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I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

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Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#481

Post by gymbeaux »

brailsafe wrote: post #387
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…

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…

They finally catered to devs in the last few years but it’s already too late for many of us because macOS is garbage now. The ARM transition makes it worse. I use Linux now.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#482

Post by rozenmd »

Venkatesh10 wrote: post #478
rozenmd wrote: post #7

ThinkPads are absolutely magic. Here's one I built for travelling: https://maxrozen.com/replacing-my-macbook-m1-with-thinkpad-t...

Which websites or store in Europe and UK would you suggest to get refurbished laptops and mobiles?

ebay or backmarket - look for IT refurbished laptops rather than individuals selling their old laptop

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#483

Post by gymbeaux »

sundvor wrote: post #427
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…

Yeah I'm so glad I paid top dollar for the 8GB version of the OG X1 Carbon back in 2012 - and got the i7 with the biggest NVME, a 256gb. I also have a newer Nano for work, but prefer the keyboard of the old. If I had picked the 4GB model then, it would have been pretty useless today. Today I wouldn't buy a personal laptop with less than 32GB of memory. The X1 Nano was hard locked at 16GB, and I guess I didn't quite a…

The nano looks cool but to me there’s no point if I can’t get 32GB of RAM.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#484

Post by gymbeaux »

mike_hock wrote: post #395
jakogut wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The x86-64 architecture was introduced in 1999, with the first processor introduced in 2003. Comparatively, the 8088, introduced in 1979, was barely older at the time than the 64-bit Opteron is now. It might be time to let i386 go.

Not as long as i386 devices still exist that are superior in at least one way to any amd64 or arm alternative. And what "superior" means depends on the use case. Some Mega Ryzen Uber Speed CPU with a Googol FLOPS that can't connect to anything is worthless to me.

What’s an example of something you’d prefer a 32-bit CPU for over a 64-bit CPU?

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#485

Post by justsomehnguy »

Delk wrote: post #475
NovaDudely wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compute power has never been an issue for me, but I generally try to max out the RAM as much as my budget allows. This is why I still have a 2010 Macbook that is more than fine. Started with 4GB and was barely usable for heavier even when it came out, but dropping 16GB into and it has been smooth sailing for over a decade now. That said my daily runner is now T420 from (2011-ish) that came with 6GB of RAM that is in…

> I swapped the HDD for an SSD and just threw Linux Mint on here - I disable the swap file so that it doesn't hammer the drive. If that's for the longevity of the drive, I don't think that's really even necessary on a personal device, based on my limited experience. Unless you're aiming for a lifespan measured in decades or would expect to be swapping heavily if you had swap. I have a basic consumer-grade Samsung 850…

> Unless you're aiming for a lifespan measured in decades or would expect to be swapping heavily if you had swap.

This one. My VERTEX3 is running fine, though it's not TLC, of course.

And with auto-leveling all you really need (if you care that much) is to.. increase the swap size, so there would be less evictions from the swap => less writes.

But anyway, even modern TLC drives would be fine for a decade if this is just a machine used for a couple of hours everyday. You need like a constant 3MB/s 24/7 to even be close for their rated TBW.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#486

Post by nython »

AnonymousPlanet wrote: post #407
NovaDudely wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compute power has never been an issue for me, but I generally try to max out the RAM as much as my budget allows. This is why I still have a 2010 Macbook that is more than fine. Started with 4GB and was barely usable for heavier even when it came out, but dropping 16GB into and it has been smooth sailing for over a decade now. That said my daily runner is now T420 from (2011-ish) that came with 6GB of RAM that is in…

I have a T420s that really struggles with video e.g. Youtube. Watching any h.245 via VLC or mplayer is impossible. Also the battery is in a bad state and I haven't been able to find a good replacement that isn't equally poor or worse right from the start. It actually has two batteries, one being in what used to be the cd tray. Still, usage time is 3 hours tops. It had been my daily driver for years, running Linux, bu…

On aliexpress, there is an usbc adapter for the t420 power cable that will allow it to take charge from a 65w powerbank (maybe even 20w). No need to search for battery replacements anymore and can also throw away the original power brick.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#487

Post by mike_hock »

gymbeaux wrote: post #484
mike_hock wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not as long as i386 devices still exist that are superior in at least one way to any amd64 or arm alternative. And what "superior" means depends on the use case. Some Mega Ryzen Uber Speed CPU with a Googol FLOPS that can't connect to anything is worthless to me.

What’s an example of something you’d prefer a 32-bit CPU for over a 64-bit CPU?

The CPU? Nothing. The device isn't just the CPU.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#488

Post by mike_hock »

dns_snek wrote: post #442
mike_hock wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why should you spend your time writing it in the first place?

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#489

Post by Shekelphile »

kelnos wrote: post #431
Shekelphile wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

You can't upgrade a framework laptop 'by piece', unless you mean swapping in more ram or a bigger/faster ssd. Not really any different from other mainstream laptop vendors in that regard. The CPU is soldered, so you can't upgrade within the CPU platform generation, there's no drop in replacement options for the screen except the IPS panel they ship with (so no high dpi options or OLED/microled, no high refresh rate option, etc), and only proprietary recessed USB-C dongles for changing ports. It's a joke product.

> When I used Apple laptops for software development, I only got around three years out of them before they felt uncomfortably sluggish

Sounds like your usecase calls for a desktop system then, I know plenty of people still using 2013-2015 retina macbook pros for daily development work and they do just fine. There wasn't much performance improvement after those years until the apple silicon transition, you could get 6 and 8 core coffee lake CPUs on the last year of the intel macbook pros but they were essentially unusable for laptop usecases since they had to aggressively thermal throttle and nuked battery life as a result (something that is an even worse problem now with Intel and AMD both juicing core count and clock speeds to chase benchmark wins rather than improving perf per watt and overall system usability).

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#490

Post by WastingMyTime89 »

gymbeaux wrote: post #481
brailsafe wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They finally catered to devs in the last few years but it’s already too late for many of us because macOS is garbage now. The ARM transition makes it worse. I use Linux now.

> The ARM transition makes it worse.

No idea what you mean. The M1 MacBook Air is the best machine Apple has produced for years and finally convinced me to update my old personal laptop. The battery life is insane despite the performance being better than any of the high end Windows laptop I have used for work during the past decade. Plus it was correctly priced at launch which is very rare for Apple which usually extremely overprices everything.

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