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I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

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Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#381

Post by fragmede »

SCdF wrote: post #376
barbariangrunge wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m an author, sometimes. My 2015 MacBook Air has slowed down so much, due to software bloat, it’s painful to use. You need to constantly buy new hardware to run peoples literally exponentially less efficient software

Yes! It's frustrating. I have a perfectly good 2015 MBP 13" that runs as fast as the day I bought it but is now unusable for much of the web, especially video or high Javascript situations. To use YouTube without it being a jetengine you need to force YouTube to return you mp4s instead of vp8 or whatever they use now. Twitch is just unusable is chat moves slightly faster than not at all. Everything in general is a fr…

The worst offender imo is VScode. it won't run smoothly on my 2010 era Thinkpad. yeah it's old, but we're talking about a text editor here. without any plugins it should still be able to do at least that much smoothly.

I don't need AAA games to run on it, but text editing!

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#382

Post by beebeepka »

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

If you live on Jupiter, with its 10-hour days, then maybe.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#383

Post by Joeri »

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…

That soldered ram is indeed a killer, and the transition can be quite sudden. We have a 2014 macbook air with 4gb of soldered ram, and my kid was fine using it for office and browsing, until at one point he suddenly wasn’t. The ram footprint of that software together with macOS updates passed some threshold where it just became too slow, so now he’s using one of my other old laptops, a windows machine with an even slower cpu, but with 8 gb ram, and that one is still ok, for now.

Apple’s talk about sustainability is just talk as long as they bake in poison pills like soldered ram and soldered storage. Those machines are unupgradable and unrepairable.

The thin and light market is almost entirely soldered ram now, so now I just price in the 16 gb upgrade as the base config price when looking at those.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#384

Post by brailsafe »

beebeepka wrote: post #377
colechristensen wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you have graduated to retro computing enthusiast.

No kidding. Not to mention that Pentium 4 was just about to worst line of intel CPUs, culminating with junk like pentium d 820 and its siblings. People ought to be paid to use this crap

People were definitely paid to use this crap at that time

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#385

Post by decide1000 »

I have an older laptop which runs Debian 12 with xfce rather slow. Browsing the web with Firefox goes fairly slow. Clicking a button can take a second before something happens. I changed the OS for GhostBSD (=FreeBSD) and now have a major improvement in speed. Buttons and links in Firefox feel snappy again.

I was not aware that FreeBSD would be this much resource-friendly.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#386

Post by RuggedPineapple »

I've actually gone even farther. The last 4 laptops I've bought have all been 50 dollar used Chromebooks. Pull out the write-protect screw, flash new firmware and install linux. If it's got enough eMMC space Windows 10 LTSC runs too (depending on model) but I find xubuntu or Fedora XFCE plays nicer with 16 gigs of space.

I have a beefier desktop for serious things, but in terms of everyday machines they work fantastically.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#387

Post by brailsafe »

Joeri wrote: post #383
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…

That soldered ram is indeed a killer, and the transition can be quite sudden. We have a 2014 macbook air with 4gb of soldered ram, and my kid was fine using it for office and browsing, until at one point he suddenly wasn’t. The ram footprint of that software together with macOS updates passed some threshold where it just became too slow, so now he’s using one of my other old laptops, a windows machine with an even sl…

Honestly I feel bad for most people who ended up with a 4gb macbook, and Apple should feel some shame for continuing to sell them for so long, not terribly unlike the Vista debacle. 4gb was an awful choice already in 2014, and since 16gb was (I think) the max and still kinda mid, that was the obvious choice; 8GB would have still been fine for an average user. I have no idea if 64gb is the obvious choice now, but the upgrade is so obscenely expensive that I'll be holding onto my intel thing for a while longer. Not as long as I can, but until the cost to value ratio becomes more compelling, or something like a cellular modem comes around.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#388

Post by SCdF »

fragmede wrote: post #381
SCdF wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! It's frustrating. I have a perfectly good 2015 MBP 13" that runs as fast as the day I bought it but is now unusable for much of the web, especially video or high Javascript situations. To use YouTube without it being a jetengine you need to force YouTube to return you mp4s instead of vp8 or whatever they use now. Twitch is just unusable is chat moves slightly faster than not at all. Everything in general is a fr…

The worst offender imo is VScode. it won't run smoothly on my 2010 era Thinkpad. yeah it's old, but we're talking about a text editor here. without any plugins it should still be able to do at least that much smoothly. I don't need AAA games to run on it, but text editing !

Yes, jesus.

I am forced to use VSCode because some disability plugin[1] I use only (for now!) exists for it, but having to switch to it over SublimeText + Vim was annoying. If you don't need to use it definitely try either of those options

[1] https://github.com/cursorless-dev/cursorless

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#389

Post by ornornor »

noirbot wrote: post #349
chadash wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The tradeoff is that the Framework's battery life is garbage . I had laptops a decade ago with 2x the battery life. I'm lucky to get 3 hours of battery doing web browsing, and standby/hibernate on the Intel processor in it is so bad that it'll fully discharge in less than 12 hours doing literally nothing. I really want to like it, but my Framework is literally a worse user experience than my old 2016 Macbook Air and…

A cursory search shows that various testing websites have measured battery life to be 7–8h on the framework which is decent I’d think?

I have no firsthand experience but 3h in comparison seems low.

Also, web browsing can be intensive if you use js heavy sites like linked in or even the GitHub homepage (when not logged in)

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#390

Post by OrderlyTiamat »

antigirl wrote: post #352
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.

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

Could you expand on that? You discovered vs code takes a lot of power when settings sync is turned on or something?
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