I still manage and develop my php/jquery saas product on a 2011 27" iMac running Linux Mint, with an SSD being the only upgrade. Runs better than most new windows machines. No complaints.

I switch between Thinkpad T420s and PineBook Pro for all the hobby work.

T420s has loose USB ports and the power socket is almost falling off, so I plan to replace it by a 5 years old T14 G2 in the coming months.

I can afford the latest MacBook, but I'd rather not generate more e-waste that there is, and more importantly I feel closer to my users, and my code is efficient and straight to the point.

My non-hobby laptop is an old cheap Dell from 5-6 years ago.

The best laptop I ever had was a maxed-out Thinkpad P7x, and it came with the most meaningless job ever.

I can only compare that job to the one at a unicorn that gave me the latest and greatest MacBook. Not only the job was meaningless, the whole industry made no sense to me.

Do you have any of these meaningless jobs that come with top Macbooks to share? I am in dire need of such a job right now.

I started my business back in 2006 with an ancient 306 laptop - it was practically free, it ran VIM just fine, and that was all I needed it to do to crank out PHP until the cows came home.

I wrote 99% of a large PHP app on an six year old laptop with a single 17" LCD. Meanwhile, at my desk, I had a Dell workstation with 3 monitors at the time, but it was easier to squirrel away in a corner somewhere, undisturbed.

After all, the actual server ran the code, I just needed text editors, terminal windows, and web browsers.

Your hardware matters quite a bit if you're doing lower level things and the architecture is not the same as you're developing for. But apparently HN is all web devs

Unless you want to insmod things in your main kernel like a cowboy, I don't see why you'd need architectures to match. Cross compilation is the proper way (for some architectures it would be quite hard to find a machine capable of compiling the kernel before the heat death of the universe...)

My substantially more privileged, but somewhat equivalent experience, was doing mobile app development, Docker, linux VMs, UI design, and finding out about hacker news on an 11 inch MacBook Air with 4gb of RAM.

i have a computer that benchmarks literally 10x faster and with 32x the amount of RAM, but i miss that little thing that helped me build my career from nothing

My dad spun up my Pentium Deschutes (400MHz!) machine the other day. Same hard drive from when I was 10 years old. “clouds.psd” was on the desktop.

I still remember retiring that computer. The first thing I did when I got my Pentium IV chip a year later was download Macromedia Dreamweaver. Did me well.

The almost regretful "I'm not Norwegian" clarification here is charming.

I do most of my work remotely on a little Raspberry Pi 4 server attached to my home ISP: https://fatcity.it/

But I'm planning to do a big jump: Soon I will switch to a 2012 Mac Mini as my primary linux server!