I had one of those `63 Darts with a straight 6 in it back in the 80s. It was a blue four door. I put snow tires in the back and drove that car all over the dirt roads in the Tehachapi Mountains north of Los Angeles.
One day I drove to the very end of a dirt road way up near the top of a mountain there and was just sitting there soaking in the view when I heard two big 4Wheeler Pickups rumbling up the road and when they came around the bend in the road where it ended and saw me in that old Dart sitting there it just crushed their egos.
Stunning. My high school roommate (1996-7ish) had a Sparcbook. He let me use it a few times, and even at the time it just felt good.
I still have the dot matrix printout of everything I ran / wrote on a TI-99/4a in the early nineties. I wish my parents hadn't s#!tcanned that machine when I went to college, I bet I could write markdown with a modem and some kind of VCS on it to publish content even on the modern web with that old dog.
Anyway, that's not to hijack your comment - even at the time, probably almost 15 years after the TI-99/4a came out I felt like there were restrictions on what you could do with a machine that kept you focused on the task at hand in really productive ways. So I totally understand.
How are the keys in such good shape? My keyboards wear out within a few years on the meta keys, and sometimes particular letters. They typically lose some of the lettering and the plastic is shiny or worn down.
Note: I keep my fingernails quite short. I do type a lot, though.
It's one of those original indestructible Lexmark-designed IBM keyboards - I'm not sure what coating they used, but they rarely wear. That's why there are so many pristine mid-90's Thinkpads out there.
Wonder how long Windows 7 will last for him. I have Windows 8.1 at home (not my daily driver, for that I use Linux), and Google Chrome is no longer updated. Nor is much else. But it works for my tasks, which is Lightroom (the last one that was not subscription I guess).
That keyboard (and trackpoint) is begging to be touched. I'll guess it's a thinkpad k/b.
I do love vintage gear, but as a daily diriver, the rest of the machine looks, um, very vintage. Check those bezels! Though the LCD is barely visible anyway.
Computers can last a long long time. I built a pair of dev computers in 2012 for about $2500 each, using one of the fastest CPU’s on CPU Benchmark that was also quite cheap (about $350 per CPU). I still use one of them as my main dev computer. Nothing has ever broken inside it, not even a fan. The original SSD raid setup is still in place. It works as well as it ever did. I don’t notice any issues when all of the different IDE’s and tools I need are open.
Same here, not into upgrading continuously for no good reason.
My primary home server (ZFS pools and hosting many VMs) is one I built in 2010, still nothing wrong with it. I keep wanting to upgrade to a new one but there's nothing wrong with it so can't really justify change.
My desktop mac mini is from 2014, works just fine. My windows laptop (toshiba) is from about 2009-2010 (I bought it used in 2011) and still works just fine (I don't use windows generally but have a bunch of niche astrophotography programs which are windows only).
Meanwhile... A Mac work laptop from 2021 lasted a year before the right side usbc ports both died. A Mac laptop from 2021 lasted a year before the screen died completely. The new machines have terrible quality problems.
My first personal desktop computer was old enough to start high school before I upgraded, though in its final years it was little more than a minecraft, youtube, and web browsing machine (a typical 14 year old). It was an old machine from our church in 2004, it had a Core2Quad and a 512MB Radeon graphics card, with 4GB of DDR2.
> My first personal desktop computer was old enough to start high school before I upgraded, though in its final years it was little more than a minecraft...
I hosted a minecraft server on a last gen P4 because the single threaded performance was that good (headless ubuntu). Intel hits these high spots were some hot chip keeps up with the next 7 years of CPUs.
They said they purchased it in 2004, and it was given to me as a graduation present in 2011, so someone at our church must have upgraded it somewhere along the line. Doing a little searching, the Quad came out even later, in 2008 so it must have been around then. Presumably for the upgrade to Windows 7.
Now that I think about it, pastor's son was a gamer that spent all his time at the church, and I always thought it weird that a church had a discrete graphics card with DVI output in a back office machine...
I still have one of those small form factor Dell Optiplex 9020 (with i7 4790) and with the RAM upgraded to 16G and SSD this things feels super nice and snappy for what I use it for. I paid around $100 for it last year. I’m really starting to wonder if newer hardware has any real advantages for me.
Still use one cheap HP Compaq XP business machine from 2006, Pentium D which is really just two 32-bit Pentiums on one die to equal an early 64-bit AMD64. Runs W11 just fine once you coax it into existence on a BIOS PC. Linux too.
A slightly older XP Dell only has a single-core 32-bit CPU so no W11 for you, but W10 32-bit is still current and there's only 4GB of memory anyway. Debian on 32-bit looks like it may be supported for somewhat longer. Uses parallel PATA and/or serial SATA drives.
Both have floppies, parallel printer ports, serial COM ports, dual DVD readers/burners and telephone modems.
Same here, see my comment below. I should add that I do plenty of compiling programs from C# for a specific application and it's still almost instantaneous.
You bought that computer at the exact right time when the bulk of the industry talent went into trying to make mobile processors more power efficient rather than making desktop processors more powerful.
I've been daily driving a 2013 MBP. After occasional memory upgrades, hard drive upgrades, and battery swaps this decade-young computer of Theseus runs great.
But the real reason I'm not upgrading is because of software compatibility:
1. This is about as new a machine I can get that runs Adobe CS6 & Lightroom with perpetual licenses. (F your subscription)
2. The new M machines do not appear to run the Intel-driven CAD software I currently run in Bootcamp, not even in emulation. (I'm not keen on owning 2 machines for my dayjob, nor wholly converting to Windows.)
Meanwhile my less mission critical software has gotten cheeky lately and started telling me my machine is too old. Spotify and Signal both refuse to update further and launch with big nastygram windows saying so. Wheeee.
For #1, I can’t imagine either switching over to open source or an Adobe competitor isn’t going to easily surpass CS6 with how old it is. I have to think GIMP has caught up with and surpassed CS6 by now.
For #2, I think if it was me and I really wanted to stick with the Mac and upgrad I’d just run Parallels. Sure, it’s yet another license, but it runs a lot of stuff pretty well, including some 3D games, so I think it might be worth trying.
Another part of me wonders if Crossover/Wine could run that CAD software.
Of course, you want to be able to run these on a trial before you buy any hardware.
If you’re not aware of OpenCore Legacy I might as well mention that in case you need a newer version of macOS on that hardware.
my current dd laptop is also an early 2013 MBP, which I had installed Linux on a few years ago. however recently I picked up music again and preferred to use Mac for certain software. oh man was the reinstallation process a nightmare. the recovery install didn't have a browser that would render the Firefox download page. the Mac app store didn't have downloads for the highest version of macOS I could install on Intel architecture. it was problem after problem but now in finally running the last version I'll be able to run: 11.17. funny how much can change or become obsolete in only a decade :D
What an incredibly wasteful world we live in. A 16g ram core i7 laptop from 2017 is considered vintage? When it comes to cars, vintage is like a century ago.
How has software qualitatively improved since 2017? Even since 2010? We are still slinging the same sht around together with an ever increasing amount of 'node modules' on our disks.
The cause of climate change is not the use of fossil fuel, but the extreme extraction and processing of raw material for releasing the next new thing that will increase quarterly revenue targets leaving in its wake extreme waste that no one knows what to do with except force third world countries absorb it.
Indeed. My old Intel Atom netbook just doesn't handle modern web at all. Even sites with just text such as Medium are unusable. I guess all this at least makes modern web developer experience great since as an user I don't get any benefits?
I myself still run a decade old macbook air - with most hardware parts replaced for a second or third time, except the mainboard: On the Ventura with all security fixes instead of Big Sur. Its awesome.
Luckly I went for 8gb and i7 back then. And swapped the NVME with an adapter + vanilla drive, so no pricey upgrades. The computer has 4tb diskspace now ...
Last year, I upgraded to a new daily driver: ThinkPad T520, manufactured in April of 2012.
Linux (Debian Stable) runs great on it, and it has TrackPoint with a non-chiclet keyboard. And if you drop it on something, the something will probably get hurt more.
It doesn't seem "vintage". My previous one, made in 2009, also still runs Debian Stable well, including when running 3 different Web browsers and a couple other bloated programs at once.
I’m still on my 2012 W520 as daily driver. Runs Ubuntu 22.04. It’s a tank - it just won’t die. And if something does wear it, it’s easy to repair or replace.
I’m actually thinking of purchasing a X220 or X220T as a smaller, more portable model of the same era. To me, this era of thinkpad is the pinnacle of laptop design. Unsurpassed. Robust and practical.
I've stockpiled a few W520 units, in case I ever need that upgrade step. The huge 170W power brick is the reason not to just move to it now, since I have a fleet of 90W AC adapters I've been using for everything since the T60.
I've also wanted to get X220, for more portable, but still matching keyboard. (I currently have some X200 units, with better displays than X220 usually has, but different keyboard layouts. They'll be a bit of work to sell, for the upgrade, since I'll have to replace the custom Coreboot that's on them.)
> The huge 170W power brick is the reason not to just move to it now, since I have a fleet of 90W AC adapters I've been using for everything since the T60.
Can't you get a barrel connector on top of a modern GaN adapter? It should be much smaller!
Good question. The W520 wants 20V (at up to 170W). Looks like the newish USB PD standard can supply 20V in addition to 5V. So maybe it could be done with a current/forthcoming consumer USB PD wallwart, without needing to add additional power circuitry?
> So maybe it could be done with a current/forthcoming consumer USB PD wallwart, without needing to add additional power circuitry?
You may need a circuit to negotiate the USB-PD, then to ouput 20V from that, but it should be possible.
It could even be a very interesting project: expose an artificial resistance on the barrel plug to simulate the Lenovo AC wattage resistor by matching what the USB-PD can deliver.
Yes. I used an x200 which was unfortunately damaged. I tried to repair it but it didn't recover. I bought an x230 off ebay. It was a factory demo piece which was refurbished. I did that in 2014 and did so because Ineeded one urgently. I replaced it about a month ago with an X1 carbon. The battery is shot and it overheats when I run too much on it. However, for day to day stuff, it's superb. Runs Debian and chugs away without many problems.
And a 7-year old machine isn’t necessarily obsolete either.
Apple uses those two words to mean specific things (vintage: >= 5y, < 7y; obsolete: >= 7y) as it relates to their support policies. Full support up to at least 5 years, some support up to 7, no support from then on.
Honestly, it’s pretty refreshing to be able to summarise 99% of a company’s product support lifecycle in such a small paragraph.
I'm still on a x230 I've bought 12 years ago (which was also manufactured in around 2012) as my personal daily driver. I replaced the keyboard once as I preferred the x220 one, replaced the battery every 4 years, and wouldn't even consider "upgrading" to something else. I mostly write C, Guile and Perl code in Emacs on this machine and spend another large chunk of my time in a terminal emulator, so I'd even argue that my hardware requirements haven't really changed during the last decade and probably won't for yet another.
The X230 is absolutely a classic, a local optimum of computer hardware. I have several of them at this point. It's just too bad that it doesn't have the X220's keyboard.
I'm still using the macbook pro i bought new in april 2015. Nearly 9 years of use! You never got that in the 90s. And to think some say progress has stopped!
In 1990 you’d still have quite a few 1980s era machines, and even into 1995 there would be old 8086 machines doing their thing.
But then everything changed when Windows 95 attacked, suddenly the upgrade treadmill was on and those older machines stopped being used not because they were to slow or broken, but because upgraders were dumping used hardware, and you might as well.
Somewhere after the proliferation of SSDs I feel it slowed down again.
I believe it's related to PC standardization really kicking in during the 90's. Before that point, cross-platform abstraction existed but was relatively bespoken to the application, and you couldn't rely on coordination of developers with users that could run out and upgrade to this year's latest, because the pre-32bit desktop hardware kept changing architectures in radically incompatible ways - segmented memory, cooperative multitasking, etc. As such your data export was usually not to another computer, but to paper.
After 1995 you had convergence on Wintel: they won the desktop architecture wars, the address space was large and flat so applications could grow, and Linux, Unicode and the Web were still nascent but all existed in a "right place, right time" sense to drive adoption.
The SSD era slowed things down because right around that time, the focus shifted towards mobile computing, which saw the same treadmill from the start of the iPhone era. The older generation phones of this era are largely uninteresting curios, perhaps valued only if they happen to store an old game that got removed from the stores.
IoT seems to be the next wave, still working towards the big shake-out and standards convergence: "computer as a feature" is increasingly possible to a degree that was unreasonable before.
Check the cost of power, cause the power draw may be costing a lot relative to the speed. https://support.apple.com/en-us/102839 indicates 115w idle or 146w idle, and 263 watt max or 309 watt max.
And that is for a machine that is likely slower / less performant than a modern one with much lower draw. Your power bills may thank you.
We have a rack with two servers (internet-facing) from around 2000/2001. They haven’t been rebooted since a facility move about a decade ago. They are still in continuous use.
I discovered this the hard way with my home server. The boot drive whilst still working wouldn’t come up on boot. It apparently worked in Linux still but it was no longer bootable.
Having to scramble after a power outage to get a bootable Linux image to fix it wasn’t ideal.
No way to have discovered this without a hard power cycle, a soft reset didn’t repro it.
The author says that most time is spent either in a web browser, or in a terminal in ssh sessions. Talk about the year of desktop Linux; I bet most web sites and most hosts to ssh to are Linux-powered.
A 2017 MPB is still my daily driver. The only thing having me switch to a M3 at the moment is I'm finally done with that horrible keyboard. Battery life is getting a bit annoying, but otherwise it's chugged away ever since I got the thing on release day.
That said, the M series laptops are such a huge step forward it's a little mind blowing!
Mine is a 2012 MBP. I am only just now seeing real performance issues; until about mid last year it worked as well as the day I bought it aside from some battery degradation (I put an SSD in it around 2018). Pretty excited to upgrade and hope I can get at least 5-6 years out of a new MBP. This was my first MacBook, and 12 years of use is pretty insane value.
Mine's a 2014 MBP, and even the battery is still mostly okay. My biggest annoyance at this point is because it no longer gets updates, it's not on par with my new iPhone and I've lost functionality like copy/paste between computer and phone.
I'm running the last(?) Intel MBP from 2019 for rust and web development and haven't found any reason to upgrade.
Interesting observation: my remote junior colleague has a M2 Pro MBP with more memory than me. We're running the same OSX and node versions. Spinning up a development environment in a project using vite and a Java DB process running inside docker is about 3x faster on my old Intel than on their M2 Pro. The problem isn't anything trivial, and I'm struggling to help them figure it out over Zoom.
Not saying it isn't fixable, but I suspect there are still ARM potholes you trip on.
It's always using a VM so I am guessing Rosetta is involved and a x86 emulation ist happening. (Again, this is a guess!)
If docker is a priority, Asahi Linux might be a great option, but this will of course create new problems, as it's far from done, and switching to Linux is a project on its own.
I for myself use a Debian ARM64 VM in UTM to have the most control over the VM and then just use docker in there. Works much better than I anticipated.
A customer of mine was running the full test suite of a Rails web app in 50 seconds on his M1 Mac, in a docker container. I ran it in 75 seconds on Linux on a 2014 laptop. 50 vs 75 could be a large improvement but not as much as one would expect from the difference of hardware: CPU, RAM, bus, everything is much faster on the M1 Mac and yet it's wasting too many resources running an x86 docker on ARM.
I just bought a used Thinkpad T470, and with arch linux (btw), hyprland, and neovim, I’m starting to like this machine more than my M1 macbook. The one thing I always thought my M1 couldn’t be beat at by an IBM compatible laptop is battery life, but the T470 actually has very good battery life. I’m not using the T470 for anything CPU intensive, but it’s the same with my MacBook. Just hobby projects, mostly writing code. I’m starting to wonder why I paid > 1k for a MacBook when a $200 used thinkpad is totally fine.
Same. I just bought a t480 off eBay a week ago while I already have a m2 pro MBP with 32gb RAM. I don’t know what compelled me but it’s just so cozy. By all measures the Mac is superior. Thinkpads are like the vinyl records of laptops.
I like that. I feel similar. I picked it up locally, and while I was driving over, I thought to myself: why am I even doing this, I have a perfect MacBook. But I'm happy I did it. It feels better in a way. Somehow like vinyl maybe, but not as fragile ;-) And my excuse is: can't run Arch on an M1 MacBook.
You can somewhat work around this using Karabiner Elements. I map caps lock to esc (when tapped) and ctrl (when held) with a 'complex modification' rule that looks like:
My (project machine) Dell Inspiron 15R SE 7520 laptop has started hanging while powered off or sleeping, with the power LED still blinking but the machine not responding to any external inputs (opening the lid, pressing the power button, holding it down). I assume the EC microcontroller is hanging, but I don't know why that is. I took the laptop apart, took the coin cell battery out and put it back in, and the problem stopped for a month or so but has returned.
What's causing the issue? Perhaps the coin cell battery is drained (and I didn't know the right way to test CR2032s at the time, so I thought it was good)? Or is the EC fried or corrupted, perhaps because I did a botched BIOS reflash which corrupted the EC, and had to reprogram the EC in flashrom over multiple passes while skipping "hung" flash blocks (the pin to hold the EC in reset didn't make flash properly writable)? Afterwards the laptop would boot, but dumping the EC flash again revealed the image was changed again. Or did the EC die due to flash corruption that occurred afterwards (either from flaky chips or because I damaged it earlier)?
it wasn't an obscure hardware issue related to corrupted firmware, but just the laptop (Windows 7) dies when it tries to go from sleep to hibernate after 6 hours
unfortunately the laptop still sometimes (not always) dies after shutting down, and cannot be powered back on. maybe dies during sleep too? i don't know.
My daily driver has been in for repairs, so for the past couple of weeks I've been using my Raspberry Pi 4-based "Hack-in-the-box" cyberdeck that I built in 2020.
The more I use it, the more I love it: Everything I need is readily available through the package manager. There are no interruptions and no nag screens. There is an unobtrusive icon at the top telling me that an update is available, but I get to install it on my schedule.
I've resisted the urge to sign into Google for Gmail and YouTube and my other social media accounts and I'm actually amazed at how little I miss it (though I still use those services from my phone, but I've been using them less)
Also, it being a home-built computer it comes with a couple of quirks: Its fan is extremely noisy, when you scroll the mouse wheel you hear a crackling noise on the speakers and the keyboard is very uncomfortable, but all of these gives it a "personality" that only endears it to me.
That's awesome. I build my own desktop for $1700 in parts in 2012. Not unsubstantial, but definitely not breaking the bank either. I had really come to take it for granted over the course of the last few years, as it's just one of multiple boxes I work on these days.
I started working on it pretty intensively again in the past few months and... man, for being 11+ years old it keeps up. Turns out I got lucky with the longevity of the i7-3820, GTX 770, and (what at the time was a ridiculous for a home machine) 32gb of ram in it.
Benchmarked (anecdotally) against a more modern (2021 build, 3x the cost) desktop, raytraced renderings still take 8x as long. But if I'm designing / modeling in 3d or BIM there is LITERALLY no dropoff.
I'm still going to make a new build soon because I'm getting back into not having time for that 8x hit on renderings. But I had no idea when I put this thing together 11 years ago that it would serve me so well for so long.
I also have a 7 year old laptop I bought for $140 new that I've put #!++ on and which keeps up just fine for most things the average punter would need in a machine.
I was able to get a Dell Precision T7820 off of Ebay. 2x Xeon Gold 6136, 128GB of RAM and an 8GB Quadro P4000 card for $500. Runs Linux great and is pretty zippy at tasks that hit all the cores of the CPU. Will probably spring for an AMD video card in the future.
I am using a desktop pc I built in 2012 for around 350 USD. It's running 24/7. I had to replace the mainboard, psu and ram over time due to failure (with similarly old components). The CPU AMD A10-5800K is still going strong though.
Eh, honestly, depending on where you live your yearly electricity bill might justify an upgrade considering you’re running it 24/7. You might want to check your idle wattage with a kill-a-watt and look at your price per kw hour on your electric bill.
Basically you can outperform that rig with an Intel Atom N100 with 1/10th the TDP of the A10-5800K. You could jump on Amazon and grab a Beelink mini PC or similar for about $200 and have an entire system that maxes out at 35W, idles at about 12-13W.
If you save 20W of power on your idle and your power costs 20 cents per KW/h the new system would pay for itself in less
than 6 years. If you’re in a country like the UK or Germany your payoff is 3 years or less.
My daily driver is a 2013 ThinkPad. It's not usable for gaming, but other than that, I just never notice any performance problems (except Android Studio, but Android Studio seems to be Uniquely Bad (TM)).
Offtopic, but I built a 486 PC, to remind me my first computer. 16MB FPM SIMMs, AMD Am5x86 133MHz CPU, Matrox Millenium + 3dfx Voodoo II. Win95. And a fkn external modem. But there is no dial-up ISP left in AU :)
No PCI, but I do have VLB. Graphics card and IO card are in VLB slots. I have 20MB RAM. For storage I’ve gone through several old hard drives but they all ended up failing. So I went with a CF card to IDE adapter. Mouse is serial, because I don’t have PS/2. I use a nice mechanical keyboard with a USB to PS/2 and then PS/2 to 5 pin DIN keyboard connector adapter. I also have a gotek floppy emulator on it. I mostly use this computer to play around with Borland C++.
I made peace with the touch bar after I found out it could be customized, and I removed most of the default functions and put in a couple that I like having handy, including the ability to lock the screen at a touch.
PSA to anyone who doesn’t know yet: you can lock the screen by clicking the Touch ID button (at least, in the newest no-touch bar Macs). It can be used to both lock and unlock.
I’m guessing your Touch Bar system can do this too but I have no way to try it. Sometimes Apple makes random little shortcut modifications when they change button layouts.
Control Command Q also locks the screen. I used to have that combo as a fast habit.
I jumped off the Touch Bar as soon as I could. I sorta miss the smooth volume and brightness adjustment but it’s not as good as having the keys be physical and always in the same place. No more looking down.
If they could make a row of physical keys with little OLED screens and maybe a couple of customizable knobs and/or sliders that could be assigned to anything that might be a really useful concept. But the need to look down at the Touch Bar really killed its magic for me.
The other thing you get on a modern Mac that’s arguably under-hyped is just the fact that the function keys are full size. It’s so much nicer.
I agree, I love my MBP 2017 touchbar layout and frankly forgot I had customized it to “how it should have come” so long ago. Borrowed someone’s stock MBP and was like oh this is all wrong. I understand all the brouhaha over the esc key, but you’ll have to pry the wonderful volume and brightness sliders from my fingers. Repeatedly spamming volume up seems so archaic.
"A lot older than I thought", my daily driver until recently was a 2011 MBP and it kinda worked for most tasks, while of course, it needed to be plugged. But it worked fine
I have working hardware from every decade, oldest is from 1982, but my daily driver and what I'm typing on now is a 2019 iMac 5K and Apple still doesn't have anything all-in-one to replace it. My keyboard is from 2002 (the USB version of the Kinesis I bought in ~ 1993).
My oldest computer still in 24/7 use is my 2014 FreeNAS, but it's using a monitor that's so old I don't even know.
Old hardware is great, but I do appreciate just how much better LCD panels have gotten over time.
Yep, LCD quality is why I now have relegated my old ThinkPads to be either servers or backup computers. They still work perfectly but once you work with gorgeus color corrected hires display it's hard to go back. You just can't unsee it. Some people don't care but I do.
I am still using a PC I built in 2012, that is over twelve years of daily use. Honestly for 90% of task I do I see no reason to really upgrade it, though I did put a newish GPU in it last year because the old one was failing. I feel like personal computing power somewhat plateaued in the last decade or so which is fine with me really, less upgrades is less waste. I think phones will hopefully reach this point soon though sadly I don't see most of them lasting over a decade.
> I feel like personal computing power somewhat plateaued in the last decade
It did in the WinTel world, after the 4th gen i7. Performance stayed flat from 5th gen until 10th or so. It's better after that. Between these later CPUs and and NVMe drives, it feels like computing has picked up a lot.
At least until Windows 11 ad/crapware bloats it all away.
My sister snagged a Mac SE that was bound for the landfill from her physics teacher in High School (c 2000). It's not just an old Daily Driver like we're discussing, or like it was when she intercepted it - it's proper retro computing now. But I just realized that 23-4 years later it's still sitting, climate controlled in our parents' house. Next time I'm there I should try to see if it's still bootable and if not how to get it there...
I almost pulled the trigger on a new MacBook Pro but then I read they made such trade offs with the display that the response time is really, really slow and has ghosting even when scrolling around.
I can’t spend £3,000 on a device that does that, no matter how great the rest of the machine is, as I don’t do graphics work. Guess I’m not their target customer.
So, my “obsolete” MacBook Pro 2015 continues to be my web surfing machine and my AMD desktop for real work. Thanks Apple!
The server and workstation I use at home are from 2013-2014. C602 chipset: the X79 of the server room.
They draw more power than I'd like, but they perform very well on the workloads I throw at them.
I'd save a good amount of money by purchasing newer energy-efficient hardware, but even when presented with the numbers I can't rationalize away the sticker-shock.
I use a 2010 MacBook Air with Debian and i3 for writing and coding practice using vim and cmdline tools. No web browser installed. For those tasks I'm much more productive on it than on any modern machine I own. I just wish the battery life were better.
I did follow iFixit and replaced the battery and SSD. Battery life is still terrible compared to a modern laptop. It's just a limitation of 14 year old tech.
My parents are still using my old 2012 MacBook Pro. Installing an SSD and 16GB of memory a few years ago revitalised it. The last time I used it when visiting them I could see no reason to retire it, but I assume it might lose out on security updates soon.
I don't think the edge teams at cloudflare could run their docker-compose tests very well on a machine like this when it was new. Maybe Docker on mac has gotten a lot leaner in the meantime or maybe jgc doesn't have to do this sort of thing.
You really don't want me doing that sort of thing. There are far more capable people keeping our network running, and far more people writing the software.
I'm confused, the screenshot is of a 2017 Mac Book. Did I miss something or is the author of the impression, that using a couple of years old laptop is somehow vintage?
I expected something from the 2000s being old, something from the 1980s being vintage
my daily driver is an i5 PC that I bought in 2012. Haven't even thought much about it. It had 12gb, I recently upgraded it to 24gb. No plans to really upgrade, it runs linux and get's the job done. My macbook is a 2012 too. computers have gotten great enough that we can probably run these for the next 10 yrs. The only reason I'm thinking of upgrading desktop is for GPU and likewise the macbook. Outside of GPU, I'll be fine. I'm still running the numbers to decide if I might just stick to cloud workload and if I do, these will chug on along for some more years.
I saw someone using an 11 inch MBA recently, and was seriously nostalgic. I really missed that tiny form factor. My M2 MBA is exceptionally capable, and hardly large, but lacks the incredibly small form factor I liked so much
I've got a range of software which I know exactly how to use. I can focus on creativity and productivity, not learning how to use a new tool before I can produce anything of value.
The article complains about the Touch Bar escape key. This standard Mac key combo saved me during all those Touch Bar years (and it’s still my primary way of hitting escape):
Command+.
Works on iPad with keyboard case (on which I use vim in iSH) too!
I still use a 2009 macbook pro for music recording. It even served me during my bootcamp a few years ago but because the os wasn’t able to update, I learned a lot about supporting old versions of stuff :)
I'm still using a Late 2014 Mac mini running Monterey. I use BBEdit and web browsers more than anything so other than the startup time it's not really much slower to use than a current Mac mini.
My desktop is a 2013 custom build, and is still going strong with all of its original parts. My wife's previous computer was a near identical build from 2012 and also lasted nine years.
i'm typing on that very same computer. it was a free replacement for my 2015 MBP, which had a battery problem that became a warranty/recall of some sort and they didn't have the parts to repair it.
my 'F' key is broken but still mostly works, the touch bar randomly doesn't work right (i think that's software though), and the battery is mostly shot. other than that, and the fact that i can no longer upgrade to the latest OS, this thing is quite adequate.
Ha, just a minutes before this post I thought again why I recently decided not to bother with upgrading my T440:
despite the upgrade (replacing the ugly 1366 panel to a proper FullHD, IPS one) wouldn't cost me much (around $50 for the panel and probably another $50 for the work and maybe cleaning) it would be still a decade old laptop with an anemic i3-4010U (2c/4t 1700MHz), the awful Intel(R) Wireless-N 7260 and a fucking pedal instead of the touchpad. Sure, I can replace the wireless card too (if Lenovo would allow me and I would find the proper one if it doesn't) but at this point... It's easier to add another $50-100 and just buy something a more modern.
But hey, if my main notebook would fail, just as JGC, I would be fine with it because it's a glorified terminal:
> a lot of my computing needs being offloaded to the cloud
You make a point about something that keeps me away from older laptops: WiFi speed.
Sure, I could get a USB WiFi card but…ick.
I’m paying for symmetrical fiber, I want to use those speeds. When I’m uploading stuff to servers it really can slow me down to have slow WiFi. I could actually really use WiFi 7 to finally un-bottleneck my connection and I’m just waiting here semi-patiently for new client devices and cheaper access points to launch.
