Yes, no one uses 16 year old laptops

Well, maybe using 16 years old machine today - but what about using current machine in 16 years ? A lot of stuff has stabilized and has been "good enough" for many use cases for quite a while.

Software support is less than 10 years so in 16 years you'd be very far behind on security patches.

Well, on Mac and other proprietary hardware & software combos.

Enterprise Linux distros such as RHEL regularly provide 10-12 years of support you can pay for per major version and presumably you will be able to upgrade the major version to reset the time.

Same thing for community Linux distros - Fedora, Debian of OpenSUSE already work on current 16+ years old hardware and one can expect that to continue in the future.

My 2006 white plastic MacBook is still in use.

It's just a friend's kid's video player right now, because with OSX it's become too slow for most uses, but if someone put Linux or BSD on it....

Especially 1st gen of new platform laptops, with all the potential quirks. I think that's also why Apple priced them very affordably.

I still use my apple 16GB ipod touch to play music, its in a speaker that has a dock for it. Still works, and I use it to play music. The hardware works. But almost none of the software works, except the music player. The browser no longer works, otherwise I would play music off of spotify or youtube. That thing is probably 13 years old now.

Good for you. Do you use a 16yo laptop though? Because that is the topic here.

Performance improvements have slowed a great deal since then. Assuming you aren't doing anything particularly heavy, you can easily get away with using a Sandy Bridge CPU (10 years old) for most tasks. You'll likely still be able to use it in 5 years just fine. That applies even moreso for something as performant and efficient as the M1.

Case in point, my ThinkPad T420 has been in use since 2011. Even though it's no longer my main driver, the performance is more than good enough for when I need a backup device.

For comparison, 16 years ago, we're talking about single-core 32-bit CPUs, the very first version of their Centrino brand, DDR2 RAM and IDE/PATA HDDs. There's just not much you can do with those limitations.

The performance improvements due to parallel computing hardware (think Metal GPUs and their successors) will be so insane in 16 years that your current laptop won't stand a chance at doing anything what will be considered standard then.

Increasing parallelism is irrelevant for most workloads due to Amdahl's law.

Amdahl's law is only relevant if you can't change your algorithms. If you can, then most of the time it's a non-issue.

The human brain runs off umptillion neurons each running at 100-1000 Hz (depending on measure). Not GHz, MHz or even kHz. Hz. Obviously it's an extreme case, but if general intelligence can be achieved without fast serial computing then there should be lots of things we can do with a few dozen cores all running at GHz rates.

That's bullshit. All of the programs I have written recently had an incredible speedup after porting relevant parts of the program from single-threaded to GPU.

Right now we are hitting the threshold of incompetent programmers and tools long before any other.

Only occasionally, I have an old windows laptop with a CD rom drive. I have some old backups photos on CDs. Its from the 2000s so not sure how old it is exactly.

Still use my 2010 MBP 15”. I changed out the battery twice and swapped in a SSD drive. It’s my only dvd drive. I also have a 2011 Air 11” that still works.

That’s right. I use an 18-year-old laptop.

Nearly no one, I would venture to guess.

This couch side laptop I use to read and search things is a 2011 MBA. Not 16, but maybe it'll make it...

My 2011 MBA from grad school is pretty much done, its so slow. I replaced the battery and the charging port and its doing better but still about to end. Good 10 years though.

Yeah, after posting I was thinking about that.

I have a very lean setup on it with Linux. I don't think it'll last too much longer to be honest.

I mainly use it if I'm on my phone, but find something that a bigger screen/keyboard would help.

But I can't do much on it. Even a RPi has more RAM on it.

I have an Iphone 4 that still serves as a remote control for my music setup. The battery was replaced once, 2014 or so.