A 1st-gen i7 (2008) can decode 1080p60 H.264 in software in realtime. Been there, done that.
Where can you even find 60fps video of decent quality? That's framerate I associate more with gaming than video production. Surely 24fps is still the standard today? (I am very ignorant in this regard; please be kind.)
Source: I just did this with a 2011 MacBook Pro
Thr issue that mine has - aside from a broken hinge over time - is that one of the thermal sensors is fucked, so the machine puts the fans on full and heavily throttles the CPU. Before that happened (last year) it was a solid machine.
Consider that the utility of old hardware depends on what you want to do with it, as well.
I have Debian on both but recently I was testing old SSDs and one had windows 10 and even that was perfectly usable.
My main daily driver is a MacBook Pro 64GB M2 Max, so it's not like I live in a world of ancient tech and don't understand the difference.
Who exactly are satisfied with less than a 15 y/o notebook? Why are they on (more than) 15 y/o notebook and not on a smartphone?
> I suppose it depends on what they intend to use it for.
15 notebook is enough to be a glorified typewritter or tty, or to watch some movies (forget about HEVC, x265 and even x264 is troublesome)
Intel Core i5-540M @ 2.53GHz vs AMD Ryzen 3 4300U
Clockspeed 2.5 GHz 2.7 GHz
Turbo Speed Up to 3.1 GHz Up to 3.7 GHz
# of Physical Cores 2 (Threads: 4) 4 (Threads: 4)
Cache L1: 128KB, L2: 0.5MB, L3: 3MB L1: 256KB, L2: 2.0MB, L3: 4MB
First Seen on Chart Q1 2010 Q1 2020
Single Thread Rating 1159(-49.8%) 2307(0.0%)
CPU Mark 1808(-75.7%) 7431(0.0%)Glorified typewriter is a perfectly acceptable use case. Plenty people out there who just want to write a novel or thesis or email or look up a recipe or Wikipedia. Not everyone is gaming and watching 4k video
Do you even internet?
Just try it yourself on some 2c/4t machine from 2010. Sure, you can do it, but it would be an exercise in patience.
Maybe it's because I don't use bloatware browsers and keep JS off by default.
(I guess GP’s point that installing Linux would be the sensible course of action is probably true with this laptop).
If you coerce it to... not do that, the laptop might reset whenever power usage goes up quickly, because it was designed with the expectation that the battery will jump in and act as a reserve.
This detail from the comments explains why they'd replace hardware rather than simply installing Linux as-is. I was a little perplexed until I saw this.