I decided to buy a Mini-STX (AsRock X300 64GB RAM/Ryzen 5700G) and wait for a good laptop to become a available. It's still portable, much better performance/price ratio and you can buy a good (portable) high brightness matte display of your own choice.
It may not be portable as in battery portable, but it's small enough to go in suitcase.
I stopped buying new laptops (2020)
411–420 of 551 posts
Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)
#412Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess your superfast laptop wasn't very good at rendering the webpage of the article
Are we not allowed to use the article as a springboard for conversation? Am I obligated to only restrict myself to what the author wanted to talk about without expanding the realm of discussion with the people on HN?
I just don't think it's that interesting to take an article that says "I and other people with similar needs to me can do X", and reply, "well I have different needs and can't do X". Well... duh? There isn't really much conversation to spring into.
Many people who buy new laptops every few years really don't need to do that. Some who buy new laptops every few years actually do see a benefit to doing so. The latter group isn't really all that interesting to talk about, at least not in the context of the article. The former group is, because making old laptops more useful for those types of people could have a huge positive environmental impact.
Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)
#413Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well in 5 years I expect most dev work will be done in VR collaboratively with remote teams, w multiple virtual screens and AI assistance. Another world. Laptops and cell phones will be gathering dust with the desktops. Things change fast. Remember the world without the iPhone? That was 16 years ago. So when you talk about using a 5 year old laptop to save a few dollars it just doesn’t make sense. You can listen to m…
How about we save that $1,200 and donate it to something like Rainforest Alliance instead?
Tbf the whole point of the the article is to use less stuff. If we all did that then we'd hopefully not be in the situation of having to chop down the rainforest.
So logically as it's consumption that's causing that destruction, you should really be donating the $1200 when you buy the new laptop, not when you don't.
Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)
#414Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would be silly if this article were trying to recommend a 15 year old computer for intense numerical processing, which is why nobody, including the author, made the attempt.
yeah, but "author realizes they have no substantial computing needs because they only word-process" isn't a particularly interesting article. like boss you can hook a bluetooth keyboard up to your phone and go to town at that point, if you want, there's really no need for a laptop at all. and since it's not applicable to the userbase here you're gonna get discussion on why it's not applicable.
> "author realizes they have no substantial computing needs because they only word-process" isn't a particularly interesting article
That's not really the point of the article, though. The point is that there are a lot of people with similarly non-computationally-intensive needs who still nonetheless buy a new laptop every few years. If more people would realize what the author has realized, they'd not only save money, but reduce e-waste and the need for quite as much new laptop manufacturing.
> and since it's not applicable to the userbase here you're gonna get discussion on why it's not applicable.
I think that says more about the bubbles HN users live in, and their inability to think outside those bubbles, than anything else. Kinda unfortunate. I would be much more interested in discussing why so many people with modest computing needs think they need a new laptop every few years (advertising, probably), and how this might be changed.
Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)
#415I can't say I stick to this 100%, but I actually like using underpowered laptops. Optimisation is an important step in the development process but its often rushed through even by those who consider it most important (myself included). However, if you NEED to optimise your code just to get the thing to work on your computer, a lot more attention is put into it. If I'm optimising for a lower spec machine than my users…
You can easily underpower your better laptop on demand for a specific task. And also you can do it in more controlled ways: what happens if the process gets less memory, fewer cores, lower cpu speed, worse network, etc. Getting an underpowered laptop to do both development and testing is not the only, or even best way to do this.
To expand on that, one of the main reasons I upgrade my laptop is to make development tasks better: faster compilation times, and less sluggishness when I need to work in bloated IDEs like IntelliJ.
Sure, that may put me a bit out of touch computing-power-wise from many of my users, but, as you point out, there are ways to compensate for that.
Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)
#416For 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…
Unfortunately soldered RAM consumes less energy and space.
Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)
#417I 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…
You sorta hint at this in your post, but I assume that eating the cost of the rare damaged-in-transit laptop is still cheaper than paying full price for all-new hardware.
And while I certainly understand that environmental impact might not be the chief concern for a company (even a non-profit), continuing to give secondhand hardware a new life is certainly way better for the environment.
Regardless, it seems bonkers to me that a courier can get away with such a clause. You're paying them to ship something safely from point A to point B; it should be completely irrelevant what that thing is when it comes to paying you out for their mistakes.
Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)
#418Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess your superfast laptop wasn't very good at rendering the webpage of the article
Are we not allowed to use the article as a springboard for conversation? Am I obligated to only restrict myself to what the author wanted to talk about without expanding the realm of discussion with the people on HN?
Yes, but you should start by explaining that you are switching the context, to make it clear that you're aware of it. The author took care to explain that his stance applies to office applications and may not apply to other use cases, even specifically mentioning audio-visual work.
Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)
#419Earlier 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…
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.
It’s scale, too, isn’t it? At Apple scale you get better materials, better engineering at every level, and better testing processes—for the same or less money.
I admire Framework for achieving what they’ve done, modest though the success is in absolute terms. That said, they’re also probably still burning venture funding. Hardware disruption is hard.
Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)
#420I am hoarding older thinkpads at this point. The soldered RAM ones I am not touching. The older ones are cheap to upgrade and pretty snappy. I havent bought a new laptop since 2009.