[HN Gopher] I will never need to buy a new computer again
___________________________________________________________________
I will never need to buy a new computer again
Author : ecliptik
Score : 94 points
Date : 2025-01-12 16:56 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (82mhz.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (82mhz.net)
| lbrito wrote:
| Give it enough time and a new version of Slack will eventually
| grind to a halt on your puny 2019 CPU.
| Marsymars wrote:
| Will run into memory pressure long before then.
|
| I have a 16GB M1 MacBook Air that feels very snappy for now,
| but with the pile of Electron app I run daily (Visual Studio
| Code, Discord, Slack, Signal, 1Password, Plexamp, Google
| Messages for Web) and some misc other accessory apps (WhatsApp,
| Teams, Microsoft To Do, Excel, OneNote)... along with a
| browser, I'm basically running out of memory with my set of
| startup apps before I even open anything for "heavy" work.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| Why not use those as a web app tho. It does exactly the same
| thing.
| Marsymars wrote:
| I've tried with Slack/Discord/Teams, and have found the web
| apps to not be particularly workable for my use. The
| Electron apps have better notifications, and I typically
| have dozens to hundreds of tabs open, which doesn't work
| well with keeping a handful of important tabs active. (Both
| active mentally/visually, and not put to sleep by the
| browser to save on resources.)
|
| And a bunch of those _aren 't_ the same in the web version
| - Signal, WhatsApp, VS Code, 1Password and Plexamp are all
| Electron and are either unavailable or functionally not
| useful for me on the web.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| IDK whats wrong with notifications for you. For tabs - I
| pin core ones (i.e. slack, harvest, asana) to be in
| front. Use tab groups for each project/ticket I work with
| for longer term organization.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Another idea is to use a separate browser or profile just
| for those web apps that need notifications and other
| settings you wouldn't want mixed up with your daily
| driver.
| AstralStorm wrote:
| You could write a new client, but at some time you will run
| into an issue where they start adding features faster and
| heavier and more required than you can keep up with by
| optimizing the software to run on your potato.
|
| Case in point, people have managed to run a bit of the modern
| internet on Amiga. Enough to be useful. But all of it? Forget
| about it.
| mxuribe wrote:
| I'm sure you're right, but its a sad state of affairs. I mean,
| is this what Marc Andreessen meant when he stated that famous
| phrase about software eating the world or something? That is,
| that software will get so crappy, so bloated that it will
| simply engulf the world like the Blob from that old horror/sci-
| fi movie? I'm sure its not, i'm just being silly of course.
| And, i know its the old fogey in me, but i sure hope more lowfi
| efforts like Gemini, tildes communites, etc. prosper, and
| create other similar creativity...Because with all the
| processing power that exists in the world, among the things
| that slow our machines to a crawl include a freaking chat
| app??? Seems like such a waste. (Not blaming you of course,
| simply went off on a tangent from my frustration with bloatware
| like Slack, etc.)
| pomian wrote:
| You're right. just look at the devolution of Windows by
| generation. As everyone on HN comments on, how terrible
| Windows 11 is compared to windows 10, compared to windows 7,
| etc. (bloat, unnecessary apps, intrusiveness and so on.)
| Advertising? WTF? We all thought - when we were running
| Windows 3.11, imagine if we had a faster computer ?!
| compass_copium wrote:
| Is slack that bad? I've only used it for Bernie organizing in
| 2020, but it worked fine on my 9-year old (at the time) PC.
| theideaofcoffee wrote:
| > But here's the thing: I don't need it. I don't have a single
| usecase for which I would need this much processing power. In
| fact, I could still use that i5 from 2011 and it would do
| everything I want it to do perfectly fine. I didn't need to
| upgrade, I just wanted to.
|
| If only we could have a bigger percentage of people that thought
| the same way. Then we might be able to get away from the insanity
| of marketing for new New NEW when what you have will do. Maybe
| these huge "tech" companies will be taken down a peg into more
| sane valuation territories. Maybe we'll stop with the mounting
| piles of e-waste driven by the advertisers pushing FOMO of not
| having the shiniest.
|
| A guy can dream though.
|
| I figure I'll slow my pace of upgrades even more than I have now
| and when the software becomes yet a larger pile of bloated
| nonsense shat out by clueless developers than it already is, I'll
| switch back to writing letters.
| keybored wrote:
| Consumer Capitalism is neither driven nor perturbed by
| environmentally and clock-conscientious nerds.
| lbrito wrote:
| >Then we might be able to get away from the insanity of
| marketing for new New NEW when what you have will do.
|
| That is literally how modern capitalist consumer economies
| work. The whole system is based on the assumption of more
| people buying more things they don't need, computers and
| otherwise.
|
| Our society is that way intentionally.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I'm doing my part. I'm writing this on a ~10 year old computer
| at home and my machine at work is ~9 years old. Both absolutely
| capable of doing what I need.
| palata wrote:
| > when what you have will do
|
| The problem is that it doesn't. Software developers get the
| latest hardware, either because they like it ("it's my job") or
| because their company pays for it. As a result, they write
| software that works on their hardware, which is obviously more
| forgiving in terms of performance. Eventually, everybody has to
| update their hardware because their current hardware can't load
| a simple website or a chat app.
|
| I can see a _huge_ difference when loading website on my work
| computer vs my personal computer. Just last month my weather
| forecast app was updated and became literally unusable on my
| phone. Of course I can 't use the old one anymore, so I don't
| have access to the public national weather forecast app. It
| works great on more modern phones though... showing exactly the
| same data as the previous app, but... I guess it looks more
| modern?
| RajT88 wrote:
| Not to mention QA machines tend to be a lot cleaner than the
| real life machines running the app.
| theideaofcoffee wrote:
| These software "engineers" that insist on the latest-specced
| toys are part of the problem. By not living up to their
| imagined title and actually engineering within constraints
| (constrained hardware performance which would beget more
| efficient software), they're just punting and saying "oops,
| -I- didn't do this". But they're not engineers and never will
| be until they take some responsibility for being a partial
| cause for the current mess.
| AstralStorm wrote:
| To a point yes. However remember that it takes time and
| effort to optimize the software down. And if you write it
| for slower hardware from the start it will be less capable
| and/or creative. Might be pretty cool still, or even
| useful. Just not quite _as_ cool and useful.
|
| Can't have your cake and eat it too. It's not all laziness.
| How long did it take to get Doom to run on a toaster? ;)
| palata wrote:
| > Just not quite as cool and useful.
|
| I am genuinely trying, but I am finding hard to find
| modern software that qualifies for those words.
|
| Is Slack "super cool and useful"? Is Word/Excel a lot
| cooler and more useful than... well honestly 20 years
| ago? Does Microsoft Teams qualify for that? Facebook?
| Instagram?
|
| I don't think that more powerful hardware allows
| developer to write "cooler" and "more useful" stuff. What
| it allows is to write more, faster. Since the early
| 2010s, it feels like we specialized in writing worse
| software, but writing a lot more of it.
| rvdginste wrote:
| As a software engineer, I insist on giving developers high-
| end laptops. The reason is very simple: a lot of
| development environments are very heavy to run, and
| developers should not waste time on their development tools
| running slowly. I also don't want developers to disable
| tools that are meant to keep an eye on the quality of the
| code. High-end laptops generally serve well for development
| for up to 5 years.
|
| Developing on high-end laptops should definitely not be an
| excuse to deliver slow software, and in the teams I work
| in, we do pay attention to performance. You are right
| though, a lot of software is a lot slower than it should be
| and my opinion is that the reason is often developers that
| lack fairly basic knowledge about data structures,
| algorithms, databases, latency,... One could say that time
| pressure on the project could also play a role, but I
| strongly believe that lack of knowledge plays a much bigger
| role.
|
| Now, aside from that, also keep in mind that users (or the
| product owner) become more and more demanding about what
| software can and should do (deservedly or not). The more a
| piece of software must do, the more complex the code
| becomes and the more difficult it becomes to keep it in a
| good state.
|
| Lastly, in my humble opinion, the lowest range budget
| laptops are simply not worth buying, even for less
| demanding users. I think that most users on a low budget
| would be better off with a second-hand middle or high range
| laptop for the same price. (I am talking here about laptops
| that people expect to run Windows on, no experience with
| Chromebooks.)
| palata wrote:
| > users (or the product owner) become more and more
| demanding
|
| I disagree. For all my life, customers have been asking
| for as much as they can imagine. Customers wanted flying
| cars long before they wanted the latest iPhone.
|
| The thing that changed is that we realised that if we
| write lower quality software that has more features
| (useful or not), customers buy that (because they are
| generally not competent to judge the quality, but they
| can count the features). So the goal now is to have more
| features.
|
| > I think that most users on a low budget would be better
| off with a second-hand
|
| Which is exactly the problem we are talking about: you
| are pushing for people to get newer hardware. You just
| say that poorer people should get the equivalent of newer
| hardware for the poors. But people on a budget would
| actually be better off if they could keep their hardware
| longer.
| arn3n wrote:
| He's forgetting that software keeps getting slower. Forever and
| ever. With new hardware comes new expectations for hardware by
| software vendors.
| ecliptik wrote:
| "what Andy giveth, Bill taketh away"
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill's_law
| mouse_ wrote:
| Not all software gets slower.
|
| I have an old Windows 7 laptop and the newest versions of the
| Chromium browser (Supermium fork, for legacy Windows
| compatibility) run far faster than any versions of Firefox or
| Internet Explorer ever did.
| kussenverboten wrote:
| Rust code apps are super fast on my linux laptop from 10
| years ago too.
| palata wrote:
| What do you consider as "Chromium running faster"? Like
| loading Chromium or closing a tab?
|
| I doubt website loads faster. Statistics show that modern
| websites load slower on modern hardware than old websites
| used to their respective hardware. I don't see why it would
| be different on Windows 7.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Websites are software. Most websites get slower.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| Technically websites are markup. Web apps are software and
| their frameworks are getting faster.
|
| Adding features makes it slower and is inevitable pain of
| progress. Suggestion we should stop improving things is
| ridiculous.
| layer8 wrote:
| The only upgrade I made on my PC from 2014 is replacing an HDD
| by an SSD once those became affordable. It's still perfectly
| fine for the web, office and dev work, and likely will last for
| the rest of the decade.
| jasode wrote:
| _> He's forgetting that software keeps getting slower._
|
| It depends on the software usage. If you're not using cpu-
| demanding tasks like rendering videos in Adobe Premiere,
| Blender 3D, etc, then _very old pcs_ will continue to work
| fine.
|
| The desktop computer I'm typing this comment on is a 10-year
| old Intel i7-5820K 3.3GHz pc. Back in 2014, I maxed it out at
| 64 GB RAM but I took half out and reduced it to 32GB RAM. I use
| it daily for VS2022, VSCode, VMware, MS Excel.
|
| I also help maintain a desktop for my 80-year old friend. Her
| computer is a 15-year old i7-950 3.06GHz. That computer from
| 2009 runs Windows 10 and she uses it daily for Chrome browsing,
| Youtube videos (including 4k), Amazon shopping, and Mozilla
| Thunderbird email.
|
| It's possible that Windows 11 with its TPM requirement may
| finally force a hardware upgrade of those dinosaurs but I read
| there are hacks to get around that.
|
| I could definitely see how buying a new high-end pc today will
| last ~15 more years for typical consumers. On the other hand,
| the power users who want to run the latest LLM locally with
| 600-watt graphics cards that will be obsolete in a year will be
| a different story. Today's NVIDIA 5090 with 32GB RAM may be too
| small to run the next latest & greatest LLMs for those who want
| to stay on the bleeding edge.
|
| EDIT REPLY: _> Why did you take half the RAM out?_
|
| It was a long story that I left out. The motherboard was
| unstable with all 64GB of RAM in it. It would lock up with RAM
| corruption after a few hours. Finding the root cause of this
| this took _several days_ of trial & error with swapping the 8
| RAM sticks and running MEMCHECK on multi-hour scans. After
| testing and going the process of elimination, it turns out that
| _none of the RAM sticks had defects_. The defect was the
| motherboard itself. Take _any of the 4_ out of 8 RAM sticks so
| it 's 32GB RAM and everything is super stable.
|
| I was just mentioning the 32 GB RAM without all that backstory
| to emphasize that I've gone 10 years without being at the more
| "future-proof" 64 GB.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Why did you take half the RAM out? To save power?
| AstralStorm wrote:
| It was unstable. Could have replaced it with new stable ram
| of course.
| agieocean wrote:
| Nitpicking but you can run Blender on dirt specs I ran it on
| a $60 Chromebook and got a couple of good renders out of it
| even did some vfx
| compass_copium wrote:
| >It's possible that Windows 11 with its TPM requirement may
| finally force a hardware upgrade of those dinosaurs but I
| read there are hacks to get around that.
|
| This is what killed a lot of computers in my company's
| laboratories.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >He's forgetting that software keeps getting slower
|
| I mean, depends on what software you use. There's a pretty
| sizeable and growing ecosystem of people who put a lot of
| thought into performance. Just look at tooling like ripgrep,
| some of the newer terminals people have been working on,
| recently I came across a pretty nice neovim plugin where
| someone had written their own custom SIMD fuzzy string matcher
| (https://github.com/saghen/frizbee). There's some pretty
| admirable effort people put into performance these days.
|
| I think speed of your setup is mostly limited by how willing
| you are to look for better alternatives.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| I always think the Core 2 Duo was an inflection point in terms
| of performance. Before that every new operating system release
| seemed slow on even the most modern hardware. After it was
| fine.
|
| Having said that my 8GB MacBook Air runs the unit tests for my
| current project four times faster than my 2018 i7 Mac. I will
| upgrade within a couple of years.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> With new hardware comes new expectations for hardware by
| software vendors.
|
| That is grinding to a halt. Chips are making only modest
| performance gains with each new fabrication bode, and the time
| between nodes is stretching to 3 years. Not only that but it
| looks like GAA FETs at 1-2 nm (marketing name) is close to the
| end of the road.
|
| Software is going to have to stop getting more bloated, and may
| have to become more efficient as people want to run it on
| smaller devices.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Maybe this is also why we're seeing the rise of more
| statically typed compiled languages like Go and Rust. I've
| successfully run Rust on mobile and it's great, very snappy
| compared to web apps.
| porcoda wrote:
| The rise? Those kinds of languages have always been here
| and widespread. If anything you're seeing the tapering off
| of the rise in other languages (JS predominantly) that took
| place over the last 15 years or so.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Yes, that's what I meant, the usage of languages like
| Ruby (for Rails) and Python (backend, not for AI work) is
| dropping and static languages are rising.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| You can also buy second hand to save another 50-80% when you do
| upgrades due to something catastrophically breaking. I got a used
| but very good quality mid tier Ryzen laptop for $200 from a few
| generations ago and added 32GB memory and a nvme drive and it's
| an absurdly good computer for dev work.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I just got a new M4Pro Mini (Apple). It replaces my M1Max 14-inch
| MBPro.
|
| Bit zippier (not screaming), but it does have native support for
| Apple "Intelligence."
|
| I was waiting for the M4Max/Ultra Studio, but, y'know, I realized
| that I have no need for that.
|
| This has been working fine, for a couple of months. I suspect
| that I won't be replacing it, for a few years.
|
| I probably will need to get a new iPhone, and maybe iPad,
| sometime in the next year or so (also for Apple Intelligence
| stuff), but I'm in no hurry.
| darthrupert wrote:
| They may need to buy a new server though. (Site is down at the
| time of writing this)
| snitch182 wrote:
| Yeah. That was kind of funny.
| keybored wrote:
| I think I used my 2010 laptop for eight years. Upgrades: 120GiB
| (GB?) SSD.
| maliker wrote:
| Now that there is great GPU-accelerated remote desktop options, I
| mostly just remote into more powerful machines. Even a country
| away the on-screen performance is almost like sitting at the
| machine, and as a bonus I don't hear every fan on my laptop going
| crazy. I've been a happy Parsec.app user for a while, but there
| are many other options (e.g. RustDesk has this).
| manav wrote:
| I've been waiting for this to get good enough. Can any of these
| apps do passthrough of USB/webcam?
| maliker wrote:
| Looks like it's not supported in RustDesk or Parsec, but
| there are other tools that will do it [1].
|
| [1] https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/discussions/6014
| masa331 wrote:
| I have a T430s which was handed down to me by my boss 10 years
| ago. It has i5 from that time, 8Gb RAM. I'm still doing web app
| development on it same as 10 years ago and i don't feel any need
| to change it. I'm actually afraid there is no better laptop i
| could change it for when mine dies. Also i can't imagine no
| better keyboard :(
| a2800276 wrote:
| Same, T460 and a T480 I think. Updated to an SSD and maxed out
| RAM. My only quibble is max 1980x??? Screen resolution.
| ThinkPad are so cheap when they come back from their leasing
| contract, not sure why not more people are excited about them.
|
| Even if you don't use Linux, they typically come with a Windows
| Pro license built in.
| Spawnzer wrote:
| You can upgrade the screen too, at least on the t480
|
| For around 100$ and some manual work you can upgrade to 2k
| resolution with say a B140QAN02.0 screen or heck even 4k if
| you dont mind spending twice the laptop's worth on that
|
| Absolutely love that laptop, tricked out mine with 64gb of
| ram (absolutely overkill but hey I could) and a X1E glass
| trackpad and it's been my main dev laptop for the last 5-6
| years
|
| A 6e wifi upgrade is somewhere on the roadmap as well for me
| halfcat wrote:
| > _"T430...no better keyboard"_
|
| This is so true. I wish MacBook didn't have such shallow
| keyboards or I'd be all in. Maybe it's improved recently but at
| one point it was like typing on a table. Always loved the
| travel of the ThinkPad keyboards.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| ThinkPad keyboards also got worse (flatter) every couple of
| generations, sadly. My laptop with the best keyboard is an
| R50e from 2004. The keyboards are still nice compared to most
| current ones, but...
| wiredfool wrote:
| The T420 keyboard is far better than the chicklet T430s. It's a
| proper mechanical keyboard.
|
| I've got both, have used both for webdev work, but compared to
| a modern laptop, the screens suck, the video is underpowered
| for 4k monitors, and the ssd interface is slow, and the
| trackpads are awful. On the bright side, trackpoints. (But I'm
| using a M13 w/ trackpoint so.... ) They're also heavy and
| battery life is almost long enough to work the whole way on my
| bus commute, one way.
| vinc wrote:
| I have a T440p with 16 GB of RAM and a T480 with 40 GB of RAM
| (that can be extended again to 64 GB) and I'm also pretty happy
| with both and worried about the future of computing. I might
| stockpile a few of them!
| onli wrote:
| The one other use case that will need better hardware is gaming.
| And compiling is also always better when faster. Using llms
| locally will also profit from new hardware, though I guess there
| is almost never a use case for those.
| dangrossman wrote:
| I just got rid of my 2013 Microsoft Surface Pro. It was still
| being used daily in my workshop, 11 years old. Core i5 processor,
| running Windows 10. I only got rid of it because the battery
| decided to become a spicy pillow one night, expanding until it
| cracked open the case and pushed out most of the touchscreen.
| gavin_gee wrote:
| it's often a corporate's need for new revenue and security that
| causes the machine to march on. Just look at this TPM Win 10
| upgrade issue.
|
| My 2011 i5 desktop is still happily chugging away as a build
| server, home storage, and remote host. But oh yes, it will have
| to be nuked, thanks to MSFT policies.
| nox101 wrote:
| "640k is all you need!"
|
| There is always new tech. Local LLMs and other high processing
| intensive things might be a thing people want. Not directly, but
| it may enable things they want. More viral TikTok videos. Maybe
| some kind of health monitoring. Maybe AR will finally get a
| compelling use case if it can identify everything in your field
| of view but it requires serious computing power. Maybe AR 3D
| movies where the characters show up in your house and adapt to
| your living room. Siri might suck, but lots of people want a
| "Star Trek" computer that actually understands them.
|
| The point is not any specific example. Rather, it's that there's
| always something around the corner that needs more computing
| power. I have no idea what it will be, but I'm confident
| something will appear.
| II2II wrote:
| The author pretty much acknowledges that with the YouTuber
| example. And yeah, you can create a fairly long list of other
| reasons why people may want to upgrade.
|
| But here's the thing: in the 1990s, people pretty much needed
| to upgrade regardless of what they were doing. Sure, you had a
| few holdouts. These were people who would continue to use
| Wordstar and had no interest in exchanging documents with
| people who use that newfangled Microsoft Word. These people
| were the exception rather than the rule, since most people
| wanted to be able to share their documents, get onto the
| internet, or any other number of things. Chances are, they also
| had multiple reasons to upgrade.
|
| The situation is quite different today. You can get away
| without upgrading because most of the software, if not all of
| the software, you need will run just fine on an old PC. As for
| the other stuff, maybe you'll have one or two reasons to
| upgrade. Is that enough to justify it? The answer is going to
| depend upon the person, and the actual task they need to
| complete. For most people though, I would suggest that they
| don't feel the same compulsion to upgrade their computer.
| nox101 wrote:
| I agree there hasn't been a super strong reason to upgrade in
| the last 10 years. I just disagree with "I will never need to
| buy a new computer again".
|
| I suspect at some point the new "Youtube" (3d volumetric
| video, holodeck, or something) will come out, it will be as
| popular as youtube and as "must have feature" such that 95%
| of the population will want a computer that can do this new
| thing and todays computers won't be able to do that new
| thing.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| > Local LLMs
|
| Does anyone use those other than spam?
|
| I guess IDEs and even iOS are shipping them, albeit far in
| usefulness from the SOTA. Low latency in iOS is noticeable tho.
| Retr0id wrote:
| I have a 3950x in my desktop and I feel exactly the same way. I
| have the upgrade itch but I can't justify it in cost/benefit
| terms.
|
| I don't even use _that_ system much because my M1 Pro macbook can
| do almost all the same things.
|
| "software gets slower to counteract hardware getting faster" is
| mostly true, but what's more true is that "software gets slower
| to counteract the _developer 's_ hardware getting faster". Devs
| (or their employers) aren't feeling too compelled to upgrade, and
| so they don't, and so software is staying fast(ish). Apple's
| annoying RAM-upgrade pricing is likely helping here, too.
|
| (By the way, I've diverted my hardware-upgrade itch into
| photography gear)
| alexisread wrote:
| Having to configure a new machine has put me off upgrading stuff.
| If I have to spend time doing that, it takes away from more
| important things. Obviously for major QOL improvements eg. Eye-
| level laptop screen, it's worth changing, but I've found very
| little that fits that metric.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| That's one of the reasons I'm happy I'm on a 4 year old Galaxy
| phone and it feels like new. Doesn't feel slow, battery life is
| great. I hope it lasts another 4 years.
|
| I got off the Apple train because my first iPhone got too
| sluggish for me to want to use at 2 years old when there was an
| OS update.
| eptcyka wrote:
| That is why I love NixOS - migrating machines is trivial, as
| long as you are OK with using Linux, or finagle with macOS.
| markuman123 wrote:
| Energyconsumption is nowaday the reason for a CPU Update.
| hansvm wrote:
| When I upgraded 5 years ago, general mechanical failure without
| available replacement parts was the driving factor, but energy
| consumption was high on my list. A light laptop with a long
| battery life is something that never used to exist, and it
| definitely improves my quality of life. If battery life at a
| low weight cost doubles in the next 5-10 yrs I'll probably
| upgrade again even if the machine is usable.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| My 4 year old personal desktop PC agrees with him in full. My
| shitty work laptop that the big corpo paid less than $400 for, it
| screams every second for an upgrade: it takes 10 seconds to open
| VSCode without any project vs less than 2 seconds and it can
| barely paint the external monitors when moving a browser window
| or resizing it. It is also 4 years old.
|
| I expect to replace the desktop components in a few years when
| something breaks. Broken CPUs due to age are extremely rare, but
| mainboards with bad contacts for memory are pretty common, I've
| seen a lot that don't work that well after 8-10 years. I don't
| expect a desktop PC to work forever, the PSU will break in 10
| years anyway, the SSD will reach write limit (I did a few
| already). But right now performance is not a concern.
| markuman123 wrote:
| Energyconsumption is a reason for a CPU update.
| zrm wrote:
| Not really. The era of "modern efficient CPUs" started some
| 10-15 years ago. Under light loads, Ivy Bridge or Haswell is
| going to have a similar thermal profile to modern machines.
|
| Many of the new machines are actually worse, e.g. 3770K @77W
| vs. 14900K @125W/253W. That isn't to say they're not also
| faster, but if you actually use it you're burning more watts.
| stuartd wrote:
| https://archive.ph/Ch8C9
| rubymamis wrote:
| Electron would love to have a word with you.
| ivraatiems wrote:
| I've mentioned this in other threads, but I run a small side
| business refurbishing and selling old laptops. One element of my
| work is saving retro machines for retrocomputing, old hardware
| interfaces, etc., but I also refurbish and sell for general use.
|
| For the average person with average needs, there is no difference
| between, for example, a $100 Dell Latitude E5530 from 10+ years
| ago and a $600 Best Buy low-end Dell laptop from today, so long
| as the Latitude has been modestly upgraded with 8GB of RAM and a
| small, used SSD. Its 3rd generation i5 is more than enough to do
| anything they need. It even runs Windows 11 just fine, so long as
| you inform the customer about the need to manually install
| feature updates.
|
| For the general public, buying new computers is an expensive scam
| that contributes massively to waste. The machines I refurbish
| would typically have been thrown out or 'recycled' (stripped for
| precious metals in an expensive process) if not for my
| intervention. There's no reason for this except number-go-up
| greed, and it should stop.
| superjan wrote:
| And, refurbished business laptops tend to have better keyboards
| than consumer grade laptops, as well as a better build quality
| (generally speaking).
| ChiefNotAClue wrote:
| I'd argue that new, low-end laptops are in the $300-$400 range.
| Most people would be better served by a new laptop, instead of
| a decade old refurb. Sure, basic tasks might not need
| additional processing power, but things like better battery
| life, higher resolution screens, fast solid state drives,
| better webcams, and network adapters supporting newer
| wifi/bluetooth standards are things the average person would
| notice and benefit from.
|
| I doubt the average person knows how to or is willing to
| manually install feature updates to continue to run Windows 11
| on an unsupported laptop. Refurbishing is great, but I'm not
| sure how much more you can get out of a 10+ year old platform.
| I think the sweetspot is a 3-6 year old platform where a
| refurbished unit will be a decent bit cheaper, but still have a
| good bit of life left.
| the_snooze wrote:
| For laptops specifically, the technical specs don't matter
| for most use cases, but the "quality-of-life" things
| absolutely do: screen resolution and brightness, keyboard and
| trackpad comfort, and battery life.
|
| It's hard for me to recommend most ~$500 Windows laptops when
| they skimp out on those things to lean into specs, while
| older-model Apple Silicon MacBook Airs are just a bit pricier
| but absolutely deliver on quality-of-life.
| Spivak wrote:
| Yep, Apple likely got a bunch of lifetime customers during
| the decade long period they spent not leaning into specs in
| favor of putting every dollar into quality of life.
|
| Gamers and power users of course shunned them for so long
| saying, "you could get a better laptop for half the price!"
| but it's a testament to how good the build quality was that
| the full force of tech enthusiasts telling everyone not to
| buy it wasn't enough to sway people away.
|
| Everywhere but the low end the point has become kind of
| moot these days for the most part, Apple has beefy specs
| now and mid-high range Dells and Thinkpads have good build
| quality and QoL. I think speaker quality is the most
| noticeable difference between Apple and Dell where Dell
| just doesn't value it as anything other than an
| afterthought.
| Sayrus wrote:
| My 10 years old laptop has FHD screen, half a TB of SSD.
| Battery life is not as great as today's laptop but that's a
| tradeoff my family is willing to take because they transport
| the laptop but rarely use it on battery.
|
| Battery can be changed easily, memory can be replaced in case
| of failure or need to upgrade.
|
| It doesn't support Windows 11, but it happily runs 10,
| browser and the entire Office software suite. It's built in
| an plastic/aluminum chassis so it's a bit sturdy but the
| keyboard is not soft as low-end plastic keyboards.
|
| The value of such a laptop is lower (if not nearly $0) than a
| low-end laptop but much snappier.
| ivraatiems wrote:
| The value of that laptop is definitely not $0. It's
| probably $50-150 depending on the specifics of the machine.
|
| Battery life is one of the biggest issues there isn't a
| good way around. Replacement non-OEM batteries are
| extremely variable (and often pretty poor) in quality.
|
| Also, it probably _does_ support Windows 11, as long as you
| 're OK with manual installation of the once-a-year feature
| updates.
| the4anoni wrote:
| Refurbished laptops can be superior in comparison to cheap
| Bestbuy laptops. These old laptops are often much more solid
| built, have better keyboards, may even have better screens
| (FYI brand new laptops with cheap TN 1366x768 screens are
| still manufactured).
|
| Good refurb definitely should have an SSD and battery at
| least in good condition.
| Marsymars wrote:
| > Refurbished laptops can be superior in comparison to
| cheap Bestbuy laptops.
|
| They can be, but there's an inflection point of age. For
| ~400 USD you can get an all-E-core i3-N305/512GB SSD/8GB
| RAM/1080p laptop - which is about on-par for performance
| with a midrange 4-core CPU from the final 14nm mobile chips
| (Comet Lake, 2019). With the N305 you get notably lower
| power draw under load.
| ivraatiems wrote:
| I think the use case you imagine most of my customers have is
| not the one they have. Most of my customers need a laptop for
| a handful of "can't do it on the phone" things that they do
| occasionally - taxes, bookkeeping, a Zoom call here and
| there. They're not daily driving it like you or I would.
| Another large plurality need a Chromebook-like device for
| school (I often install ChromeOS Flex on the lower-end
| machines, if it's compatible, to achieve this, and sell them
| for $40-50 each).
|
| The point that others have made about business laptops vs
| consumer laptops is also salient. Most of what I am
| refurbishing is business-grade and therefore has held up
| quite well in terms of build quality.
|
| I do also do quite a bit of business in the ~4-6 year old
| machine world, but that's a different demographic of customer
| from my average.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| I'd argue that there's no better value right now for a basic
| computer than the Mac Mini M4 standard for $500 (been on sale
| for this price 2-3 times at various places since release, and
| it's the standard Education price at Apple store).
| valleyer wrote:
| Where do you buy the old machines from?
| Pooge wrote:
| If you don't mind me asking: how did you first build your
| client-base? And even now, how do people know that you sell
| those products?
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| I feel average person doesn't even use a computer/laptop
| anymore. Smartphone + TV covers most cases. iPad if you are a
| bit more advanced.
| agilob wrote:
| Don't worry, we - software developers are going to ruin the
| software with AI features that you will need to upgrade to Ryzen
| Al Max+ 395 just to run an editor.
| atlgator wrote:
| I'm sure this is tongue in cheek, but it's a legitimate fear.
| mattbee wrote:
| I thought the same about my 2020 Ryzen, until I started working
| with the Unity editor two months ago.
|
| I'm reminded of the dead parrot sketch - this thing wouldn't
| "voom" if I put four million volts through it.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| My main machine is a 3.8GHz 8-core Ryzen, 64Gb RAM, GTX1070 GPU.
| Bought and self-built in ~2018 and still seems pretty good for
| development and the odd game. Even the 1TB Toshiba SSD is
| claiming to be healthy according to the monitoring app. It just
| zips along and copes with everything, and I've never felt any
| temptation to upgrade anything.
|
| Me back in 2005 would have though this setup was science fiction.
| yk wrote:
| I felt like that from 2010 or thereabouts to two years ago. There
| wasn't really a use case for having a very fast machine. Now with
| llms and sd, I think there is a use case that happily absorbs any
| compute I can buy, just like first person shooters in the 90ies.
| sitkack wrote:
| This is simply not true, the UI speed isn't increasing because of
| systemic bloat, The Great EnFattening. But the throughput gains
| are immense.
|
| A single NVME SSD can now push over 10GB/s
|
| Main memory bandwidth is now over 100GB on midrange hardware.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| I thought 7GB/s was the max, but you're right! Looks like I
| need to upgrade to PCIe 5.0!
| Yoric wrote:
| My daily computer is 7 a years old laptop. The battery has its
| issues, but it's still powerful enough for everything I do -
| except games, for which I have a refurbished 5 year old desktop.
|
| So... yeah, I tend to agree.
| butz wrote:
| After starting running some LLM models locally I would like a
| faster CPU, maybe with dedicated "AI cores" or whatever they are
| called. But old CPU still works and I'll need new motherboard,
| RAM, ... So I'll probably keep using my PC until one of parts
| will finally give up.
| rkagerer wrote:
| The machine I'm typing this on is a 'whitebox' build I put
| together in 2010.
|
| I build computers to last - the specs were high-end at the time,
| and have been upgraded over the years (video card, RAID
| controller, SSD's, etc). Even though it's getting long in the
| tooth, the box is still reasonably performant today.
|
| It's highly customized; the case sports thoughtful additions like
| sound-dampening foam, bespoke brackets for additional cooling
| fans (all Noctua of course), hardware thermostats & monitoring
| LCD, interior lighting that activates when you open a panel even
| if the machine is off (makes it a pleasure to work with when
| under a desk), etc.
|
| Choices that really panned out well include: Infiniband (this was
| back when 10G NIC's were stupid-expensive, but eBay was flooded
| with great, second-hand Mellanox cards off universities), Areca
| (their RAID controllers and arrays were so easily upgradeable
| across generations), ECC RAM everywhere, and an external PCI-E
| expander (six x16 slots just weren't enough).
|
| It has in the range of 1000 software titles installed, countless
| ones used regularly (guess I'm somewhat a jack of all trades).
| Specialized diagnostics and tooling track and isolate changes
| made by software, which has helped manage things and prevent
| bloat accretion. I periodically run benchmarks to ensure metrics
| like bootup time, disk transfers, etc. still match out-of-the-box
| numbers).
|
| When you have to install and configure that many apps, migration
| is a real pain, which motivates longevity (and a collateral
| reduction of e-waste).
| bpye wrote:
| > and an external PCI-E expander (six x16 slots just weren't
| enough).
|
| Out of interest - what do you use the extra slots for? At most
| I can think of:
|
| - NIC
|
| - GPU
|
| - NVMe
|
| - HBA
|
| - Maybe old protocols like FireWire/SCSI/GPIB
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| For me, the fun is spec'ing and building new PCs. I wish I could
| do it every year.
|
| Then the pain is finding a home for my old PC.
|
| I heard about a guy on Facebook who builds and configures PCs for
| free (free labor, not free parts). He only does a couple each
| year. That sounds like a pretty fun hobby.
| ritcgab wrote:
| As long as your computer runs a browser and a terminal emulator,
| it is more than fine.
| onehair wrote:
| Even when it takes 5 minutes from turning on the computer to
| loading a page on the browser?
| michaelt wrote:
| A computer won't necessarily be slow just because it's old.
|
| Today, PS1100 will buy you a Macbook Air with an 8-core CPU,
| 16GB RAM and a 256GB SSD
|
| In 2015, PS1100 brought me a desktop PC with a quad-core 4GHz
| CPU, 32GB RAM and a 250GB SSD
|
| (Yes, obviously, there's been inflation, comparing a laptop
| to a desktop is a little unfair, the newer machine's RAM will
| be faster, one includes a built-in screen, etc etc etc)
| ritcgab wrote:
| Disable JavaScript then ;)
| hkt wrote:
| I'm in this camp, perhaps a little more extreme: my daily driver
| laptop is a ThinkPad X230T, which I think is from 2011 or 2012.
| It is separate from a home lab - which I don't currently have,
| but which I'll use hardware from a few years ago if I ever need
| again. The only thing that can kill older hardware is software
| bloat - honestly, the web is the biggest culprit here.
| hnpolicestate wrote:
| I game so I had to upgrade my GPU and CPU but I'm going to ride
| Windows 10 for as long as I can.
|
| It's a coin toss whether I go Linux or Windows 11 once 10 becomes
| unusable.
| cloudking wrote:
| 1080Ti from 2017 still handles modern AAA games really well, was
| able to play and finish Cyberpunk 2077 with no issues. Really a
| remarkable feat of engineering for it's time.
| open-paren wrote:
| I have the same card (+8700k) and I agree, it plays without
| issues and at decent frame rates... Without ray tracing. Have
| you seen those videos? It looks amazing. There's a reason that
| Nvidia used it to demo their 50*0 series cards at CES. I'm
| waiting to play Phantom Liberty until I can play it with some
| kind of ray tracing.
| atlgator wrote:
| If I don't build a new PC, what will my new 5090 run on?
| theodric wrote:
| Anything within reason that has a PCIe slot
| alganet wrote:
| My experience so far is that you can get around 7 years of heavy
| usage from a premium product. It doesn't matter how much
| maintenance or care you have (I treat mine like it owes me money
| now, but I've been careful before), that's how far it goes
| without disappointing you.
|
| I am also expecting to reuse my current daily drivers (like I did
| before) as backups or auxiliary machines. My laptop keyboard has
| some loose keys and my phone screen started to die, but they
| still have a lot of compute to give.
| bnolsen wrote:
| My only beef with this has to do with power usage which can make
| some of the older computers just not worth it.
| compass_copium wrote:
| Yep, I have a Lenovo E420 (I think?) that I bought when I
| graduated in 2011. If I replace it, it will be due to things like
| the USB ports not working, not due to processing power being
| insufficient. I don't game anymore, I can watch video on it, I
| can use the Internet and word processing. What does one DO with a
| high powered processor?
| whymeworrynow wrote:
| You're probably not on windows 10, because that makes sure you
| need a new computer. Personally I wouldn't say I'd never need a
| new computer, but my i5 bought 11 years ago does everything I
| need (as a software developer) other than playing back 4K video
| recorded on an iPhone.
|
| Which means the MS is forcing people like me to either buy a few
| new computers or to finally commit to Linux.
| nipperkinfeet wrote:
| I'm still using my Dell XPS 7100 from 2009. It has an AMD Phenom
| II X6 1045T. Only upgraded the GPU over the years. Added more RAM
| and an SSD. It still works like a charm. Even the original
| keyboard it came with is the same. No need to upgrade to anything
| new as of yet.
| zoomTo125 wrote:
| Well, newer laptops are built with poor quality plastics, so the
| hinge will break after 2-3 years. Older models are a beast
| though. Even the budget Dell Inspiron 3520 (2013 ~$400) is still
| running fine as a youtube streaming machine.
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