It can probably last over ten years for the average person, if good care is taken.

Tech enthusiasts are the ones who can see through the marketing and upgrade-treadmill BS; the "average person" can end up buying a new machine when they fill up their hard drive.

I use a 5 yo phone (Motorola Defy+). It runs Android 4.4.4, thus far I've not seen a valid reason for wanting something newer. It still runs for about 4 days on a single charge, using the original battery.

Things start looking bad for the tech industry when people start showing off with 'old' stuff instead of brand-spanking new.

I have an Android 4.4 phone, and while it has worked acceptably for me right now as I am self-employed, if I were working for a company that required me to have access to sensitive customer data, having a phone that still received security updates would be a hard requirement.

..which reminds me I have some more work to do, given the recent publication of https://source.android.com/security/bulletin/2016-07-01.html

I understand that we talk about this sort of thing quite a bit, but I can't imagine actually doing it myself. My phone is just supposed to work for me so I can get my real work done and have time to enjoy outside of it. I'm not supposed to work for it.

I'd guess you have to really enjoy working on that sort of thing, but then again you called it "work to do", so I'm not sure.

I have seen SSDs on ebay with the converter built in, maybe kill two birds with one stone?

Performance is more than acceptable, the thing boots (Linux) in a few seconds (that is, a few seconds after BIOS has done its thing of course). In other words, those 3€ for the adapter (incl. shipping) were well spent...

For tech enthusiast who enjoy smartphones unfortunately a 8 year old phone won't cut it. I have 4 year old Nokia Lumia that still runs fine and with an average 1.5 days of battery life (it used to live 2 days, it's aging). It works well for me because I care about basic apps, GPS, internet browser, and email. But for more apps heavy users most apps won't work if the phone isn't on the latest OS version, and most old phones can't upgrade to the latest OS version. For instance if Facebook stops maintaining messenger on windows phone 8.1, I'd loose my most used app. Fortunately the market share for 8.1 in emerging markets is still important enough for fb to keep a quality app.

I've much more often been frustrated by my phones. My last phone was at the point where I'd expect ~1 second delay for any interaction, whether that was opening an app or scrolling in a webpage. I think as the current one ages I'm going to start eliminating apps and wiping the phone more frequently than I do now, because I'd rather have all that money going toward my desktop and laptops.

A bit off topic topic, but is there any reason 32-bit Windows is still a thing? Every Intel processor I've seen since Atom failed is 64-bit.

Here's an Intel blog post from last year talking about it: https://blogs.intel.com/evangelists/2015/07/22/why-cheap-sys...

Heh, I use Linux (NixOS) with XMonad, st and Emacs, so it's always pretty responsive. Not used Windows in over a decade, so I can't comment on its speed.

> But for more apps heavy users most apps won't work if the phone isn't on the latest OS version, and most old phones can't upgrade to the latest OS version.

My phone runs Debian, so I haven't had any problems keeping up to date :)

Meanwhile, most of the components in my desktop are older than three years, and it's doing just fine.

That, to me, is the real tragedy/travesty. There should be some eco-EU-law or something against that, a bit like the micro USB charger standardisation. I say this typing from a 2008 (or was it 2009?) MacBook on which i've been able to replace the RAM (8GB), disk drive (SSD, single biggest improvement) and battery (lasts longer than when new from factory now), and all of those upgrades weren't expensive at all. Of course i run Linux and XMonad and pretty much the only graphical app is Firefox with NoScript, but still, i can't see myself forking out hard $$$ for a non-maintainable machine. The upgradability isn't even the big deal for me, because as someone else pointed out these days computers are "fast enough", it's the fact that certain components are just going to fail (especially the battery). And it absolutely sends sickly shivers down my spine that people are being forced to landfill perfectly okay hardware because of a battery becoming worn out. Seriously Apple, where have your holistic eco-friendly principles gone?

Make no mistake: ever since the AT/XT days the useful lifetime of a computer has been in the three year range because of the nature of matter and the physics we exploit to make digital circuits do what they need to do. Can you still use a 20 year old computer that runs Word Perfect 5 on MS-DOS 6.22 and isn't really made to do much more? Of course. And of course, you'll still be able to run OSX Panther on a 2005 MacMini for years to come, but you can't use those things for anything new or modern, you've created a little time machine that can only do what we wanted to do in 1985, or 1995, or 2005, instead of in 2015 (or soon enough, 2025).

Most of us want to use those new programs that rely on new algorithms that require the faster hardware, or old algorithms that massively benefit from faster hardware - we want spreadsheets to take less than seconds, not more than minutes, for ever-more complex work; we want games that run smoothly, not "not at all" or at 1 or 2 frames per second; we want our internet browser to start when we tell it to, not after a period of time that is long enough to wonder whether it even started at all.

Things all have lifetimes, and for computers that lifetime's about 3 years, and has been for decades. On the upside, computers are ships of Theseus: most of the time, we can just swap out broken parts for new parts, including faster parts, so really the lifetime of a single, unadulterated, intact computer is three years, but with a few hundred bucks every three years, we can keep pulling it back into the modern age until at some point nothing of the original remains - and the lifetime of THAT computer is much, much longer.

I wonder if there's a way to solve this problem that doesn't involve buying a new computer every three years.

In terms of software requirements, I think most people don't play heavy requirement games, and for basic personal and office tasks, the 2/4 threaded CPU's of the past few years have been up to the task of browsing, office suites (with responsive spreadsheets), and media.

My dad ran Ubuntu for a decade on my 13 year old workstation. He couldn't do anything I could do on my laptop. A Pentium IV with HT was good enough for his LaTeX and his MCMC simulations.

Not if you compensate for how much extra you paid for it.

> As a browser and a ssh machine it's good enough.

So you're just offloading the needed upgrades to someone else, while still ALSO needing to maintain your own computer (though to a lesser degree).

Unless you need the extra battery capacity (how often do you need to work for several hours without being close to a plug?) then it's much simpler to just run everything locally. Plus you don't need an internet connection! Plus using an IDE or anything else graphical will actually be a bearable experience!

It's not how much you pay for your computer, but how much you spend per year, on average, that counts. If a computer does its job for twice as long as the other, it's reasonable to pay up to twice as much for it.

Surely you mean "He could do everything I could do on my laptop"?

I usually get 5 years from my notebooks (batteries are an issue, of course)

I can't get a pair of shoes to last me 2 years. The fact that my 2013 MacBook Pro is still working is fairly surprising to me.

I just ordered a new touchpad sticker and keyboard for my 5 year old Thinkpad. I expect to replace the batteries within the next year, but other than that, I expect it to go to 10+ years, even though my previous Dell laptops did not make it past 5 years.

Three years is also not a long time considering the price of a MacBook. The basic model starts at $1299 [1]; $400/year for computing is a lot of money.

My two year old Chromebook is definitely a piece of crap; the motherboard is warped from having dropped it on carpet (carpet!) once, and the monitor has scratches caused by the keyboard. But that's okay, because I bought a very low end model that only cost $200.

[1] http://www.apple.com/mac/compare/

I sometimes get the "new tech" itch, but I haven't convinced myself that I'd get enough benefit to retire this thing, yet.

The author of the article was writing about non-retina MBPs, which are still for sale.

A mid-2015 15" rMBP purchased today is running a two-year-old processor from a three-year-old architecture. And the GPU, should you get the discrete GPU option, is from a four-year-old architecture (it's a GCN 1.0 part).

Although if the Broadwell parts weren't really an upgrade, then it does not matter. The old ATI part would be more annoying.

I also kind of understand why Apple didn't go with Skylake yet. Seeing all the problems with power management states in Linux and Windows land, it looks like they decided to skip this generation until that gets fixed.

Things run a bit slower for the apps that get unnecessarily bloated over time. Including some websites. Still fast enough day to day to not really matter. I was used to it about 3-4 years ago. Thanks to software improvements, my laptop actually got better over the years. ;)

For newer work - as needs change, specs change, it's advantageous to get new equipment to meet changing needs (generally faster processing in my case).

Of course, chances are that any other notebook might fail sooner, and I assume that my careful handling has increased the longevity of the device.