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I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

solar.lowtechmagazine.com

441–450 of 551 posts

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#442

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.

I won't take any distro seriously that doesn't support at least i686, amd64, arm and arm64. Compiling for four architectures can't be too much to ask. Shit software that can't be written portably enough to run on more than amd64 must be kicked off the repo. We need this pressure on developers if we're to maintain a modicum of code quality.

> Shit software that can't be written portably enough to run on more than amd64 must be kicked off the repo.

Convince me, why should I spend my time supporting i686? Just to accommodate a handful of people still running 32bit hardware?

Calling other people's work "shit" just because they don't spend their free time supporting the wishes (not needs!) of 0.1% of their users is rude and extremely entitled.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#443
I still use 13y old ThinkPad x201 with Fedora. Of course with SSD and upgraded RAM to 8GB. I cannot imagine more kid-proof laptop. It's indestructible construction, yet compact and not heavy. Perfect for home with kids. No wonders that it is commonly used in space stations!

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#444
post #408
post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Frameworks are amazing on paper, and yet I still can't purchase one in New Zealand but I can easily purchase Apple hardware.

It’s straightforward to use a shipping forwarder, just adds a bit to the cost.

It adds a lot to the cost, and I am not protected by the New Zealand consumer laws in case something isn't right with the product. Way too risky for my liking.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#445
post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately soldered RAM consumes less energy and space.

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

And when you have great resell value than that device might get a second and third user as well.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

it was a third party extension: https://twitter.com/jordanpittman/status/1526247984349978629... https://github.com/shanalikhan/code-settings-sync/issues/136...

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#447
post #315

Well, I'm retired, so I don't do much emails or zoom anymore. I do serious stuff now, like Cyberpunk, MFS and Hogwarts. So I need serious hardware, updated often. And I'm constantly on the move too, so serious hardware needs to fit into my backpack. Sorry, snowflake millennial applebooks not up for the task.

Believe it or not, Apple laptops are now quite capable of gaming, and Apple’s recent release of a game development porting toolkit shows that they’re getting serious about the space: https://youtu.be/bIPl71ZeOYk 40fps in Cyberpunk 2077 on a Mac laptop including a translation layer.

1080p, no ray tracing ... long way to go.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#448
post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Japan stays free of litter because residents keep it that way (despite not having many trash cans in public), not because someone's there watching over everyone and enforcing it: https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20191006-what-japan-can-t...

Individual actions may not make much of a difference on their own but in aggregate they do.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#449
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…

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…

It's about price detection. If you offer several versions of a product to discover the maximum reach consumer is willing to pay, then the cheapest versions need to be meaningfully worse to drive those who can pay to the me expensive versions.
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