Thin, light, very portable, USB ports on each side, headphone jack and an external monitor port (in this case, thunderbolt).

Could there be some refinements to my 2015 MBA ? Certainly - the two type-A USB ports could remain type A but be upgraded to USB3 ... you could add a USB-C port on each side in place of the magsafe and lightning ports and gain the ability to charge on either side.

But that's it. Great job, apple - you solved this form factor.

However, for reasons other than functionality or user-experience, Apple continues to fiddle and fuddle and muck around with laptops - making them weird and unwieldy in the best case, and totally unusable in the worst cases. In the case of USB ports exclusively on one side of the laptop, the only response can be merciless ridicule.

We need to actually coin a word to describe "company solved their use-case wonderfully and can't resist fiddling around with it for reasons that don't align with their user-base*.

"Special Edition-ed"[1] comes to mind ...

[1] https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/The_Star_Wars_Trilogy_Speci...

Can't help coin a new word, but Ralph Caplan described this phenomenon really well. I'm a (software) designer, and I think about this all the time:

> When cuffs disappeared from men’s trousers, fashion designers gave interviews explaining that the cuff was archaic and ill-suited to contemporary living. It collected dust, contributed nothing. When the trouser cuff returned, did it collect less dust and begin at last to make a contribution? Probably no fashion designer would argue the point; but the question never came up. Designers got rid of the cuff because there aren’t many options for making trousers different. They restored it for the same reason.

Yes, but you introduce other even more annoying problems, like your foot catching on the cuff when you put the pants on, and weird-looking vertical 'breaks' at the cuff fold.

-- Marcus Aurelius

(rephrased Aurelius? Probably)

Welcome to ~2004 in IBM ThinkPad X-series land, IBM "solved the laptop form factor" ~4 years prior to Apple's Air.

And even before that Sony's PCG-Z505 delivered most of this in a robust and lightweight magnesium package.

No. What goes without saying in my original comment was the fact that the MBA has an aluminum unibody.

Aluminum (or other metal) unibody cases represented a major step forward in aesthetics, substance and durability.

I don't care how interesting the thinkpads are (and they are interesting) - I am not going backwards to plastic.

The X220 I'm typing this on is built like a tank, and I'm quite appreciative the palmrest and keyboard keys at least aren't a thermally conductive metal like the rest of the machine.

Doesn't your MBA use plastic keys as well?

Plus unibody designs mean the whole laptop body needs to be replaced if there is damage instead of just replacing a single panel. High end Dell laptops are almost modular in comparison.

And yet the aviation industry, obsessed with lightness and durability, is eliminating aluminium in favour of plastics with each successive generation.

That's weirdly-specific. Some people would prefer a larger screen size, for example.

> Could there be some refinements to my 2015 MBA ?

I upgraded from a 2015 (I think) MBA to a 2018 model (both 13" ones), and two actual improvements that I like are: larger trackpad size, and smaller overall dimensions (so there's a smaller bezel around the screen, for example).

And some people need a larger screen because we don't run the highest resolution possible. I run my 24" 4k monitors at high-density 1080p. My 16" laptop screen is at 1536x960 or 1344x840.

Anything smaller than a 16" MacBook Pro doesn't leave enough screen space to work with.

Increasing UI size often breaks application across all operations systems.

I've worked on a 13" screen all day long and have terrible eyesight and usually eye discomfort is that last thing I feel.

> That's weirdly-specific. Some people would prefer a larger screen size, for example.

> > Could there be some refinements to my 2015 MBA ?

> I upgraded from a 2015 (I think) MBA to a 2018 model (both 13" ones), and two actual improvements that I like are: larger trackpad size, and smaller overall dimensions (so there's a smaller bezel around the screen, for example).

I'll agree that 13" rather than 11"seems to be a sweet spot for size, and the air deserves credit for popularizing that size. 13" is as small as you need to fit in a backpack, and still stupidly light. I suspect the air and it's competitors (surface book, xps, spectre) are what killed off the sub 10" netbook/palmtop form factor.

sure enough, it had been right the first time and now is a mistake imho

My laptops serve 2 purposes - first, the actual laptop that I use for travel with no monitor, and can use for work, photo processing, movie watching, gaming or whatever with some compromises. For that, 11" is utterly useless; it might have been acceptable in 2005 for checking something online, reading or sending an email, but these days a phone can do that so there are literally 0 uses cases for an 11" laptop imo.

The other use case is a portable desktop that I always plug into a (27-38") monitor for serious work or gaming; for that MBA is woefully underpowered. I used to work for a company where you could choose if you get an MBA (mostly salespeople/PMs/etc.) or an MBP (mostly engineers); there were always jokes about how you could immediately tell who never actually does any work ;)

For many people, all serious work happens in a near-zero resource application (the terminal) and the MBA is, of course, just fine for that.

In any case, being about to use a browser and a terminal hardly qualifies as "solving" laptop form factor much more than just being able to use a browser IMHO.

In English, it'd be the equivalent of taking "make worse by improving" and turning it into "makeworsebyimproving".

When I was learning German, we were taught the language has far fewer core nouns than English (4000 vs 20,000 is stuck in my head, but this is going back years), but then they bash them together to get the rest of the concepts.

An English neologism might be something like “imporse(n)” or maybe “imperiorate”. Personally that sounds more sophisticated to me. “Imporsement” or “imperioration” could be the nominalisations (what’s the noun for “worsen”?).

descriptive-with-more-readability ... Common Lisp ... Lisp ... parentheses ... angled brackets ... Angles ... Anglophones.

Like Sanskrit. Also, in Sanskrit, many words have multiple meanings, so when you string them together, there is often (somewhat of) a combinatorial explosion of overall meanings.

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/09/28/why-are-...

So it really depends on exactly what kind of information you are trying to package and how. Different languages compress differently.

Englisch took Angst and Zeitgeist. Take that one too?

E.g.: silly, ridiculous, foolish In Germany you have: albern, lächerlich, töricht

They are quite close to the English ones, but not exact the same. It's the other way around too: English doesn't have words that match the German ones 1:1

"Television" and "agoraphobia" are different; "downsizing" is less clear than the other examples.

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/verschlimmbessern

[2] https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/verschlimmbessern

Sure, but that's a purely orthographical difference, not a difference in the grammar of the languages. It's like saying that German is fundamentally different from English because in German, all nouns are capitalized, whereas in English, some nouns aren't capitalized.

There's a tendency to combine words out of existing fragments in German. Verschlimmbessern might be an example for this. In English I see this less often and there are many more words that come from Latin or Greek.

Some of the compounds may be written as compounds because that's just how you're supposed to write them, but sometimes there might be some kind of actual semantics behind it.

Could there be something similar going on in German, or is it really that German-speakers just concatenate things that English-speakers would write separately?

From your link ...

The usage of these specific two words is just widespread enough to be entered into the dictionary.

I recently finished up shopping for a Windows laptop. It took awhile, as I balanced price with features. You'd be shock how many otherwise decently config'ed offerings lacked a key and basic feature (e.g., backlit KB), or was deficient in some key way (e.g., mid-priced models with only 8 GB RAM soldered, no ability to upgrade).

I agree. Some might not need backlit or more than 8 GB but if they do that machine - to them - becomes useless. Lack of sufficient RAM will cuts years off the usefulness of a laptop.

I'm not sure how such small thinking helps the brand, loyality, etc. Do these companies not understand?

Soldered RAM is invisible on the table at Best Buy, but the price savings to the manufacturer are very visible on their balance sheet. In fact, a laptop that becomes useless and you need to upgrade from 8 GB soldered RAM to one with 16 GB soldered RAM after 2 years is more than twice as profitable as one that a consumer stuck a new SODIMM stick in and used for 4+ years. Companies understand that very well, and the average consumer hasn't been able to prove that they are even aware of these problems.

But to your point, let's take it a step further. Most people aren't going to bother to upgrade their RAM. It's likely they won't even know. Even so after three years they'll want some new feature. But who do you give that to? At least if the RAM could be upgraded, it could have some added use. I'm not so sure that bonus round is being filled with new hardware.

Put another way, a used Brand X is good shape would be a gateway to a new customer and a new purchase next time. Why not lease laptops to the consumer market? Or offer trade-up deals like phones?

There's got to be a way that's better for consumers, the environment, and manufacturers.

Aw, man, that's been a sticking point for years, that magic 8G. I don't know how they do it, but 8G of RAM has been the ever-soldered / or mid-range / you-need-to-pay-more-for-the-next-model-up thing for at least 5-6 years now. Even a web browser can eat up that 8G if it's hungry enough.

I think they actually do a lot of market research. They know that people like you and I might buy a good product that meets our needs and keep it for 5 years or more. But the bulk of their profits are coming from people who have to buy the newest whizbang model - and it has to look different - or else how will everyone know that you have the newest whizbang model?

Truth is the OEMs are just trying to move product, their mission isn’t to be the rising tide that improves compute capability for society. High competition, low margin business in the PC world and most consumers don’t know enough about computers to understand what they’re buying - just look at how many people buy “gaming” computers at Walmart or Costco.

Work-wise, at least. If it was a gaming machine I'd probably buy 32gb.

  >I think 16 is getting to the end of its usefulness in a laptop these days..

What are you people doing on your laptops to need so much RAM? I'm producing graphics and doing image manipulation on a 7 1/2 year old MacBook Air with 8GB RAM [I've even done the occasional bit of video editing] and I've never felt that it was struggling.

Market research said the iPhone would be a flop.

Most of the time, it's right, but every once in a while, you'll miss an opportunity if you follow market research too closely.

This just sounds to me like one of those stories people tell but isn't true. People didn't want a bad iPhone, sure, but that's not the same thing.

Apple can only serve so many people well.

Apparently, you are not the "average" customer.

I'm in this exact situation every time I go shopping for shoes and find out I'm not within 1-sigma from the mean.

It sucks, but it's how mass production and mass integration works. Choice becomes very limited, and no company will rise to address a specific shortcoming for a specific group.

That doesn't mean Apple necessarily needs to go after those people, though, if they believe their current balance can get them customers they want.

So supposedly the average customer needs USB ports, but only on one side of the computer?

I’m not crying a river about my new M1 MacBook having ports only on one side. Very much offset by amazing battery life.

I could in fact run the charging through the dongle as well, but then I'd be SOL when I plugged in a hard drive, which I do at least weekly.

I think the two ports but on one side is an aesthetic disaster, but it does have one upside: there are 'mega-dongles' which plug into one half of a MacBook, and those work with both the 2 port and the 4 port models.

2GB is... tight, for almost anything, and I'm a bit concerned about the wear all that swap puts on the SSD.

Loved the form factor though, and yeah, that machine was my bread and butter for a solid year.

Those reasons are marketing and profit-seeking. Modern society has this false assumption that new = "improved." So even if Apple perfected the laptop form factor, the next model will be regression that's marketed as an improvement and believed to be one by undiscerning users. If they didn't do that, customers wouldn't buy it because it would be an old = "unimproved" design.

Though, a confounding factor here is there's a lot of personal preference with something like a laptop, so there's probably no one "objectively best" design. So some fraction of regressions are just catering to a different preference set.

I don't want a phone with a large keyboard and screen. I want a mobile desktop. If it's a little heavier, thicker, and louder, that's fine.

The XPS13 is the same size as the MBA11; I'm using an 11" MBA case for mine. It has a larger, 4K screen though and faster 4 core/8 thread CPU and better GPU.

USB-C on both sides and a MicroSD card.

The trackpad isn't as good as a Mac yet but it is acceptable to me and is improving all the time.

I suppose you mean Thunderbolt

Apple failed to produce an iteratively superior product, therefore their process is "fiddle and fuddle."

Their process of innovation and iterative improvement brought us the Macbook Air and so many other great products. It seems very short-sighted to claim a particular model is the pinnacle of design and user-experience and they should quit now.

Will they always succeed? Certainly not. Should they keep trying? Definitely.

swap(f, m)

If we took your advice they'd still have the old serial and parallel ports on them!

E.g. why Steam regularly does this https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

I think it's fair to say that dropping the 3.5mm was way in advance of the user population.

As was dropping function and special keys.

I don't toss my old devices out, they get another 5-10 years use in someone else's hands so much of the environmental impact arguments are more-or less irrelevant.

Then I discovered Shadow PC. For $12 a month, I have pretty powerful machine. My MBP is now a simple thin client. When it dies, I ll buy the cheapest Macbook. Also I use 21" external monitor or my TV to play games. Works great.

Also been using it for ML projects but unfortunately they will shutdown the VM if it doesn't receive user input. So long running processes require you to be sitting by the machine.

I am a big user of iPad and their iPad app is awesome. If I can figure out right dongle tobl hook up hdmi, keyboard, and mouse, I might just never buy another laptop.

I think you are pretty much in violation of ToS the moment you install Docker and start any container or start debugging your networked code. I mean, it sounds a bit too good to be true, it's even cheaper than COTS hardware from Hetzner.

> Also been using it for ML projects but unfortunately they will shutdown the VM if it doesn't receive user input. So long running processes require you to be sitting by the machine.

Ah, that makes sense. They are betting that people need sleep and under normal usage patterns you will never use the machine 24/7 and then $36 (8h/day back-of-the-napkin math) works out to something similar to Hetzner prices.

I use MagSafe, SD card slot, USB ports daily, and the full size hdmi port weekly. The keyboard is wearing out, and the battery cycles are in the hundreds but everything just works.

That feeling that you get when you accidentally walk at full speed through your charger’s cable and you know nothing bad is going to happen? I get it about once a week.

I may upgrade to an m1 mb pro 16 but I’d still have to swallow the downgrade in port functionality and the touch bar monstrosity.

Apple has been designing primarily for cheap efficient production and maximum profit - for a long time now.

I went to the i9 16" MBP a year ago and yeah it's new and shiny and faster but not a world-changer. Managing to skip the butterfly keyboard was the big win. The better speakers are surprisingly the best feature upgrade from the 2015 to 2019.

Except for the lure of the M1 Macs, a used i7 15" 2015 MacBook Pro is probably the best bang for the buck in the Apple world.

(btw in my experience the battery can be replaced easily, also at non-official repair shops)

My laptop is 13 years old and I’ve upgraded its RAM to the maximum (4GB) and replaced the hard drive with a SSD. It runs Ubuntu 18.04 with LXDE as a lightweight desktop environment. I could probably use a more minimal window manager but for my usage, it’s the web browser that tends to eat RAM – due to modern websites’ predilection for externalising a ridiculously huge amount of unnecessary computation on to the end user. I see the article writer mentions that they use Vivaldi and Midori. I tried Midori for a couple of months around 2015 but ended up coming back to Firefox.

What makes Firefox usable is that I disable a lot of (most) JavaScript with the uMatrix browser extension (I used to use NoScript before Quantum). Since I’m not very disciplined, I can have a couple of hundred tabs open at a time; what makes this feasible is the Auto Tab Discard extension which stops open (but unused) browser tabs from using RAM and CPU.

Since being introduced to Linux in high school in the early 2000s, I have had a penchant for bringing old computers back from the dead. As a result, every laptop I have ever owned has been one that a friend or partner throws away when Windows gets slow. Every 3-5 year old laptop I have found can be brought back to life with a new Ubuntu/Mint install and Fluxbox. Case in point: I'm typing this on a 2011 Pavillion, my main workstation.

Finally, in the last few months, I realized my up-to-decade-old computers have been holding me back. Professionally, I do AI work on cloud resources and my personal projects have naturally ventured towards the same technologies. Docker, Scikit, NLP. My symmetric gigabit internet is bottlenecked by the ethernet card on my main workstation which maxes at 1% of that.

So I finally ordered a new laptop: 64 GB RAM, latest processor, dedicated graphics card to try my hand at CUDA locally, which is being assembled now. I'm not sure if this is the "start of buying new laptops" for me, or if this one is going to last 10+ years, but I think it underlines the author's point of identifying and aligning hardware with laptop requirements, especially as those things change.

If you want a smaller one to be occasionally portable, there’s Mini-ITX. I currently use a PC I built in this case: https://www.fractal-design.com/products/cases/node/node-202/...

It's a bit big compared to other small form factor options(still smaller than midtower cases) but the hardware compatibility is great!

I manage to fit in a 5950x CPU and 3080 GPU with just an air cooler and it's working without thermal issues.

I have found out I needed to unscrew the small front I/O panel PCB when removing the back side of the case. Then reattach back once the panel is clipped in. http://const.me/tmp/node202-front-panel.jpg

In my particular computer, CPU, GPU and display are rated to 65W, 250W, and 80W respectively. That’s 400W just for these 3 most power-hungry components, under high load/maximum brightness.

Lower-end office PCs often ship with ~500W PSU. Gaming PCs typically include 700W PSU or even more. For instance, nVidia recommends 750W PSU for their released but unavailable RTX 3080, that GPU itself is rated to 320W. Display ain’t included as it has a separate power plug.

When viewed as a heater, computers are almost 100% efficient. Almost all electricity they consume becomes heat. The exceptions are light from display escaping through windows, and radio from WiFi carrying energy through walls, both negligible.

This is just considering the colder season of the year.

I refuse to buy a GPU with extra power connectors.

The difference between these two is rather small, despite 4 years difference. 1050Ti delivers about 2TFlops, 1650 about 2.6 TFlops. Other specs (VRAM bandwidth, fillrate) are pretty close as well.

Generally, I only upgrade components when I can get at least 2x improvement.

Right now I'm on a quest to actually break out of the computing models I"m used to (generally glorified ETL) and to break into other models of computation and process modelling. I've got a hunch there is a direct parallel of applicability between keeping disparate people effectively working together, and writing programs which can smoothly do the same. The trick is breaking out of old modes of thinking, which I think a radical discontinuity in hardware capability for me will help accomplish. At least that's what I keep telling myself.

Well that’s too bad. Sounds like the author just didn’t have the experience or energy to give advice to windows/ Linux users like myself that do audio/ graphical work. I was really interested in seeing what he had to offer.

I personally use an NEC Lavie Hybrid Zero to make my YouTube and Instagram content for my real estate practice. I’ve resigned to stating away from 4K as the render times on an i5 with integrated graphics are just too long for the marginal quality bump from 1089p. Most of my audience seems to be watching on their smartphone anyway, so 4K doesn’t matter to me.

This opens up lots of older laptops for the apps that I use (Davinci Resolve, GIMP, any office suite), but I want to be future proof enough to be able to do 4K when it becomes the norm. For me this means a thunderbolt port so I can use an external GPU.

Audacity is great. No qualms there. Krita is the king of photoshop clones. Makes gimp look like garbage.

Krita is an incredible piece of software.

It's named “shotcut”, without the “r”.

https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/12/how-and-why-i-stoppe...

As a coder, working on something older also gives me perspective on performance of anything I'm working on.

My original iPhone SE and Samsung Chromebook bought for $30 on eBay (with SDSU etched on the front) work perfectly for what I need them for.

I have an iPad which I bought on Craigslist and runs iOS9, and it still works great for my Web needs.

I only use it for my own websites, which I keep lightweight and accessible, and a a few others like HN.

It's a very good machine, and it fits in my little blue shoulder lunch bag

Have you seen Retina HiDPI displays? You'd never go back.

Similarly, when I switched from Terminal.app to Emacs's shell mode for interacting with Bash, I didn't mind the fact that it was much slower (because "cursor control characters" and ANSI color codes are processed by Emacs byte code rather than much faster objective C code) whereas other users here on HN find Emacs shell mode unusably slow.

I am usually the first person to be annoyed (e.g., by the flicker from many brands of LED bulbs) so it is refreshing to find a tech trend that annoys someone else before it annoys me because I have the luxury of sitting back and watching them lobby for reform before the trend continues far enough to annoy me :)

Like beelink line

That flight from Belgium to Spain alone, which he likely took, was around 1,000 megajoules.

“For 10 years I interviewed engineers and scientists about new technologies and renewable energies. And I kind of learned during that period that, well, it doesn’t really work,” De Decker tells CJR from his home in Barcelona. Around the same time, De Decker stopped flying, opting instead to travel by train, boat, or bike. Readers would sometimes remark that while the magazine preached an ethos of low-tech, it still relied on the most prominent of high tech inventions: the internet.

https://www.cjr.org/covering_climate_now/low-tech-magazine.p...

It might not have the same impact on emissions as cutting out red meat, planes and automobiles, but it remains significant, and you can implement it in addition to these other changes (as glafa notes, OP doesn’t fly).

Also 4000 megajoules is like 1/10th of the average energy spent in UK to heat a house, so upgrade your insulation and get a green energy provider.

I seem to have standardized on Dell laptops, mostly because I have drawers full of their interchangeable accessories, like power adapters and docking stations. I've been happy with their Precision line, or the higher-end models of their Latitude line. [Edited: to make the relationship between Precision and Latitude more clear.] The sweet spot in age seems to be 2-4 years old, probably when corporate users are refreshed, and the old ones are wiped and sold.

Off-topic: Does anyone else have a hard time reading the article due to its blue/orange background? I find it visually painful to read a paragraph when it is split into 2 colors. I have to scroll the paragraph to one color or the other.

Yeah the used market prices crept up, probably due to families buying up laptops for online school students, but you can still catch bargains.

Unfortunately much past the X280/T480 generation and you stop being able to upgrade things yourself. It's like I see in the used Mac Mini market where there are a ton of otherwise useful machines from 2014 but they're crippled with 4GB of non-upgradable RAM.

There was a good thing going there for a while but 4chan seems to have really declined in quality of late.

My desktop is 6 years old with an i7 CPU (high-end) and 750Ti GPU (entry level). My monitor is a 24" 1080 Samsung bought new in 2009 for ~$120 at Frys if I recall. All in all, this package cost me $1,300 (there was a sale on the i7 at purchase).

I use it heavily for photography, occasional video and audio, and I'm currently playing Fallen Order (released Nov. 2019) with Medium+ settings (Texture is high) loading from a SSD bought in 2016. There is admittedly some weakness in the gaming department, but otherwise, zero issues. But I do think I'll buy a used 1660/2070 GPU and monitor in a few months to upgrade.

I have an iPad Mini 4 I use when traveling and going to coffee shops and that pretty much always fits my mobility needs.

Too many people are buying $1.5k+ plus laptops that they don't maximize usage of, then chuck away in 3 years because they either die due to the compromising form factor or because they want an unnecessary upgrade to browse the internet.

If you then consider that, unless tbe person is mental, they'd normally sell the laptop, it's not that bad.

Right now I'd say the third party power options are better than OEM, even for Apple.

Apple maintained the iPhone 30 pin connector for 10+ years. The Lightning port is 10 years old. Apple supported Thunderbolt for its entire life as a standard. Apple was one of the first to use USB-A and supported it for ~20 years until they switched to USB-C (another standard).

Apple does tend to go all in on a bus, but they don't change them often. You won't find 8 different ports on a Mac to satisfy the previous 4 generations of various connector technologies.

Regardless, if you buy a USB-C powered computer, it doesn't matter a bit what Apple does next year. It's USB-C. Whether Apple changes next year or not, you can still buy cheap/ good third party USB-C charges and they are likely only going to get better.

As far as computers, I have had USB A on all of the laptops I've ever owned, and gone through 2 display connectors (DVI, and HDMI). The laptop I'm currently typing this on has a VGA connector, should I need it. My wife, who uses macs has had a different display connector for every laptop going back to her G4.

For desktops, I wouldn't be surprised to see a PS/2 connector on the back of my computer, though I haven't looked and I know my second most recent one had a PS/2 connector. Heck, my motherboard has a firewire pin-header, which is absurd because that standard had approximately zero popularity on PCs in the first place!

Apple has much more abrupt changes. I don't think there was a single Mac that shipped with both ADB and USB ports, and it was about a year from the first iMac with USB, and the last Mac Pro with ADB shipping.

This abruptness is possible because Apple controls much more of the ecosystem than anybody does in the PC world. I think I had USB ports on my computer for 3-ish years before I ever used the for anything at all (thumb drives weren't really a thing yet, and I had no need to upgrade my mouse or keyboard). For a long time mice would implement both USB and PS/2 and come with an adapter to let them plug into either.

If portability isn't a consideration, them I still recommend desktops when buying a computer. My home desktop is 8 years old (bought in 2012) and running fine and fast. Of course, it has been upgraded e.g. it has more memory and a second hard drive.

Desktops give you the space to upgrade without having to wastefully throw away perfectly working components. Can one say the same about laptops?

Given the author's mention of the environmental impact of producing computers, it is also worth asking what it amounts to for desktops. While the longevity of the machine will help, the additional materials and replacement components (to achieve that longevity) will have an additional impact. The question is how much, since I doubt that it scales linearly with mass.

Desktop implies desk. And well, a chair I guess. :-)

People living in various group houses, moving all the time etc see a laptop as making that all easy. Let alone those living from their car etc etc.

Anecdotally, I am fortunate enough to be amazed at friends who want a "gaming laptop" but then have a "nest" on the couch hunched over the coffee table.

I keep wondering why they don't set aside a space for themselves when computing. And if you do that, a desktop naturally follows...

For me, a desktop, tablet and phone covers it all. And the tablet may not get replaced when it's time is up.

The T460p which I use now is much better. I'm currently testing a T490 as a replacement, which seems quite nice as well but has some annoying features (glossy display, integrated smaller battery) that might convince me to stay on the T460p for a while longer. Also, CPU performance hasn't really increased in the last 4 years, the T460p has almost the same Geekbench score as the T490. The display is arguably better (nicer color rendition and higher brightness) and the laptop is 35 % lighter as well as signifantly thinner, on the other hand the battery is 30 % smaller and power usage hasn't gone down compared to the T460p, so it maxes out at around 4 hours of usage.

- It's relatively cheap, starts under $200/yr. It would take years to equal the cost of an equivalent system.

- Like most cloud services they'll upgrade the hardware over time.

- I can log into my exact same workstation from anywhere, on any device and even pick up from where I last left off.

- I can upgrade to more powerful GPUs if I need, up to absolutely state of the art 30xx level. The base level has a 1080 equivalent.

- It has USB passthrough so I can use whatever I/O devices I want.

- The virtual desktop has gigabit internet connectivity.

Some downsides:

- RAM as only 12GB

- Disk starts at 256GB (but you can add more up to 2TB)

- Windows 10

However....there are upgrade packages coming soon with up to 32GB RAM, better GPUs and more default storage.

TBH, I have 10 year old laptops in the closet I could use with this that would suddenly make them viable systems again.

For your use case where you're using it at home to downsize I think you'd avoid all of these problems, assuming you have good internet at home.

I can't imagine spending $2k+ every 4-5 years to get a new machine. For less than $1k I get machines that have more powerful tech, that I can hide away under my desk, which last longer than any laptop.

  > Delivery: 23 Jul, 2013 - 25 Jul, 2013 by Standard Shipping
  > 11-inch MacBook Air
  > £1,159.00
  > With the following configuration:
  > 1.7GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 3.3GHz
  > 8GB 1600MHz LPDDR3 SDRAM
  > 512GB Flash Storage

The only deteriorations I've noticed over those 7 1/2 years is that; the battery doesn't hold charge for much more than an hour [not a problem, as I tend to work with it plugged in all the time], the screen has a couple of pock-marks [made of soft plastic, rather than glass], the fraying adaptor cable is held together with glue, screen hinges are a bit floppy and I had to replace the keyboard [although that was down to 'wine error']

Other than that, My MBA still works fine and feels quick enough for anything I need to do on it. And that includes a lot of graphics work in Illustrator and Photoshop, as well as all the other less demanding 'stuff' I do on it. So, all things considered, I reckon that's a pretty good return on my investment!

[0] https://www.timeanddate.com/date/durationresult.html?d1=24&m...

Further thoughts:

Given that the guy's 'raison d'être' seems to be about sustainability and green energy, it seems quite ironic that:

1: He abandoned his first fully functional laptop to land-fill and bought a new one just because the adaptor died. Rather than just buy a new adaptor [non-Apple ones are available at a fraction of the cost of OEM, if the price was too much to stomach].

2: He abandoned his second fully functional laptop to landfill and bought a new one just because the version of WindowsXP he had running on it was no longer supported. Rather than just install Linux on it, instead.

Perhaps the laptop-side of the adaptor died?

  >...the charger started malfunctioning. When informed of the price for a new charger, I was so disgusted with Apple’s sales practices... that I refused to buy it. Instead, I managed to keep the charger working for a few more years... When the charger eventually died entirely in 2005, I decided to look for a new laptop...

The malfunctioning charger was not the only problem. The Apple laptop had also gotten extremely slow. Because I was not aware of Linux (this is 15 years ago), I made the mistake of thinking that I needed a new laptop.

This is the whole problem: many people are not aware of Linux and its advantages, and thus keep falling in the trap that the hardware and software industries have set up for them.

Gaming / Software Dev ($399):

Dell Precision m4800/m6800

Supports docking station

Field work ($199):

HP Folio 9480m

Supports Docking Station

Offline Laptop($149):

IBM Thinkpad x220/x230

Supports Docking Station

Supports Pixel QI display (Direct Sunlight Viewable).

  eBay thinkpad: $400-$800
  ssd: $150
  new battery: $100

  (As needed)
  new keyboard: $50
  new trackpad: $30
  new plastic parts: $140
  new hinges: $20
  new display: $150
  ram: $100

It's also kind of fun.

Performance is fine, the 1440p display is great, it can idle at 5W, and working on it is easy. The dual-battery system is... weird. I like the concept, but it's been mildly annoying in practice, which I think is why Lenovo ended up dropping it.

This is the last T-series model they made with a hot-swappable battery. There's an internal Li-Po pack and you can choose between another flush-fitting Li-Po or slightly chunkier 6-cell/9-cell cylindrical packs for the external battery.

The charge controller allows you to set charge start/stop thresholds for each battery (e.g. stop charging at 80%, don't top off the cell until it drops below 70%), but it doesn't let you control which battery is discharged first, or when the switchover happens. It always discharges the "healthier" cell first, based on measured capacity / nominal capacity, and it always switches to the other cell at 5% remaining. I think their intent was to allow the two batteries to wear out evenly. But if you want to actually use the full capacity of your cells, you end up putting a lot of stress on the first battery by leaving it at 5% for hours or days. Leave it like this for slightly too long and you'll damage it, and the battery system will start discharging the other battery first, until you damage that one, etc. Hot swapping doesn't work as well as it should, because if the internal battery discharged first, but the switchover was yesterday, it's probably self-discharged to below 5%, and may not be able to provide enough power to survive the hot-swap. It would be nice if you could change the switchover threshold (e.g. to 20%), and nicer still if you could tell it which battery you want it to discharge.

The T490 onwards only have an internal pack. It's connectorized, so you can still buy a fresh one and replace it every few years, but you won't be swapping it on an airplane.

Some people reading this probably have processor-intensive tasks they routinely perform. But most of us don’t, even developers.

There’s a limit to this, but it’s further back than you might think. I also have a 2012 quad-core Mac Mini that’s still in regular use. It’s also fine!

> Some people reading this probably have processor-intensive tasks they routinely perform. But most of us don’t, even developers.

I stick to newer systems. For me, sluggish IDEs and slow builds are disruptive to my workflow. I can usually either resell or gift my older still useful systems.

Other than a few obvious improvements like moving from Thunderbolt 2 to 3 and shrinking the bezels a bit, the 2015 15” is pretty close to the perfect laptop.

No recent version on Xcode would work on this one, though.

See: https://eshop.macsales.com/guides/Mac_OS_X_Compatibility

But you’re right that this means this particular model’s days are numbered. Shame! The quad-core Mini from this era still works quite well!

I'm sure, with enough enthusiasm, someone could have a workable laptop for basic tasks like writing or video. For those with less enthusiasm, don't underestimate the power of duct tape.

[1] https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-400/

Bonus: at around $100 apiece, I can afford a few spares.

The main downside is that it's noticeably vintage, which, given current industry ageism, isn't good optics in the hands of someone already 30+ yo. So I should try to spin the vintage as a hipster fashion thing. :)

The one time I decided to try my hand at interviewing for a coding position, the interviewer gave me a rather sniffy ‘what is that!’ When it came out of my bag.

Doing onsite demos with a vga only vintage laptop also isn’t probably the best look.

Well I am completely convinced. Linux office applications are clearly (clearly!) better than commercial suites. /s

To the point of the article, despite the last point saying the practice of using old laptops is a hack, they spend most of the article brow beating anyone that doesn't follow suit or agree with them.

Some laptops are awesome and can last for many years. These are often (not always) laptops aimed at enterprise/institutional buyers...like many ThinkPads. They are designed to be serviced and have readily available parts lists and service manuals. Internally they're fairly prosaic which makes servicing more practical. Others are just generally well built and don't have a lot of moving parts to even fail.

Everything else is just shit that can't be easily serviced and is always falling apart. It's expensive and frustrating to keep such laptops longer than a few years. If you can't avoid buying one you're better off properly disposing of them than fighting with them. If you do have a laptop with good/serviceable hardware it'll easily keep working well for years.

I think the point of software is the author's strongest point. If Linux/FOSS is a feasible platform for your work and you have a productive workflow you're going to have a much easier time with Linux on an old machine versus Windows. Even the fastest moving rolling release Linux distros change far less than just Windows 10's semi-annual releases. The requirements also aren't going to change much if at all.

They quietly dropped those this past September.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24840310

https://forums.craigslist.org/?ID=309670165

https://forums.craigslist.org/?act=searchFrameMaker&SQ=rss&f...

https://forums.craigslist.org/?act=searchFrameMaker&SQ=rss&f...

Even the demo feeds are mostly broken: https://www.craigslist.org/about/rss

I would actually recommend people use a Raspberry 4 now a days, and just bring the pi or have one at each location if you don't need security... and have screens/keyboard/mouse at all places (remember to use the same keyboard everywhere). Working on trains is not really constuctive as you cannot do deep work there anyhow!

I do empathize with the author that laptop hardware quality isn't like it used to be.

There're a couple of things that are less modern: a crappy 800p display, USB 2.0, limited external display resolution. But if it's not particularly for the display I would probably still be using it. I was doing some window development work at some point, and had zero problem running visual studio with a small project and doing whatever I had to do while the model has just 2GB of RAM.

In the case of my Lenovo T410 that I bought in 2010, I finally up(?)graded it after 10 years in 2020 to a Lenovo P53.

I have sensitive eyes, so I think the TN screen was also somewhat an issue. I do regret not buying an IPS-modded X60s I was offered at one point, though.

I‘m particularly pleased with my Thinkpad: built in 2011, I bought it in early 2017. Plopped in an SSD and 8 GB extra RAM, total cost ~300€. Runs beautifully.

That's not just any old laptop, and if my situation is any indication, the author wouldn't hesitate one moment if offered a brand new X60 specimen with a stronger less crack-prone chassis material and modern SoC+LED-lit LCD. Unfortunately no such thing is currently available.

https://www.facebook.com/lcdfans/

Runs Windows 10 Pro just fine, alongside VS 2019 (.NET/C++ workloads), Eclipse, Netbeans, Office, all modern browsers, the card is more than capable to handle WebGL 2.0 can achieve.

No need to keep buying shiny toys every 2 years, specially when one doesn't buy into container fashion trend.

You should optimize your images. This would probably drastically reduce your electricity use per unique visitor.

Nice article by the way. I love the frugality.

_{Behind CloudFlare which is not solar powered and does most of the work sending stuff to clients.}

In the late 90s (when websites looked exactly like that) 100kb would be considered excessive.

What is a typical page weight today, inclusive of all external references (images, JS, CSS)?

also bought T520 1-2 years ago perfectly satisfying my needs after upgrading RAM and SSD, for years used another used T20 and in between some cheap new thinkpad but not T line, had the worst experience actually with the cheap new one

All because it can take freaking weeks in my experience, and they can mess up and not fix it at all...

Of course, I only buy used/refurb, so they're really cheap - cheaper than one new one.

There is a big difference in performance though, you can't buy something too old if you want to do anything intensive. Fortunately for me (and unfortunately for the environment), companies throw away perfectly fine workstation-class laptops every year it seems.

I'd like to get some Ryzen machines next, the performance for the money is unmatched.

I've also been thinking a small form factor desktop coupled with any laptop as a display could be a better choice - new laptops come with soldered CPUs, GPUs, even RAM, which is a shame. A desktop would be upgradeable for a good while. And I see you could build them really small, like XBox small, they'd fit in luggage rather easily.

Also, pardon me, but wtf is this about:

> tiny and messy IT shop run by a Chinese in Antwerp, Belgium. The Chinese may not have a reputation for building quality products, but they sure know how to fix things.

Really man? -_-

That said, I was impressed by the man's repair qualities. I asked him how he was going to repair my 2006 laptop without access to spare parts. He said he would just repair the fan by replacing the copper wire. Don't see that happening in an official repair shop. And he did it overnight.

Also, that's the kind of repairs I would do, I've actually fixed quite a few fans that started grinding with simple automotive grease, they last for years :D

indeed. the desktops at my home are a nice example of "Ship of Theseus" .

Like another comment down below mentions, companies toss away perfectly good laptops after a year or two, which can be bought in the ballpark of 150-300 quid/euros/USD. They'll last 2-3 years on average, and even longer if you aren't into intensive activities. Just go to some IT guy in a multinational - I remember my old firm had stacks of ThinkPads piled all the way up. Some companies even have old MBPs at hand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EATdYG7h9IQ

apparently a private school is Aussie land was going to throw 100 of these MacBooks into the dumpster/landfill. They were intercepted by someone else and this person received 15 of those MacBooks (I guess he just paid for shipping and handling?). After repairing them, he had 11 functioning computers at the end of the video. The other 4 were salvaged for parts or something like that.