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I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

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Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#431

Post by kelnos »

Shekelphile wrote: post #275
quadrifoliate wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Owning a macbook vs owning a framework laptop isn't going to effect climate change in any way. In fact, Apple's track record is that their products generally outlast the competition, even when they do otherwise stupid things like software DRMed screen and battery replacements and soldered SSDs. It is purely virtue signaling. If you want to do good by the climate and still want a powerful tool there is no better optio…

I don't think Framework is expecting to compete with Apple. They're competing with Dell, HP, Lenovo, Acer, ASUS, etc. Apple's laptop market share is what, still under 10%?

Assuming Framework's thesis bears out, that their customers will actually upgrade their laptops piece by piece when given the opportunity to do so, rather than buy a whole new laptop, then it's a matter of increasing their market share, especially through corporate IT contracts.

Every new company/concept has to start from zero. Maybe Framework has a sub-1% market share right now, but what if, over the next decade, they can grow that to 10%, maybe beyond? While there will certainly be some e-waste (likely most users will not find a use for their old Framework mainboard when they upgrade, and some mainboard upgrades will presumably require new RAM), it'll still be a lot less than people chucking complete laptops, including chassis, keyboard, touchpad, and screen, once every few years.

> Apple's track record is that their products generally outlast the competition

Not sure I agree with this, though my personal experience is pre-Apple-Silicon, which may have changed things for the better. When I used Apple laptops for software development, I only got around three years out of them before they felt uncomfortably sluggish, given the general bloat increases in software development tools (and the increasing number of lines of code we need to compile) over time. Apple certainly does fairly well by their users who have more modest computational needs; my partner has a ~10 year old MacBook Air that's still usable for light web browsing and video playback, though not much more.

At any rate, telling people that their desire to own an upgradeable laptop is mere virtue signaling is just lazy thinking. I might venture to suggest it's a defensive reaction to justify their own purchasing habits, but perhaps that goes a little too far.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#432

Post by loup-vaillant »

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…

The real scandal though, is that you need more than 4GB of ram to do some office and browsing. I mean, you update the software and it just becomes worse?

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#433

Post by Reason077 »

watersb wrote: post #343
Reason077 wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an M1 MacBook Air and use an app called CoconutBattery to monitor power usage. What I’ve noticed is that while the laptop is usually super efficient (say, 2.5-4W while web browsing giving 8+ hours battery life), occasionally the power draw climbs up to 6, 7, 8W or more with no obvious explanation, draining the battery in 3 or 4 hours. Activity Monitor will show no apps using unusual energy yet the power is goi…

Metadata indexing for Spotlight? I've had very stubborn runs of the md* indexer (not at laptop can't recall name -- mdimport?) decide that yes, this coffee shop is a great place to crank it up. A similar one is a large initial indexing by the Dropbox app. I've had my M1 Air on the desktop Thunderbolt dock for the past month so it's gotten way past that initialization stage.

Spotlight’s energy use shows up in Activity Monitor, though.

Whatever drains my battery is invisible to Activity Monitor (but visible to apps that monitor the power management hardware itself), so presumably it must be some hardware device?

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#434

Post by tmtvl »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #416
Joeri wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And it sells more systems when the user needs to upgrade for more RAM.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#435

Post by tmtvl »

ant6n wrote: post #372
Dalewyn wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

But there must be some with 32bit support?

OpenSUSE still builds i686 ISOs. Of course if you want to go crazy there's always TinyCore.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#436

Post by Lio »

jwcooper wrote: post #42
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…

This is what Framework set out to do (and is pulling it off so far...I'm typing this out on my 12th gen framework). They have an entire marketplace of replacement parts you can buy, including screens. They've even got battery upgrades (increased capacity), better speakers, new screen type (matte) that you can retrofit into your existing Framework. They support upgrading from their first gen laptop (admittedly they ar…

What I really appreciate with Framework is that they have little kits that let you repurpose the old insides of your laptop when you upgrade the processor or SSD.

That's a nice touch that means you're not just throwing that stuff away.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#437

Post by kelnos »

kibwen wrote: post #214
mitchell209 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want my EV to last a month on a single charge and yet some people are arguing against battery improvements. Crazy.

This is a straw man. The argument is not against improving batteries. It's about engineering products for what people actually need , and not over-engineering them for the fantasies that we construct regarding what their needs are. To continue the EV example, the majority of trips by car in the US are less than 3 miles. You could comfortably reduce an EV's range from 300 miles to 30 and sell a car that still suffices…

> if you're working somewhere with wifi, you're working somewhere with electricity

I agree with most of what you said, but I think this isn't necessarily true. Many people who want to work from a cafe have access to wifi but not electricity. Sometimes those outlets are in high demand and most people don't get one.

Or maybe you're on a plane, and your laptop is trying to draw too much current than the plane's crappy socket will give you (this just happened to me on a flight a week ago), so it only intermittently charges, but not enough to keep the charge percentage from steadily dropping.

Not wifi, but you might be tethering to your phone, away from electricity entirely.

Or maybe you just are offline entirely, without wifi or electricity.

Granted, I do agree with your overall point: the vast majority of the time my laptop is plugged in, and when it isn't, I expect I'll be near an outlet again within 2-3 hours at the most. Though I wonder how much of that is inherent to my usage patterns, and how much of that is me modifying my behavior because my laptop gets pretty bad battery life.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#438

Post by fragmede »

SCdF wrote: post #388
fragmede wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I want an ·easy· button for vim. I want to upgrade to a new version, be given new decoration and a new colorscheme to be angry over. but then I want it to have all the modern features. LLM code-complete that i can choose to pay a monthly SaaS for, a bevy of plugins like one to help me program my esp32 for my little iot project, super special handling for language-of-the-month.

but I also don't.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#439

Post by melagonster »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #432
Joeri wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The real scandal though, is that you need more than 4GB of ram to do some office and browsing. I mean, you update the software and it just becomes worse ?

windows need 4 GB ram, so this is operating system...

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#440

Post by glogla »

yardstick wrote: post #148
MAGZine wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If productivity is so important, why are people using laptops at all? Desktop processors are faster.

If you just work in one location only, sure. I work from home, the office, coffee shop. When Im at home I often like to code from the couch rather than the home office. Laptops add flexibility. I like their middle ground of flexibility and performance. I’m also one of those “weird” people that don’t use an external monitor. And yet I’m still just as productive, probably more so, than most of my coworkers.

List of places I worked from last month:

- my desk at home

- my couch at home

- my dinner table at home (in a boring call while preparing and eating lunch)

- my desk at work

- like 15 different meeting rooms in offices across two continents

- couch on terrace at work

- beanbag on terrace at work

- hotel room desk

- airport lounge

- airplane (if you count watching conference talks as working)

Flexibility is great!

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