I'm a bit confused by the "still". How often would you expect to upgrade hardware? Keeping a computer for three years is completely normal for most people.

True… here I’m going wondering if it’s time to upgrade my 2017 MacBook Pro because a couple of keys started to fail and I’m having a hard time…

A thinkpad keyboard replacement cost ~50$ last time I needed it.

I am using my Dell XPS 13 now for almost ten years. Still works perfectly.

I have a 10 year old MacBook Pro that works perfectly too. Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t allow OS upgrades.

I’ll probably get an M3 and use it for 8-10 years.

Ever tried OCLP [1]? It allows for patched MacOS installs on officially unsupported Apple hardware.

[1] https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/

Thinkpad x220 checking in, still rocking my Sandy Lake and still enjoying a real keyboard. It's about 12 now. Other laptops have come and gone.

I couldn't live with my macbook m1. I hated the keyboard and the desktop - why is there no delete key, pray? UTM crashed a lot. Asahi was lovely but I just didn't like touching the hardware.

I got my M1 Max MBP 14" at the end of 2021 (so almost 2 years ago now) and my previous machine was an X220. The main reasons I switched were:

- I was a consultant/contractor, and sometimes you have to run software you really don't want to (Citrix, Teams). You can kind of do this on Linux w/ emulation, but on an older machine it's painful.

- Can't drive a 4k monitor at 60fps

- 1366x768 is hard to webdev on

I also had a multi-machine setup so like, a Chromebook for being spied on, a Windows machine for gaming, and an air-gapped Windows machine for music production. My partner and I had decided to move abroad and it felt like a little much to bring 4 laptops over, so I reluctantly consolidated. In truth the only thing I really gave up was acquiescing to being spied on, but at this point that's more because I haven't set up a pi-hole (etc.) than anything.

I do miss (Arch) Linux, and obviously the X220 input system is unparalleled, but I'll say that I'm pretty accustomed to the MBP input system now (I learned Fn-Delete is actual delete, which actually improved my life significantly). I probably lost ~30WPM (I'm around 100-150WPM on a good keyboard) and it's definitely a worse ergonomic experience to have to leave home row to use the trackpad (you're telling me you want me to stretch my ulnar nerve even more?).

There are other niceties. My partner can airdrop me things. I can load truly ridiculous Excel spreadsheets. I can move my music production onto it. I can stream both an Snes9x emulator window and a webcam grab through OBS to game w/ my brother in the states.

Glossy screens on laptops don't make any sense to me though. The argument is you get better color reproduction, but there are great matte screens that do that (I have a 32" matte display with 100% AdobeRGB that proves it), and besides that, I bet if the difference matters to you you've got a high performance glossy screen on your desk in an office with controlled lighting. Laptops go places! Sometimes they're sunny! Matte screens please!

you're changing architecture, and memory and storage speed in one go; i think you're going to like it

This year I upgraded from MBP 2015 to M2. I am still bothered by the notch on the M2.

I use a completely black background, I forget the notch exists plus I save a bit of battery.

This is the way, or have an external monitor as your main monitor.

Or have four external monitors; the reason I had to wait for the M1 Pro.

it's Apple customer we're talking here...

I upgrade every 2-3 years. Although current device is first macbook so maybe i'll break that (+ an M1)

I upgrade my macbook once per decade. I changed the battery, the ssd and the bluetooth card about 6 month ago (8 years into owning my second macbook). I need to change the screen (1 cm black strip on the left because of a shock) and the speakers are broken. Anyone has a tip for replacing the screen cheaply ? I spotted some going for 30$ on Aliexpress, it looked like the seller had a rather important stock.

True, I am using my 2014 desktop and my work PC is from 2020. Totally normal...

So true, 4-5 years seems reasonable to me, 3 years isn't much

Lower-end consumer laptops (think: Acer, Asus, ...) tend to fall apart after a year, this is what I was starting out with in university being rather poor.

Now its more like: the current device has zero issues, but the newer available models look increasingly tempting for my inner child to play with.

Also I owe my career, salary and life situation basically to open source (so I donate regularly) and ... apple computers that work flawlessly in many situations other laptops would be dead already or require me to tinker with stuff instead of doing billable things.

What do you mean still? They’re only a few years old at this point.

It shouldn’t be impressive that a basically new computer still does everything that one would want to do.

Not OP, but I can describe a similar experience. Still feels better than brand new $current-year non m1 laptops.

It’s not a great thing, but most companies supply employees new laptops every 3 years if they want to keep those employees.

is it rare the decommissioned machines are given back to the employee after cleanup?

Depends on how the computers were procured. Leasing deals won’t allow that, for instance.

My org insists that the disks of all obsolete machines are destroyed and the rest of the hardware sent for disposal. I have a few systems that could be wiped and given away for charity but that’s not allowed. This seems incredibly wasteful to me.

seems a lot of orgs work on cargo-cult knowledge

https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/56891586200393318... (2015)

https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/11917713453627965... (2019)

i think swift had another post about it a bit more recently but i cannot find it now

if you encrypt the disk at the os level, you only need to throw away the keys, ie: reformat the drive. no need to physically erase as what is store is just noise once the keys are gone.

Thanks for the links. I wonder if it’s entirely that, or if management fears that staff might somehow gain a benefit by taking obsolete hardware.

There’s a temptation that is removed by destroying or selling to a liquidator - and it removes any chance of apparent favoritism: Steve got to take home that twelve CPU rack mount and I just got an old mouse.

But even more common in large companies is that it’s all on leases and goes back to the leasing company to be liquidated on eBay; you can always find miles of three or five year old gear there.

ebay being the access normaliser to this equipment doesn't sound too bad

it substitutes the internal network/hierarchy bias for a mostly monetary one

maybe there's no point for us to argue over the decisions of management

Keep in mind that people in their 30s and older today either grew up or lived their working years during a time when upgrading computers every year or two was the norm.

That hasn't been necessary for 15 years.

I still remember the joy of buying additional/bigger RAM sticks for my PC and then being able to do more demanding stuff much better :-)

I remember those days, but that hasn't been the case since intel released the Core 2 line.

Also am M1 user. I remember back in my Windows days the things would slow dramatically over a couple of years mainly due to software bloat.

That seems to have gotten better but I don’t know if it’s because I’m smarter on what I install, or if windows is better.

The problem I have is Microsoft keeps shoving windows 11 down my throat; that damn start menu needs to remain where it was in 1995!

windows 2000 was peak windows for me. only got worse afterwards one way or another... but hot take: windows 8 "metro" was kinda awesome refreshing though most people hated it :-)

W2K was certainly peak UI for me - all my windows machines run as close to that UI as I can get them.

More like: if I would lose it today, I would be the same thing again, maybe next gen M2/3, but everything basically identical to this one. There is no single other device out there I'd prefer to buy instead. Nothing shiny to chase thats better somehow...

The main problem with devices like Apple's Mx series laptops is that everything works fine...until it doesn't. This device is non-repairable and non-upgradeable as far as CPU, RAM and disk are concerned. Now people may claim that Apple hardware is superior to other manufacturers and that it will last longer. So far I have found that to be false, I have more old non-Apple hardware that is still working fine and few Apple devices that can no longer be used as Apple devices but at least I was able to replace failed hard drives on them. Similarly, people will claim that Apple's superior hardware is the reason for their inflated prices but I have also found that to be false...it is the Apple's perceived value that is driving those prices. Apple users will actually pay more for second hand devices that what they would for new Apple devices. I saw this just recently on ebay where I followed a few auctions and the ending price for 2nd hand Mx laptop was higher that what I would pay for newer model in the store. Madness.

Just had a 2019 MacBook Pro 16" have its SSD die randomly. Took it to a repair shop and they said that since the internal SSD is soldered on to the logic board, there is no easy way to repair it without also getting a whole new board, so the machine is essentially completely bricked. I can't even boot it off of an external drive because Apple requires the boot volume to be the internal SSD!

I couldn't believe it was designed in such a fragile and user-hostile way. I took care of it, didn't drop it or spill anything on it, and it is bricked after just a of couple years due to a simple component failure beyond my control.

But it’s not like this design was a secret that Apple kept from you, this is well known information.

I honestly hope that EU legal pressure forces Apple to make their Macs more repairable. SSD failure = brick is just bad design.

Meanwhile in another HN thread - "muahaha, look at these Europoors, how your economy is stagnating, no successful startups, no innovation. That's all due to your overregulation!!!111" /s

true in the context of HN, but kind of a moot point from a more broad consumer perspective, I think.

Might not be a secret but it's not like Apple inform you on it. Looking at the product page you need to click on "How much is storage is right for you" to find a vague : "MacBook Air storage is not user accessible".

What does accessible even mean ? Far from clear that even Apple won't upgrade/change it.

And as for the boot issue it was not present on older modele and quite a lot of people only learned of it with the recent Rossman video.

I would expect any person buying a device that costs a couple of thousand bucks to do some research before buying.

casual classism on HN. You're suggesting not only that everyone do the research, but be capable of doing the research, understanding the research, understanding whether they're being lied to, all without potentially any knowledge of how things work.

remember how normal people operate ffs

Sorry but you don’t need a CS degree to do some basic research.

I’m not a “car guy” but I can still make an informed decision when buying a new car.

had the same thing happen to the ssd in my father's thinkpad ... replaced it with a new ssd.

Yeah that is a unfortunate design choice, I consider drives to be wear items, that is, they will wear much faster than the rest of the machine, and as such should be field replaceable units.

But hey, they're super environmentally conscious at least by adding a few recycled cans to the new laptop you'll end up buying after the repair isn't worth it.

------

Now people may claim that Apple hardware is superior to other manufacturers and that it will last longer.

-------

On the average that's undeniably true.

But not for some Apple is perfect kind of reason but because apple is producing high quality laptops while others manufacturers are producing a lot of shit too besides that.

> The main problem with devices like Apple's Mx series laptops is that everything works fine...until it doesn't. This device is non-repairable and non-upgradeable as far as CPU, RAM and disk are concerned.

Given inflation, the Macbook Airs are pretty crazy cheap. If they break you can just replace them. The base base low end M1 Air is only $1000 last I looked (and another $100 off for those in education). They're some of the best price:perf in a laptop the world has ever seen. "inflated prices" is not an accurate description of an $899 retina M1.

Money is only part of the equation. It's pretty wasteful to have to toss a computer because one component failed, when that specific component would be replaceable in other brands.

Apple has a tradein program where you can trade in your current Apple device for a discount on a new device.

But how much of what is traded in is actually repurposed?

And get paid peanuts in return?

Thats even worse! Tradeinn orogramm are insidious, their purpose is to drain the marlet of second-hand goods, so to increase sale of new ones.

Every time you sell a second. hand conouter you are cutting their sale of new ones.

This seems like a movement of the goalposts. I'm not that concerned about electronic waste, and I haven't seen any great arguments why anyone really should be.

It's not replaceable in other brands, because approximately no one is making a laptop remotely equivalent to the M1/M2. Perhaps the Surface Pro, but even that isn't a good comparison.

Remember when Apple made the first Air and it was so far ahead of every other laptop out there that Intel had to invent the term ultrabook to describe it so Asus and Dell could clone it? Yeah.

>I'm not concerned about electronic waste.

Why not?

If you’re concerned about electronic waste specifically you’d never buy a new computer, only repair computers destined for the trash.

Concerned about it in general is appropriate for governments and large companies, of course; they can make a dent.

That's an insane thing to say. I am concerned about electronic waste. I am not concerned about it to the extent that I would never buy or use a new computer. I am concerned enough about it that I don't want to waste a perfectly good computer because it has been designed to be thrown away.

Would you say that someone concerned about food/food-related) waste should not ever buy any food? Of course not. But don't buy food that you don't intend to eat, and don't buy food that causes unnecessary waste like food that is unnecessarily individually-wrapped.

I go out of my way to recycle things appropriately: dropping off old computers at the local e-waste depo, recycling old rechargeable batteries at retail, etc. It may very well be pointless, but at least I feel I tried.

That’s good, but reuse is best - maybe something like https://www.pcsforpeople.org/ is nearby. They’re great.

The base model price is a little misleading.

256 and 8 gb are lowkey unusable for anything but a Facebook machine .

I always look at the price for the 16/500 or 16/1t machine as the reference point

I have the base model $1k M2 air and it functions excellently as a development machine. Both web dev for work (running multiple react clients, node servers, Pg instances, docker containers, etc all at the same time), and for basic game dev for recreation - though admittedly I’m using Godot for that which is among the lighter weight game engines available.

That to say, it’s far more than a glorified Facebook machine and is a truly excellent value. I much prefer it over my work issued intel MacBook Pro.

That’s not true at all. Have you actually used one?

Edit: obviously if you need a windows vm you’re out of luck at 8gb ram

You’re out of luck if you need docker.

M1 Macs would make fantastic Linux laptops, because macOS is appallingly bad at backend development. It makes it up in sheer hardware power and efficiency, otherwise I’d be completely at loss why it’s so loved.

> macOS is appallingly bad at backend development

That's news to me. In what way are they bad compared to Linux? Both can run docker, Intellij, Insomnia and Dbeaver.

The main thing is Docker requires emulation

True although if you develop for arm then you can use virtualisation. Still, performance wise I've not noticed any impact.

Docker runs fine... Both x64 and arm64 containers run

It requires a full VM. macOS is the only OS with that requirement.

And? It still runs fine.

It works. It doesn’t work fine. It breaks, sometimes in a way you need to manually clean it up.

I used the M1 Air 8/256 as a dev machine for a whole year. It was faster than a 16/512 Intel 16" MBP from 2019.

Calling it a Facebook machine is silly.

> The main problem with devices like Apple's Mx series laptops is that everything works fine...until it doesn't. This device is non-repairable and […]

The sad unspoken truth is that most apple users are just rich enough to replace the whole thing when it breaks, and don’t really care much of the environmental issues if apple hardware.

Most of my Apple laptops I have given to other people who have used them for years. Of the three M laptops I have (including the first M1 Air), none has any issues so far. If one breaks, I would let it repair at Apple. My personal main Laptop has AppleCare to make that less costly, in case something breaks.

I doubt you can find any data to back that claim up. My first macbook was in daily use for about 8 years. My current macbook is only four years old so I'm not expecting to replace it any time soon. Colleagues seem to have the same usage pattern. Apple hardware lasts a long time.

edit: no hard data after a quick google but every article on the first two pages estimates 5-8 years.

I often recommend Apple refurbished to friends who are strapped for cash, the argument being that it’ll last longer and be cheaper over the long run. So far haven’t really run into an issue with this. Call it the Sam Vimes theory of computer upgrades.

I had a laptop with a replaceable CPU. By the time it was worth upgrading it made more sense to buy a new laptop rather than upgrading the CPU. For repairability it's also not really that different unless you're running something like a framework laptop and, even then, replacement mainboards cost about as much as a whole new laptop anyways.

I do wish the M* laptops had something like a CFexpress slot or similar though. The built in storage is blazing fast and power efficient but soldered. Thunderbolt or USB drives are plenty fast enough these days but the external nature of the ports is a bit of a pain. Large amounts of storage are also where the price inflation really is (since you can't just add cheap storage it has to be the blazing high end storage + markup) so this would help the most.

RAM I'd rather have soldered in these days on a laptop. Performance is higher, power usage is lower, and you can order it with enough that you don't need to wait for new modules to be invented to upgrade and have enough RAM 5 years from now. It does mean you can't take any old M1 from ebay and upgrade it, which is definitely a downside, but for a laptop I think the benefits outweigh the cons. One thing I've noticed is there are always people that order them maxed out and move on when the next generation comes so high RAM options are still available used. One thing that is lost is, again, you can't choose to cheap out and get bottom bin speed memory. You have to pay for 8 channel 6400 MHz RAM in your laptop. Not necessarily a problem with the manufacturing method, it's possible to solder cheap RAM, rather just an Appleism. On the other hand... you do always know what you're getting if you buy one, which could be a plus.

Anyways, all of this is to say if you want a budget laptop which minmaxes it's price/performance ratio at a lower cost then the Apple laptops are definitely not the right pick. The reason for this is not as much how they are manufactured rather wher Apple targets the platform. The best price/performance optimization is probably a Chromebook with a monoboard and soldered RAM.

>and refusing to bother with company provided computers

To you and people that do this:

Do you enroll your personal PC in the companies MDM like intune or Jamf?

Do you install their endpoint protection/antivirus/EDR/MDR?

or you just leave it unmanaged?

Was wondering the same thing - going through a tech audit at the moment for ISO and that certainly wouldn’t fly, unless we were able to prove that we effectively treated it like we owned it.

Working at companies without strict audits, and previously at bigger corps that had audits we established parallel networks for developers. Either way, BYOD was possible after all.

Also I insist on not having security based on VPN/VPC only, but treat every service as if (and often has) direct internet connections, so devs are _forced_ to think about security from day 1.