It’s a far cry from the 20+ hour runtimes shown during reviews of the new machines, but still good enough to cover about as long as I’d want to sit in one spot.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#352

Post by antigirl »

turdprincess wrote: post #328
eBombzor wrote: post #306

> Laptops don’t change > New laptops may be more energy-efficient per computational power, but these gains are offset by more computational power Guess this was written before the M1 :) I also felt the Zen 2 Laptop chips marked a huge step forward on the Win/Linux side at that time: generationally more power efficient than the best laptop chips from Intel, same core/thread count as the desktop equivalents, and cheap…

Anecdotal, but my M1 MacBook Pro doesn’t have amazing battery life. The other day I went to a coffee shop with 60% charge and only made it about 2.5 hours doing iOS development.

My M1 max [14inch] was suffering with really bad battery life. Turned out it was sync plugin for VSCode.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#353

Post by giantrobot »

soulbadguy wrote: post #196
mgraczyk wrote: post #106

I just bought a new Macbook Pro and have been using it for ~1 week. Even compared to my previous 2019 Macbook Pro, it's a huge step up in build quality and speed. If you spend any time waiting for code to compile, web pages to load, or dependencies install, I'd say buy the fastest laptop you can find. I'd guess this new machine has already saved me around 20 minutes of waiting. At that rate it will pay for itself in…

+1 on the importance a high-quality screen. I never quite understand why PC manufacturer skimp on what is agruabably the most important interface with the device. And when they do, they of course jump into spec chasing with resolution and frame rate taking the focus instead of contrast, color reproduction and PWM (for people sensitive to it ). What's the delta in BOM cost for a high quality display ? Maybe someone wi…

> What's the delta in BOM cost for a high quality display ? Maybe someone with industry knowledge can comment.

Higher quality screens are more expensive than shitty ones. It's not just the cost of the panel itself but more pixels take more power. That means more expensive driver circuitry and likely a larger battery to be able to offer a marketable battery life.

That higher power may not work in your current design's thermal envelope. A different panel may also need a redesign of the display shell, bezel, and even hinge(s). Each component might not have a significant increase in cost on the BOM but all of them together add up as does any redesigns to support the extra power usage.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#354

Post by 6510 »

oneplane wrote: post #175
rpcope1 wrote: post #12

> Most of the 160-200 million laptops sold each year are replacement purchases. The average laptop is replaced every 3 years (in business) to five years (elsewhere). 3 My 5.7 years per laptop experience is not exceptional. 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…

Some of the laptop issues are a chain of dependencies that en up with mechanical and power envelope. That doesn't mean it's impossible, but say you want to go from 720p to 2k, that also requires more power, a bit for the panel and a bit for the backlight. The mainboard might not have a TCON and eDP or LVDS transceiver to drive such a panel, and the GPU might not be able to handle it either. So now that new panel need…

I imagine by that time you've used their market place often enough. Their used parts shop might be more awesome than the laptops. I can only imagine what it will look like in a few decades. Should be awesome.

In contrast, I'm the 4th owner of a "free" asus laptop that broke shortly after it was purchased (by the first owner) They never bothered to return it. I have a pretty good idea what is wrong with it but there is about 4 cm of space when I open it. I need some long strong pliers to pull some distant plugs. In a repair video from someone who really knows what they are doing, he reaches deep inside, pulls the plug with great force then smashes the pliers against the pcb making the laptop jump on his desk. "this is normal" he said and proceeded to pull the rest the same way. I've been gathering the courage to do it for about a year now.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#355

Post by poisonborz »

patchtopic wrote: post #323

I work for a non profit org. We sometimes purchase reconditioned laptops as they are good value for some use cases. We have a lot of WfH users so need to courier laptops to some staff. We recently had an insurance claim denied for a damaged reconditioned laptop as TNT/Fedex used a "no second hand goods" clause in their insurance to wriggle out paying up. This has not stopped me purchasing reconditioned laptops, but s…

Good to know, but in practice this just means more and cheaper second hand devices to be available to the public.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#356

Post by NikolaNovak »

jaredhallen wrote: post #330
NikolaNovak wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. I have two working t420s (t420s is thinner than t420 and I think puts it in the realm of "acceptable" in modern standards. T420 I find is mostly a stationary laptop). They run upgraded ssd drives and ram. I also recently stocked up on 3 used t480 as it's the last generation with easily removable battery as well as drive and memory. Those should last me a while! My primary daily driver is the 6 year old t25 - bas…

Most of the newer business class laptops I've seen just have a few screws to pull the back panel and replace the battery. It takes about 5-10 minutes.

Right but that's a) compared to 5 seconds with external battery and b) requires certain comfort and skill level and c) as you point only for specific laptops

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#357

Post by Dalewyn »

LeFantome wrote: post #341

For a lot if what I do, the CPU on an older laptop is just fine. So, I too use really old laptops. That said, I am upgrading laptops that sold with 2 - 4 GB of RAM to 16 GB, or at least 8 GB. Often I am replacing on old HDD ( maybe as slow as 5400 RPM ) with a faster SSD. That SSD also juices the battery life. So, what I am using is a lot nicer than what the original owner had to deal with. Many laptops today will no…

>Linux is fantastic on older hardware

I've been having a hard time getting Linux to work on older hardware ever since the majority of distros dropped 32-bit builds.

Then again, "older" for me means stuff from the Pentium through the Pentium 4 era. Seeing as "older" today means Sandy Bridge and the like, the moral of this little tale is I am a fucking old man angry at the kids on my lawn.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#358

Post by nvrmnd »

lost_tourist wrote: post #281
arrowsmith wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can even put them on top of your lap.

most pc laptops I've used weren't very comfortable after some number crunching or kernel building after a few minutes...

yes but have you tried a desktop computer on your lap

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#359

Post by bdavbdav »

chadash wrote: post #319
akmittal wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just upgraded RAM(4 -> 12 GB) and HDD to SSD of a 8 years old laptop and it became a lot more responsive. Laptops now a days are not upgradable and companies claim they are doing so to build lighter laptops but framework is proving all of them wrong

> and companies claim they are doing so to build lighter laptops A framework 13" is 15.9mm thick and weighs 2.9 lbs. A macbook air M1 is 16.1mm thick and weights 2.8 lbs. So it's pretty darn close. I'm sure that thinner and lighter laptops exist, but yeah, the framework is pretty thin. And at a certain point, it stops mattering. Being thinner wouldn't really provide much utility at this point. The fact is that repair…

I’ve got a framework 13, and am in the “I wish I just bought the MacBook Air” camp.

The battery life is terrible, the speakers are terrible, the thermals are terrible. It may be thin and light, but the different levels of R&D really show.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#360

Post by pokepim »

prmph wrote: post #302
rpcope1 wrote: post #12

> Most of the 160-200 million laptops sold each year are replacement purchases. The average laptop is replaced every 3 years (in business) to five years (elsewhere). 3 My 5.7 years per laptop experience is not exceptional. 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…

I swore off those Chinese manufacturers (Lenovo, Asus, Acer, etc) many years ago for similar reasons and haven't looked back. I just don't buy any products from them, laptops included. Surprised people are still having to learn the hard way that their products are crap.

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