[HN Gopher] The Soul of an Old Machine
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The Soul of an Old Machine
Author : zdw
Score : 51 points
Date : 2023-04-15 21:31 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (benjamincongdon.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (benjamincongdon.me)
| lawgimenez wrote:
| I have the same experience OP, my Macbook Air M2 arrived 2 days
| ago. I came from MBP Pro 2015. I would loved to keep on using my
| 2015 but latest Xcode will only run on Ventura. And also Electron
| apps are too much for the old machine to handle. Except for
| Things 3 which is the only app that runs very fast on 2015.
| hexagonwin wrote:
| I still use my 2008 MacBook with GNU/Linux and FreeBSD on it. It
| does all my web browsing tasks, and most stuff runs fine on it
| even with it's limited 2.5GB ram. I guess OS X is pretty heavy-
| weight.. The 2014 MacBook Pro should be fairly usable even now
| with these OSes instead.
| msravi wrote:
| I think $90 is too little value for an old laptop compared to the
| value you can get out of it.
|
| I use my 2010 macbook pro as a home server and it has served very
| well - as long as you get rid of the os and install linux on it.
|
| I use it to run a couple of low traffic websites, pihole dns, a
| photoprism server, a paperless document server, a tailscale
| subnet router, and a nextcloud server. That's certainly more
| value than $90 I'd think.
| rvense wrote:
| It seem absolutely bizarre to me that a 2014 Mac wouldn't be
| usable for web browsing, I wonder how much of it is just a matter
| of taste, or if Apple are playing down-clocking games like they
| do/did on their phones?
|
| My daily driver is a Core 2 Duo machine with 8GB RAM that's a
| full five years older than this. There are some outlier sites it
| doesn't handle well (Microsoft Teams is the only one I'd call
| close to unusable), and I do wait more for it than I do my work
| machine (2020), but honestly it's fine for almost everything I
| need.
| ghaff wrote:
| I have a 2015 MacBook Pro and iMac. They're perfectly fine for
| at least for browsing. The MacBook Pro has had a battery
| replaced along with a warranty screen replacement for a
| manufacturing defect.
|
| I did get a new Apple Silicon MacBook for image/video work and
| because I wanted a more loaded on the go machine for various.
| And my older Macs don't support current OS releases. But the
| new system was something of a luxury.
|
| But to the article's basic point I still have various old
| hardware laying around I should recycle as it's really mostly
| taking up space. Maybe I'll keep a few things but very little
| is either interesting or likely to be useful.
| criddell wrote:
| > struggling to manage even a single Chrome tab
|
| Is Chrome significantly slower today than it was just a few years
| ago or is this more of a complaint about how modern web pages are
| constructed?
| vgel wrote:
| I still use an iPhone 6s--typing on it right now in fact--and
| the web has definitely moved on past these old devices. When I
| got it, it worked perfectly. Now lots of websites will run out
| of memory and crash the tab after a bit (e.g. new Reddit,
| Twitter, most news sites), and just chug in general because the
| rendering can't keep up. I've gotten familiar with how Safari
| prioritizes painting because on slow sites I can watch the
| sections pop in.
|
| I've replaced the battery and the health is fine, people just
| don't test their stuff with old devices (I've done frontend
| before, I get why not).
| didgetmaster wrote:
| Every developer should run the software they are about to
| release on 10 year old hardware. If it doesn't run or is so
| slow as to be absolutely unusable, then something is wrong
| and needs to be fixed.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| Agree with the author, this series of MBPs was their opus. I have
| a mid 2015 and an M1 (which I bought to replace the mid-2015),
| but I won't be getting rid of it. My daughter will get it to toy
| with after I'm done using it for car resto work.
|
| Love that laptop. Glad to see the port load out in the new Apple
| silicon machines is similar to this series at least.
| danielovichdk wrote:
| Title came form this book FYI. In case readers didn't know
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7090.The_Soul_of_a_New_M...
| tecoholic wrote:
| Just came to mention the Tracy Kidder reference and you have
| beaten me to it. The book is one of my all time favourites.
| causality0 wrote:
| Growing up I was a huge computer nerd and whenever I got a new
| one I'd give my old one away to someone. It's a practice I deeply
| regret, and I've derived considerable satisfaction from going on
| ebay and rebuying my old machines.
| theodric wrote:
| I use a 2014 MacBook Pro, running Big Sur, basically daily as a
| low-power desktop. It is performant, runs everything I throw at
| it, and does so fairly silently. 16GB RAM, and an NVMe SSD in an
| adapter.
|
| I don't understand why this person's was stuck on Mojave, or why
| it wouldn't be perfectly serviceable with an SSD upgrade and an
| OS reinstall.
| zabzonk wrote:
| somewhat off-topic, but reminded me of an even older machine (on
| which "soul of a new machine" book was based) - nthe DG Eclipse.
| i had to deal with one of these at the BBC Addressing Unit
| (amazing how much stuff the BBC sends out, mostly for free, to
| its viewers/listeners). anyway, the DG was on its last diodes,
| and i replaced it with an Altos (look it up) running unix. mostly
| good for everyone.
| rvense wrote:
| I'm fairly certain "recycling" in this case means extracting the
| gold plating from the circuit boards and maybe the aluminium from
| the case. I think they're starting to do the batteries as well,
| but I'm not sure it's happening yet. Certainly all the epoxy and
| fibre glass and most of the minerals inside the components are
| unsalvagable. Most of what was a magical machine is going to be
| toxic garbage forever, and not on a human, but a geological
| timescale.
| bruce343434 wrote:
| Why isn't it melted down into a giant "distillery" where you
| can drain certain levels for the materials? The slag would be
| hardened out then crushed, and maybe a centrifuge can take it
| from there to separate even further.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The results aren't valuable enough to pay for this kind of
| processing.
| rvense wrote:
| I was actually under the impression that this is more or
| less what they do, but that not everything can be recovered
| this way, in particular the various materials that get
| encased in epoxy for ease of handling, like most of
| electronic components.
|
| And when you look at the semiconductors, the chips and the
| display, the input materials to most of it aren't really
| that special, as I understand, but turning the sand into
| thinking machines takes clean rooms, factories,
| transportation and processing that add up to huge amounts
| of energy - in some cases as much as will be used to power
| the device in its lifetime, I've heard. And no recycling
| technique is ever going to bring the embodied energy back.
| [deleted]
| sumuyuda wrote:
| Put Linux on it to make it useable again.
|
| I was running Linux on my 2011 MacBook Pro until the GPU finally
| failed, otherwise the machine was perfectly usable for web
| browsing.
| thedanbob wrote:
| Same, my wife still uses my 2013 Air running Arch.
| butz wrote:
| Still sad about selling my old Samsung netbook. Was hoping to get
| something similar in size (10"), but with better specs. And then
| netbooks just disappeared.
| kbutler wrote:
| 12" MacBook is similar size because of reduced bezels (MacBook
| is 11.04x7.74x<=.52 2.03lbs) a little wider, way thinner and
| lighter) vs Samsung n150 10.4x7.4x1.4 2.8lbs) and the MacBook
| is a much better machine (display and computation).
|
| May want to give one a shot...
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/12-inch_MacBook
| SanderNL wrote:
| You will regret getting rid of it. It is a small form factor that
| is easily stored.
|
| If anything you will look back later and marvel at all the
| freedom we had.
|
| "You could just plug into the internet with this?", "You say you
| could just download code and run it? Without government
| certification? What? You even wrote your own code?? How did you
| circumvent the Trusted Computing check? Oh.. right, you could do
| whatever. Wild times. Dangerous times."
| rektide wrote:
| I still have every laptop I've owned & I don't know why
| (fujtisu p1120 (what a badass machine), some msi core2duo (p951
| or something), a msi gx66, a dell venue 11 pro, and my current
| Samsung book 12. Oh and I bought a Sony Vaio P way way after
| the fact for like $130, as a potential p1120 refresh- neat ass
| system. Almost two decades of gear. Some very well stickered,
| the Dell & GX not so much.
|
| I think you're onto something about size. It's a factor. Still,
| I feel real shame for having not gotten rid of more machines. I
| have gotten rid of old desktops at least.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| I still miss my 486 sometimes. I rebuilt a 90s gaming machine
| somewhere in early 2010s. You can guess how often I power it
| up.
| rektide wrote:
| I did get my parents to throw out the Gateway 2000 full
| tower that had been sitting on the porch. I bought a p166
| /w mmx from a paper route. Then eventually put a legendary
| Abit BP6 in it. Took me at least 18mo to get the second
| Celeron cpu for it.
|
| Served them for a real long time as an eventual hand me
| down. Alas I had though I'd left them with more memory so
| it was still like 32mb of ram for a long long time, just
| feel so bad about that.
|
| Sat on the porch & served as a coffee table for a long long
| while. I did ask them to get rid of it & now it's gone. I
| did take a photo or seven first.
| jensC wrote:
| I have a similar Mac, a 2013er. I love that machine so much that
| I bought another, nearly the exact copy of it, a few years ago.
| Currently I can not imagine that I will need a better/newer Mac
| or another modern machine. However I am old/older now and had my
| share on "I need a new computer/laptop every few years".
| didgetmaster wrote:
| I have both a desktop computer and a laptop. I tend to upgrade
| each about every 10 years. I stagger the upgrades so that I get a
| new machine about every 5 years. You think that your old machine
| is still 'good enough' until you realize just how much faster and
| more capable the newer model is.
|
| I had an Intel i7-3770K computer that seemed to work just fine.
| Even builds on a decent-sized project did not seem uncomfortably
| slow. About a year and a half ago, I ripped out the guts and
| updated it to a Ryzen 5950x with 64 GB RAM and a PCIe Gen 4 SSD.
| It only took a few days before I wondered how I could possibly
| have tolerated the older machine for so long.
|
| Now my laptop (Intel 6700K) which I got in 2016 is getting long
| in the tooth. When I update it in a few years, it might make my
| desktop seem slow.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| Ubuntu is running on my old laptop. Much better than the MacOS.
| nayuki wrote:
| > replace my 2014 MacBook Pro. It was, and is, a great machine.
| If not for its woefully aged processor and now-insufficient
| memory, I'd happily keep using it.
|
| > my MBP was struggling to manage even a single Chrome tab, and
| noticed that is just was not pleasant to use this machine anymore
|
| I don't share your experience. My Lenovo ThinkPad X220 bought in
| year 2012 with an Intel i5-2450M CPU and 16 GiB RAM is still
| usable. In particular, it runs Firefox on Windows 7 just fine,
| and I get acceptable performance on websites like Reddit and
| Twitter.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Heck I think my $15 (well now 16.50) Kimsufi server has the
| same or very similar CPU. It's been a solid and capable Plex
| workhorse for years for me, and is still sufficient in that
| role.
| semihsalihoglu wrote:
| I wonder if anyone has studied how the average frequency of
| personal computer buying, i.e., average number of years for a
| person to buy a new computer, has changed over time since 80s,
| 90s, and what factors explain the differences. I think I usually
| can go about 5 years before I start feeling the need to buy a new
| one. I wonder if that's frequent or not or average.
| rektide wrote:
| It's never been perf for me.
|
| I still use my msi gx66 with a hd5870 (2010) for some on the go
| gaming-ish, every now and then. I was trying to use a Vaio P
| (shitty atom) in 2016 but even after sinking money in couldn't
| get it to live on battery (should try again with a USB-c pack &
| fixed barrel jack output cable!). I just bought _another_ 5
| year old Samsung Book 12 detachable.
|
| If you ignore the fact that I buy repeats sometimes, be cause
| a) they're cheap (under $300) b) I like having one wherever I
| go rather than toting & re-setting up, I'm around 4 years. But
| it's because I want something different in form, some
| capability I have unserved. I went from ultraportable to
| affordable-value to gaming to detachable to bigger detachable
| with oled.
|
| With steam play, it's kind of awesome that I never need to
| consider buying a gaming laptop ever again. With 5g latency
| really did drop a lot. A while ago I'd done the dance & setup
| an aws based gaming machine & that was fun, showed me that if I
| do want to play FPS and am physically far from home, I can set
| up a cloud box that will again have good latency.
| jasoneckert wrote:
| > One practice that tends to work for "releasing" sentimental
| objects is taking a picture of it, and being intentional about
| what value it brought me, and allowing it to go (in a fairly
| Kondo-esque fashion)
|
| I wish the Kondo method worked for me. I still have a ton of old
| Sun computers in my basement I just can't get rid of, because
| they all SPARC joy.
| rektide wrote:
| I heard the "take a picture of it then get rid of it" from
| Bruce Sterling, probably over 15 years ago now.
|
| I still have way too much junk, too many projects I hope some
| day to get to, for my tiny living space & general not-enough-
| project-time. But there have been a bunch of things this method
| has helped me out with.
| tough wrote:
| Didn't the gal retire because the Kondo method didn't work for
| Kondo either (Once having IRL kids and all)
| flir wrote:
| You are a bad, bad person.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I have been through _many_ machines. Some of my oldest would
| probably actually be worth vintage money, these days.
|
| My first machine was a (just released) Mac Plus, with 4MB of
| memory, and an external 20MB SCSI disk. Cost about $2500.
|
| _[UPDATE] Actually, my first machine was a Commodore VIC-20,
| with 3KB of RAM, a machine language monitor cartridge, and a
| cassette drive._
| k7vin wrote:
| I love that you titled this 'the soul of' -- I could have done
| the same with my old leather jacket [https://objet.cc/kev/cuir-
| serie-m].
|
| and that's why we call one of the section in our Objet journal
| 'Soul of an Objet'; example here with Gilles:
| https://objet.substack.com/p/063-nailing-down-your-style
| ofrzeta wrote:
| I'd say it's a reference to Tracy Kidder's book "The soul of a
| new machine".
| marapuru wrote:
| I've been using a 2009 MacBook Pro since I bought it. It's not my
| primary machine anymore, but use it for basic music production. I
| upgraded the RAM and fitted an SSD and was able to install a more
| recent (officially unsupported) version of MacOS on it.
|
| Also, in line with the article. I was sentimental about giving up
| on it. It's a strong piece of hardware with features that are no
| longer present these days, like a CD/DVD writing drive. Which I
| still use to create digital copies of DVDs I have lying around.
|
| The battery is long dead, but I have a power socket and cable
| nearby.
|
| So to me, it's not dead. And I somehow hope it will last for
| another 10 years. (Fingers crossed)
| kps wrote:
| I was using a 17'' 2009 as a 'bedtime reader' until the
| backlight died last month. Pro(?)tip: Acrobat reader can rotate
| viewing (unlike Preview, whose rotate operation affects the
| document), so that you can lie on your side and have a page-
| sized display.
|
| I also have a cheese grater running Snow Leopard (the last good
| MacOS, and the last with Rosetta). I'd like to replace it with
| a VM, but apparently 10.6 still gives UTM (QEMU) trouble.
| ihatepython wrote:
| $90? You got ripped off. 2014 MBP is still perfectly usable
| alanfranz wrote:
| Agreed. You could make at least double AND let sb use it
| instead of recycling. Reuse should come before recycle.
| Jorengarenar wrote:
| And that "recycling" probably ought to be put in scare quotes
| [deleted]
| speedbird wrote:
| Still using my 2012 MBP
|
| Isn't a patch on my M1, but it's still very useable for everyday
| stuff.
| neilv wrote:
| Yeah, I'm still using a 2009 ThinkPad with Debian Linux as my
| main workstation, and it handles numerous Firefox and Chromium
| tabs just fine. (I do upgrade the GPU in a server frequently,
| however.)
|
| > _Unfortunately, a couple months ago I realized my MBP was
| struggling to manage even a single Chrome tab_
|
| Probably the author is doing something much more
| computationally intensive than I am. And also running software
| from a company that wants to sell frequent hardware upgrades.
| hochmartinez wrote:
| I use a Lenovo with a Celeron processor, 4GB of RAM, and
| Manjaro (Arch) Linux as my main computer for coding and
| browsing.
|
| Swapping the HDD for an SSD and installing Linux, transformed
| this machine. Now it's fast enough for normal tasks, even for
| light photo retouching. And it loads web pages without issues.
| Faster with each new release of Brave.
|
| Brave's Chromium engine is optimized for Chromebooks, which
| usually have low power processors, so it runs fine on almost
| any computer, even with Core 2 Duo processors from 2008.
|
| I also have a Macbook Air from 2014, and it is plenty fast. If
| you have enough RAM, almost everything loads instantly.
|
| To free up RAM, you can use a tab suspender or enable the
| battery and memory saver mode in 'chrome://flags'. Each
| Chromium tab creates a new process and eats a lot of memory.
|
| https://blog.google/products/chrome/new-chrome-features-to-s...
|
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/tab%20suspender
|
| You can speed up Firefox or any Chromium based browser even
| more by storing the browser cache in a RAM disk. I use a small
| 128MB cache in the RAM disk and it works great. There is plenty
| of information on the web to set this.
|
| There is a quite a lot of power hidden by bloat, in these old
| laptops.
| twic wrote:
| > Unfortunately, a couple months ago I realized my [2014 MacBook
| Pro] was struggling to manage even a single Chrome tab, and
| noticed that is just _was not pleasant_ to use this machine
| anymore.
|
| Eh? I use a 2011 MacBook Pro as a daily driver, and it's fine. I
| wouldn't try to run IntelliJ or games (especially not since the
| discrete graphics chip is dead), but it handles an upsetting
| number of browser tabs, plays video fine, and generally behaves
| itself.
|
| But then, i am running Linux, not MacOS.
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