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I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

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Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#361

Post by piaste »

vel0city wrote: post #298
piaste wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your actions do not, indeed, matter. Neither does your vote, or your boycotting of $global_evil_corp, precisely because there's millions or billions of people involved. (To be pedantic: while not literally zero, your actions matter several order of magnitude less than would be necessary to be able to perceive their effects.) But that's a really hard pill to swallow. Your post is a beautiful example of that difficulty…

So you're saying my neighbors and I should feel fine throwing old car batteries in the lake and switching back to leaded gas?

I'm saying that lakes don't get saved when people virtuously choose to individually stop throwing trash into it: they get saved when the entity in control of the lake forbids throwing trash into them, and enforces that ban.

If leaded gas was still being legally sold alongside unleaded one, people like you would be passionately arguing for decades about why it's everyone's moral duty to pay extra for unleaded gas, and you would feel so proud every time you stopped at the green pump instead of the black one.

And meanwhile we would all be breathing lead.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#362

Post by Gigachad »

JCharante wrote: post #338
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.

I’ve gone 4 work days without charging my M1 MBP

I've got the M1 2020 and find it almost lasts 1 day usage.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#363

Post by Gigachad »

gtirloni wrote: post #174
wyldfire wrote: post #14

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…

I often replace phones because the battery starts holding less charge and I find it annoying to charge all the time. I tried a battery replacement service once and didn't like the result on my sealed and hard to open by design phone.

Get the battery replaced at an official repair location rather than a middle of the food court business. Apple has a whole setup of gear that will get a perfect result pretty much every time. And they will just give you a new phone if they break it.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#364

Post by Gigachad »

the-grump wrote: post #297
themadturk wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not doing to badly with Asahi Linux. There are still shortcomings to work out, but there are people using Asahi on their Apple Silicon machines for their daily driver.

Yeah but it's nowhere near the choice you get with a typical x86_64 laptop with an AMD/Intel chipset. I have minor problems with my Lenovos and Framework, but by and large they do work out of the box.

Asahi Linux basically works. The main issue is that Linux software, especially proprietary, does not play nice with ARM.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#365

Post by Gigachad »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #144
tyg13 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Who is buying macbooks every year though? I'm using the M1 2020 for work and it still feels like a brand new laptop.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#366

Post by piaste »

bscphil wrote: post #332
piaste wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By your logic, you may as well not vote either, because everyone else is voting. Correct. Voting is the worst possible example, because while e.g. individual recycling has a negligible but technically non-zero impact, voting is overwhelmingly* likely to have exactly zero impact. * unless the voting base is either extremely small, or extremely close. Your vote only matters as much as the likelihood that at least one…

> Your vote only matters as much as the likelihood that at least one result is decided by exactly one vote This is entirely wrong. The value of your vote is the relative ratio of the fraction of alternate universes in which you vote in the election and your side wins, over the fraction of alternate universes in which you don't vote in the election and your side wins. The value of your vote, as a result, is emphatical…

You're basically describing superrationality, which is a model I don't buy.

Defecting still wins the one-shot PD, which in this case maps to "not wasting dozens of hours researching political candidates" and everyone who votes like you is a prisoner.

If you want to be safe against network effects, just lie and tell everyone that you voted when asked.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#367

Post by Gigachad »

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…

Because the screen is pretty close to the most expensive part and isn't one that shows up well on spec sheets other than resolution. Windows laptop consumers almost all go by price per spec sheet item so those shitty screens boost the value way up.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#368

Post by thefz »

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…

> Guess this was written before the M1 :)

Depends on what you do, my girlfriend uses her M1 heavily for video calls and the battery lasts the same as any other average laptop.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#369

Post by AnthonyMouse »

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…

> And those things in turn need more (or well, 'different') space

But this is the source of the problem. The lack of modularity and standardization.

The first generation mobile Core i7 from 2008 had a TDP up to 55W. The base TDP of the current generation is the same, Ryzen is even less. It shouldn't need a different cooling solution to dissipate the same amount of power. The same is true of mobile GPUs.

Don't layout the new board in a different configuration. Don't change the chassis. Just put the newer chips in it, in the same places they were before. Which means the newer boards and chips will be compatible with the older chassis.

> say you want to go from 720p to 2k, that also requires more power

If the new screen uses 20W instead of 15W, that shouldn't really matter. Screens typically aren't actively cooled and are also hinged into their own section of the chassis, so if the newer screen needs different passive cooling, it can come with that and still slot into the same base chassis.

And if the new screen uses 20W instead of 15W, you should still have enough power unless the entire rest of the laptop is at max spec. If you have a battery and power supply that could support a 55W CPU and a 55W GPU, but you actually have a 25W CPU and a 30W GPU, the screen using an extra 5W should be irrelevant.

> The mainboard might not have a TCON and eDP or LVDS transceiver to drive such a panel

On the other hand, it might, because 2k displays have been around for more than a decade. And if it doesn't, you should be able to upgrade the GPU to one that does, and plug the display directly into the new GPU, which in turn plugs into a standard slot using PCIe that doesn't require anything else to be changed.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#370

Post by colechristensen »

Dalewyn wrote: post #357
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.

I think you have graduated to retro computing enthusiast.
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