> Most of the 160-200 million laptops sold each year are replacement purchases. The average laptop is replaced every 3 years (in business) to five years (elsewhere). 3 My 5.7 years per laptop experience is not exceptional.
This is one of the many aspects I don't like about how laptops are designed today. Even with OEM desktops like my Dell Precision T1700, it's still serviceable and fixable today without a whole lot of effort. For both my Dell and Supermicro workstations, they basically last 10+ years, and I've got a lot of options to keep them going; I wish I could say the same about laptops. I really wish I could get a new 2k screen for the old Dell Latitude E6530 I have -- it's built a lot more robustly than my newer latitude. I really would like to see our government mandate user serviceable parts (kind of like how the EU apparently mandated replaceable batteries, which is a huge win), as there's so many older designs that would continue to chug along with a few fixes, like IBM era Thinkpads or some the more robustly designed Latitudes. Lenovo has been going the wrong direction lately...I have sworn them off after having a two P1s and a P53, which were gently used and taken care of, die in under 2 years.
This is what Framework set out to do (and is pulling it off so far...I'm typing this out on my 12th gen framework). They have an entire marketplace of replacement parts you can buy, including screens.
They've even got battery upgrades (increased capacity), better speakers, new screen type (matte) that you can retrofit into your existing Framework.
They support upgrading from their first gen laptop (admittedly they are a very young company, but their promise has held up thus far).
Hopefully more folks that are interested in upgradability and repairability are purchasing frameworks to show other companies that it's worth it to do (I'm unaffiliated with Framework, just a customer).
Some of the laptop issues are a chain of dependencies that en up with mechanical and power envelope. That doesn't mean it's impossible, but say you want to go from 720p to 2k, that also requires more power, a bit for the panel and a bit for the backlight. The mainboard might not have a TCON and eDP or LVDS transceiver to drive such a panel, and the GPU might not be able to handle it either. So now that new panel needs three more things:
- Power supply
- Display transmission
- GPU
And those things in turn need more (or well, 'different') space, which in turn might not fit in the existing chassis. And if it does, you might still have the thermal envelope issue where the chassis can't support the right airflow in the right places, or the cooling solution might not.
None of those are impossible to solve, but they also aren't as simple as "just give me a different panel", because it's not really just about the single component, it almost never is.
We have had a lot of luck in the past with a single 'family' of computers (usually largely designed by compal, Foxconn etc.) having interchangeable parts, and the base models essentially being downgraded versions of the top-tier model, which means that as long as you stay within that family, you get to upgrade parts along the way.
Framework does an excellent job of keeping everything that still fits within the same envelope going. But if at any point the current eDP interface needs to be replaced to support higher bandwidth, that means that the possible combinations between panels, cables and mainboards is now a whole lot more complicated. Some panels might only work with some mainboards, which might mean you have to replace both at the same time, greatly reducing the usefulness of what remains. Currently we don't have a huge gap between previous generations and current generations, but I'm very curious what's going to happen when we do make another significant jump. Only time will tell.
>For both my Dell and Supermicro workstations, they basically last 10+ years, and I've got a lot of options to keep them going; I wish I could say the same about laptops. I really wish I could get a new 2k screen for the old Dell Latitude E6530 I have -- it's built a lot more robustly than my newer latitude.
Agreed. When I was checking out new laptops to buy one, in shops, about a year ago, I was shocked to see the lower quality and sturdiness of the cases and keyboards. For no apparent gain except possible lightness.
I think laptop makers have started doing an auto industry in terms of built in or planned obsolescence.
I swore off those Chinese manufacturers (Lenovo, Asus, Acer, etc) many years ago for similar reasons and haven't looked back. I just don't buy any products from them, laptops included. Surprised people are still having to learn the hard way that their products are crap.
My T420 is still running strong 12 years later. I don't use it for much since I'm not on Linux anymore, but I occasionally open it up and play with it. I'm using a Dell Inspiron now and I'm hoping it lasts a while.
For a lot if what I do, the CPU on an older laptop is just fine. So, I too use really old laptops.
That said, I am upgrading laptops that sold with 2 - 4 GB of RAM to 16 GB, or at least 8 GB. Often I am replacing on old HDD ( maybe as slow as 5400 RPM ) with a faster SSD. That SSD also juices the battery life. So, what I am using is a lot nicer than what the original owner had to deal with.
Many laptops today will not age as well as, in ten years, that soldered on 8 GB is really going to be a bummer.
I use Linux a fair bit which makes a difference. Linux is fantastic on older hardware and the software itself is totally up to date. I use old Mac laptops a fair bit. The version of MacOS they support would be unusable as would the applications that would still run on it. The same is becoming true of Windows.
That soldered ram is indeed a killer, and the transition can be quite sudden. We have a 2014 macbook air with 4gb of soldered ram, and my kid was fine using it for office and browsing, until at one point he suddenly wasn’t. The ram footprint of that software together with macOS updates passed some threshold where it just became too slow, so now he’s using one of my other old laptops, a windows machine with an even slower cpu, but with 8 gb ram, and that one is still ok, for now.
Apple’s talk about sustainability is just talk as long as they bake in poison pills like soldered ram and soldered storage. Those machines are unupgradable and unrepairable.
The thin and light market is almost entirely soldered ram now, so now I just price in the 16 gb upgrade as the base config price when looking at those.
Compute power has never been an issue for me, but I generally try to max out the RAM as much as my budget allows. This is why I still have a 2010 Macbook that is more than fine. Started with 4GB and was barely usable for heavier even when it came out, but dropping 16GB into and it has been smooth sailing for over a decade now.
That said my daily runner is now T420 from (2011-ish) that came with 6GB of RAM that is in near mint condition I bought for $100. I swapped the HDD for an SSD and just threw Linux Mint on here - I disable the swap file so that it doesn't hammer the drive. So when it is 6GB of RAM - that is all it can work with but it has never been an issue.
But the original HDD was running Windows 7 and oh my gosh the bloat they had installed! This poor thing was in pain with that junk on board! It is amazing how many times I have had an old laptop come up, unusable because of how the OS treats the system and the users just keep dumping more on it that is reasonable. But swap the disk drive and OS and you would never recognize some of these things.
I once came across some netbook Toshiba Presario (?) - 1.4Ghz Core Duo with 3GB of RAM running Windows Vista. The poor thing! But do the old one two on it and it was a brilliant little machine for plucking away on, could easily get 6-7 hours on battery as well.
The only thing that has aged, other than HDD that can be replaced, is video cards, which you can't upgrade. 4k monitors have become common and you will need something fairly recent to drive that. 4k videos also, my laptop struggles with certain 4k hevc iphone videos.
I've been having a hard time getting Linux to work on older hardware ever since the majority of distros dropped 32-bit builds.
Then again, "older" for me means stuff from the Pentium through the Pentium 4 era. Seeing as "older" today means Sandy Bridge and the like, the moral of this little tale is I am a fucking old man angry at the kids on my lawn.
I often buy a ~one generation old phone for this same reason. It's just so much better value to buy someone else's phone. The folks who keep buying the newest generation tech often seem to take really good care of their gear - perhaps because they plan to resell it later.
I haven't done this as much with laptops because I do tend to keep those for such a long time that I can reasonably amortize a bigger investment over ~5+ years.
Curated marketplaces like "swappa" are a good way to purchase used gear. But anywhere you've got an escrow/guarantee should suffice.
Went to comment this. A mid-range or high end product from a gen or two ago is often the same price as this year's budget option, and way, way better in every sense.
Right, which is why replacing a laptop after 3 years isn’t that bad, so long as the old one finds a home. Unfortunately it seems like windows machine are much less resealable/reusable after they’re no longer wanted..
> New laptops may be more energy-efficient per computational power, but these gains are offset by more computational power
Guess this was written before the M1 :)
I also felt the Zen 2 Laptop chips marked a huge step forward on the Win/Linux side at that time: generationally more power efficient than the best laptop chips from Intel, same core/thread count as the desktop equivalents, and cheap enough to be in a lot of budget laptops.
I can't say I stick to this 100%, but I actually like using underpowered laptops. Optimisation is an important step in the development process but its often rushed through even by those who consider it most important (myself included). However, if you NEED to optimise your code just to get the thing to work on your computer, a lot more attention is put into it. If I'm optimising for a lower spec machine than my users are likely to have, that gives me plenty of leg room.
For the record, I'm mostly talking about personal projects, which are game dev, where performance is more of a factor than something like a web app.
I'd like to defend the T430 from a T430. Yes, it was a bad purchase when I made it (and when the author made it), but you can buy them for $100 a piece now on Ebay. Keyboards you can probably buy 20 for $50. Since they are from the dawn of Thinkpad's bullshit, they hardcoded the hardware choices you could make for upgrades into the firmware. Awful. But 1vyrain (https://1vyra.in/) came along and fixed all that.
A T430 doesn't even feel underpowered these days, and has a (horrible) webcam (that can be improved a bit by judicious software postprocessing.) With a dining room table, a router running OpenWRT, 4 T430s, and a 5-10 year-old gaming PC as a server to compile things on/serve things from/etc., you could start a little software company and your biggest expense would be the table.
I just bought a new Macbook Pro and have been using it for ~1 week.
Even compared to my previous 2019 Macbook Pro, it's a huge step up in build quality and speed.
If you spend any time waiting for code to compile, web pages to load, or dependencies install, I'd say buy the fastest laptop you can find. I'd guess this new machine has already saved me around 20 minutes of waiting. At that rate it will pay for itself in around 6 months.
If you're just using the laptop to write and browse the web, maybe it's ok to try to save some money.
Even ignoring economics, I spend like 12 hours a day staring at this thing. It's really important to me psychologically that the screen be high quality so I don't loose my mind.
+1 on the importance a high-quality screen. I never quite understand why PC manufacturer skimp on what is agruabably the most important interface with the device. And when they do, they of course jump into spec chasing with resolution and frame rate taking the focus instead of contrast, color reproduction and PWM (for people sensitive to it ).
What's the delta in BOM cost for a high quality display ? Maybe someone with industry knowledge can comment.
Nice. Now try to do the same as (some types of) programmer or 3d modeller or video editor. The newest MacBook with an M2 chip compiles and runs my projects drastically faster than the 2015 Dell XPS Skylake-i7 laptop I used to have and the GPU on the M2 is so ridiculously more powerful it's like going from 3dfx voodoo to a modern GPU.
The keyboard and mousepad on my Thinkpad have died twice. I've replaced it twice for 30 dollars each time. I would have had to buy a new laptop if I had something else. The conclusion about this being a hack and not a new economic model is why I'm hoping Framework seems success. Unfortunately I think my Thinkpad is on the way out for good and I plan to replace it with the Framework 16 when it is available, which I hope will last me just as long as my Thinkpad
If the keyboard or trackpad died on my laptop I would simply take it to be serviced. The company that made it has storefronts around the country where I can bring it in. They have an app that makes the scheduling easy.
In fact I just had the battery replaced after 5-6 years (I don’t quite remember). Works for me.
They used to be. I am writing this from the above-mentioned T480. It is 3 years old, has both usb-c ports replaced, small crack on the backside of the screen and the keyboard zif is broken, so the tape cable is... well taped to the connector.
On the other hand my X200, T420, T450 are still in mint condition. To be completely fair, modern macs are also way off from well-built. Shiny yes, but sturdy is the last thing I'd call them.
BTW, in older ThinkPads, the drain-pipes under the keyboards actually worked - you could pour water on it just for kicks. Now it is there only for decoration.
Anecdata, but before going all-in on ThinkPads I thought I share my experience.
For the ThinkPad x13 2nd gen Ryzen I received for a customer project (with the customer not interested in getting it back after the project was completed) it's too early to say anything about reliability, but somehow the touchpad isn't centered properly and I always hit left click when I want right click - it's unbearable and surprisingly bad for a ThinkPad.
Before, I had an ThinkPad E495 Ryzen that worked ok but after two years the touchpad got stuck - the pointless (for me!) construction with touch point and extra mechanical buttons (only acting as barrier) certainly didn't help.
Before, I had my beloved Dell XPS 2016 which however had a swollen battery. Still, I consider it one of the best notebooks I had; gnome 2 and Unity also just got it right.
In the last four years I got five (!) ThinkPad and Dell Precision notebooks for customer projects having battery or memory problems OOTB (the x13 I mentioned above was a notebook that finally worked).
The notebook I used for the longest time (7 years) was a PowerBook G4 2003. I hope my current MacBook M1 will last me about as long, but at least 5 years. In terms of power management, display, and usability, a Mac notebook is in another league compared to Dells and ThinkPads with Linux, it's not even funny. Linux desktops have regressed to the point they have ceased to be usable for me. With the newer MacBooks, I think Apple listened to customers and nailed it; I'd just prefer lighter (non-alu) materials.
They really are. For example, I have a P53s (basically a renamed T590) that will randomly clock the i7 CPU it came with down to 400MHz under active use for extended periods of time, and I can't run anything that actually uses the cores on the i7 for more than a minute without hitting the 95 degree PROCHOT. The dedicated GPU also will clock itself down to 100MHz and shift the termal throttling range from 75 degrees to 65 degrees randomly, on a system with a single fan cooling solution.
Just magical, and I can't wait to see Lenovo's next trick.
We sometimes purchase reconditioned laptops as they are good value for some use cases.
We have a lot of WfH users so need to courier laptops to some staff.
We recently had an insurance claim denied for a damaged reconditioned laptop as TNT/Fedex used a "no second hand goods" clause in their insurance to wriggle out paying up.
This has not stopped me purchasing reconditioned laptops, but something to be aware of and taken into account.
In fact just buying another reconditioned laptop was not a large expense and damaged laptops in transit are relatively rare.
You sorta hint at this in your post, but I assume that eating the cost of the rare damaged-in-transit laptop is still cheaper than paying full price for all-new hardware.
And while I certainly understand that environmental impact might not be the chief concern for a company (even a non-profit), continuing to give secondhand hardware a new life is certainly way better for the environment.
Regardless, it seems bonkers to me that a courier can get away with such a clause. You're paying them to ship something safely from point A to point B; it should be completely irrelevant what that thing is when it comes to paying you out for their mistakes.
Really? because a few years ago battery life was maybe 7 hours and now it’s 18. And with faster processors, thunderbolt 4 and USB C charging, wifi 6, better screens and lighter.
I keep hearing this argument for not buying a new laptop every year and it just doesn’t hold water. I say buy the latest MacBook, expense it, factor it in as a monthly cost. These are expendable and essential tools. They pay for themselves
And these framework laptops are pretty awful. They run hot and are poorly designed. The modular usb addons are a joke and exchangeable GPUs? heavy, power hungry, not for laptops. 3 hour battery life. The main product feature AFAICS is virtue signaling. These products are not open hardware either. Then, there’s this modularity argument. Like this is the last laptop you’ll ever own and forever will be replacing it piece by piece. Disassembling over and over. But that’s not realistic. You’ll have to upgrade to faster processors and the form factor of the mb will change regardless of what they say, and you’re counting on the company being around in a few years which is a poor bet. They can’t compete with Apple or even Lenovo
I got tired of laptops being: non-upgradable, poorly designed, overheating, having cheap components, cheap materials, so I'm switching to a backpackable mini-ITX build. For a journalist, even a first gen iPad should do the trick, but for quick compilation and development in general with all those heavy apps and daemons even a relatively fresh laptop CPU just doesn't keep up. The only two downsides are: no battery, space.
I have not directly bought a computer in 13 years. I’ve been a programmer for 10.
My daughter uses the one I was issued at coding bootcamp in 2013. My home recording studio uses a 2010 mac mini. My wife uses an out-of-warranty one from my work, as do I for my home dev machine. My son uses a really old cheap laptop that was laying around.
I installed SSDs and maxed out the RAM on all of them.
Maybe people are attracted to the latest shiny thing, or give up early on a computer that would go to scrap without a little TLC.
I feel like 2010-2020 was a stagnant time for hardware, which was most visible in the lack of huge leaps in gaming console quality. AI is changing that. Having tons of RAM and VRAM really does open up options that would simply be impossible before.
Running large AI models locally is a bit niche right now but I'm doubtful it will stay that way, so I say it's a good time to value bleeding edge machines
> Furthermore, Linux operating systems do not steal your personal data and do not try to lock you in, like the newest operating systems from both Microsoft and Apple do.
Is recent macOS accused of stealing or shown to steal personal data? Platform lock-in is not news, but that would be. This is an earnest question; maybe I'm in a bubble and missed a big story.
One really good reason to buy new gear: Discovery of new UEFI rootkit exposes an ugly truth: The attacks are invisible to us
Turns out they're not all that rare. We just don't know how to find them. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/07/resea...
Oh how I miss the form-factor+keyboard of my X40/X60. Seeing that tent of an X60s has me feeling very nostalgic. One of the few devices capable of doing that for me.
It's too bad they had so many flimsy plastic parts until the X220 era, which still tends to crack palmrests and bezels with use.
If someone packaged a modern SoC beneath an X40/X60 keyboard in a rugged light chassis with all the modern display/battery junk I'd be all over it.
I used to think that as long as all you needed to do was some web browsing that older or underspeced machines were fine.
But in the last few years websites have become insanely resource intensive.
Even using something as seemingly simple as Gmail is a frustrating experience on older laptops (speaking as someone who just upgraded from a 2017 dual core MacBook Pro).
I also have a hard time believing that the same hardware could handle that task much better if it used some lightweight linux distro. The browser engines are the same after all.
You could swap Gmail for a lightweight email client, but I find that this approach of choosing software compatible with a capabilities of these low powered machines runs into some limitations sooner or later, e.g. when someone decides to sends you a Microsoft Office file, asks you to collaborate on a Google doc, insists on doing a meeting via Google Meet or Zoom.
I may also want some of the other amenities modern laptops have to offer, like bright screens, long lasting batteries, the possibility of using a modern IDE or IDE like editor instead of having to learn VIM.
I have the same problem on my 2015 Macbook Pro, I can do all usual work I want, but website are getting slower and slower burdened by heaps of JavaScript, autoplaying video and what not. Sometimes I even have input lag when typing in a search bar(!). The Ikea website is a good example of bloated website.
Adblock only helps a bit, and most websites don't work without javascript.
Huh, I have a Thinkpad t450s from 2015 which I’m sure has less power than a 2017 MBP, and I use it for email and streaming YouTube just fine. It runs Linux and I use an adblocker, so maybe that’s a difference? Or maybe I don’t mind the decreased performance as much.
I don’t do my programming on it, so I can’t speak to that.
[+] [-] rpcope1|2 years ago|reply
This is one of the many aspects I don't like about how laptops are designed today. Even with OEM desktops like my Dell Precision T1700, it's still serviceable and fixable today without a whole lot of effort. For both my Dell and Supermicro workstations, they basically last 10+ years, and I've got a lot of options to keep them going; I wish I could say the same about laptops. I really wish I could get a new 2k screen for the old Dell Latitude E6530 I have -- it's built a lot more robustly than my newer latitude. I really would like to see our government mandate user serviceable parts (kind of like how the EU apparently mandated replaceable batteries, which is a huge win), as there's so many older designs that would continue to chug along with a few fixes, like IBM era Thinkpads or some the more robustly designed Latitudes. Lenovo has been going the wrong direction lately...I have sworn them off after having a two P1s and a P53, which were gently used and taken care of, die in under 2 years.
[+] [-] jwcooper|2 years ago|reply
They've even got battery upgrades (increased capacity), better speakers, new screen type (matte) that you can retrofit into your existing Framework.
They support upgrading from their first gen laptop (admittedly they are a very young company, but their promise has held up thus far).
Hopefully more folks that are interested in upgradability and repairability are purchasing frameworks to show other companies that it's worth it to do (I'm unaffiliated with Framework, just a customer).
[+] [-] oneplane|2 years ago|reply
None of those are impossible to solve, but they also aren't as simple as "just give me a different panel", because it's not really just about the single component, it almost never is.
We have had a lot of luck in the past with a single 'family' of computers (usually largely designed by compal, Foxconn etc.) having interchangeable parts, and the base models essentially being downgraded versions of the top-tier model, which means that as long as you stay within that family, you get to upgrade parts along the way.
Framework does an excellent job of keeping everything that still fits within the same envelope going. But if at any point the current eDP interface needs to be replaced to support higher bandwidth, that means that the possible combinations between panels, cables and mainboards is now a whole lot more complicated. Some panels might only work with some mainboards, which might mean you have to replace both at the same time, greatly reducing the usefulness of what remains. Currently we don't have a huge gap between previous generations and current generations, but I'm very curious what's going to happen when we do make another significant jump. Only time will tell.
[+] [-] fuzztester|2 years ago|reply
Agreed. When I was checking out new laptops to buy one, in shops, about a year ago, I was shocked to see the lower quality and sturdiness of the cases and keyboards. For no apparent gain except possible lightness.
I think laptop makers have started doing an auto industry in terms of built in or planned obsolescence.
Edit: just like mobile phone makers.
[+] [-] prmph|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shortrounddev2|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LeFantome|2 years ago|reply
That said, I am upgrading laptops that sold with 2 - 4 GB of RAM to 16 GB, or at least 8 GB. Often I am replacing on old HDD ( maybe as slow as 5400 RPM ) with a faster SSD. That SSD also juices the battery life. So, what I am using is a lot nicer than what the original owner had to deal with.
Many laptops today will not age as well as, in ten years, that soldered on 8 GB is really going to be a bummer.
I use Linux a fair bit which makes a difference. Linux is fantastic on older hardware and the software itself is totally up to date. I use old Mac laptops a fair bit. The version of MacOS they support would be unusable as would the applications that would still run on it. The same is becoming true of Windows.
[+] [-] Joeri|2 years ago|reply
Apple’s talk about sustainability is just talk as long as they bake in poison pills like soldered ram and soldered storage. Those machines are unupgradable and unrepairable.
The thin and light market is almost entirely soldered ram now, so now I just price in the 16 gb upgrade as the base config price when looking at those.
[+] [-] NovaDudely|2 years ago|reply
That said my daily runner is now T420 from (2011-ish) that came with 6GB of RAM that is in near mint condition I bought for $100. I swapped the HDD for an SSD and just threw Linux Mint on here - I disable the swap file so that it doesn't hammer the drive. So when it is 6GB of RAM - that is all it can work with but it has never been an issue.
But the original HDD was running Windows 7 and oh my gosh the bloat they had installed! This poor thing was in pain with that junk on board! It is amazing how many times I have had an old laptop come up, unusable because of how the OS treats the system and the users just keep dumping more on it that is reasonable. But swap the disk drive and OS and you would never recognize some of these things.
I once came across some netbook Toshiba Presario (?) - 1.4Ghz Core Duo with 3GB of RAM running Windows Vista. The poor thing! But do the old one two on it and it was a brilliant little machine for plucking away on, could easily get 6-7 hours on battery as well.
[+] [-] cm2187|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dalewyn|2 years ago|reply
I've been having a hard time getting Linux to work on older hardware ever since the majority of distros dropped 32-bit builds.
Then again, "older" for me means stuff from the Pentium through the Pentium 4 era. Seeing as "older" today means Sandy Bridge and the like, the moral of this little tale is I am a fucking old man angry at the kids on my lawn.
[+] [-] wyldfire|2 years ago|reply
I haven't done this as much with laptops because I do tend to keep those for such a long time that I can reasonably amortize a bigger investment over ~5+ years.
Curated marketplaces like "swappa" are a good way to purchase used gear. But anywhere you've got an escrow/guarantee should suffice.
[+] [-] AussieWog93|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] therealdrag0|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gtirloni|2 years ago|reply
I tried a battery replacement service once and didn't like the result on my sealed and hard to open by design phone.
[+] [-] zokier|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smohare|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] eBombzor|2 years ago|reply
> New laptops may be more energy-efficient per computational power, but these gains are offset by more computational power
Guess this was written before the M1 :)
I also felt the Zen 2 Laptop chips marked a huge step forward on the Win/Linux side at that time: generationally more power efficient than the best laptop chips from Intel, same core/thread count as the desktop equivalents, and cheap enough to be in a lot of budget laptops.
[+] [-] bodge5000|2 years ago|reply
For the record, I'm mostly talking about personal projects, which are game dev, where performance is more of a factor than something like a web app.
[+] [-] pessimizer|2 years ago|reply
A T430 doesn't even feel underpowered these days, and has a (horrible) webcam (that can be improved a bit by judicious software postprocessing.) With a dining room table, a router running OpenWRT, 4 T430s, and a 5-10 year-old gaming PC as a server to compile things on/serve things from/etc., you could start a little software company and your biggest expense would be the table.
[+] [-] mgraczyk|2 years ago|reply
Even compared to my previous 2019 Macbook Pro, it's a huge step up in build quality and speed.
If you spend any time waiting for code to compile, web pages to load, or dependencies install, I'd say buy the fastest laptop you can find. I'd guess this new machine has already saved me around 20 minutes of waiting. At that rate it will pay for itself in around 6 months. If you're just using the laptop to write and browse the web, maybe it's ok to try to save some money.
Even ignoring economics, I spend like 12 hours a day staring at this thing. It's really important to me psychologically that the screen be high quality so I don't loose my mind.
[+] [-] soulbadguy|2 years ago|reply
What's the delta in BOM cost for a high quality display ? Maybe someone with industry knowledge can comment.
[+] [-] hoherd|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|2 years ago|reply
How and why I stopped buying new laptops - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32674830 - Sept 2022 (111 comments)
How and why I stopped buying new laptops - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26188282 - Feb 2021 (100 comments)
How and why I stopped buying new laptops - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25486191 - Dec 2020 (279 comments)
[+] [-] ido|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OldManRyan|2 years ago|reply
The keyboard and mousepad on my Thinkpad have died twice. I've replaced it twice for 30 dollars each time. I would have had to buy a new laptop if I had something else. The conclusion about this being a hack and not a new economic model is why I'm hoping Framework seems success. Unfortunately I think my Thinkpad is on the way out for good and I plan to replace it with the Framework 16 when it is available, which I hope will last me just as long as my Thinkpad
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] draw_down|2 years ago|reply
In fact I just had the battery replaced after 5-6 years (I don’t quite remember). Works for me.
[+] [-] rozenmd|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] luciusdomitius|2 years ago|reply
On the other hand my X200, T420, T450 are still in mint condition. To be completely fair, modern macs are also way off from well-built. Shiny yes, but sturdy is the last thing I'd call them.
BTW, in older ThinkPads, the drain-pipes under the keyboards actually worked - you could pour water on it just for kicks. Now it is there only for decoration.
[+] [-] tannhaeuser|2 years ago|reply
For the ThinkPad x13 2nd gen Ryzen I received for a customer project (with the customer not interested in getting it back after the project was completed) it's too early to say anything about reliability, but somehow the touchpad isn't centered properly and I always hit left click when I want right click - it's unbearable and surprisingly bad for a ThinkPad.
Before, I had an ThinkPad E495 Ryzen that worked ok but after two years the touchpad got stuck - the pointless (for me!) construction with touch point and extra mechanical buttons (only acting as barrier) certainly didn't help.
Before, I had my beloved Dell XPS 2016 which however had a swollen battery. Still, I consider it one of the best notebooks I had; gnome 2 and Unity also just got it right.
In the last four years I got five (!) ThinkPad and Dell Precision notebooks for customer projects having battery or memory problems OOTB (the x13 I mentioned above was a notebook that finally worked).
The notebook I used for the longest time (7 years) was a PowerBook G4 2003. I hope my current MacBook M1 will last me about as long, but at least 5 years. In terms of power management, display, and usability, a Mac notebook is in another league compared to Dells and ThinkPads with Linux, it's not even funny. Linux desktops have regressed to the point they have ceased to be usable for me. With the newer MacBooks, I think Apple listened to customers and nailed it; I'd just prefer lighter (non-alu) materials.
[+] [-] cache_hit|2 years ago|reply
Just magical, and I can't wait to see Lenovo's next trick.
[+] [-] Venkatesh10|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] patchtopic|2 years ago|reply
We sometimes purchase reconditioned laptops as they are good value for some use cases.
We have a lot of WfH users so need to courier laptops to some staff.
We recently had an insurance claim denied for a damaged reconditioned laptop as TNT/Fedex used a "no second hand goods" clause in their insurance to wriggle out paying up.
This has not stopped me purchasing reconditioned laptops, but something to be aware of and taken into account.
In fact just buying another reconditioned laptop was not a large expense and damaged laptops in transit are relatively rare.
[+] [-] kelnos|2 years ago|reply
And while I certainly understand that environmental impact might not be the chief concern for a company (even a non-profit), continuing to give secondhand hardware a new life is certainly way better for the environment.
Regardless, it seems bonkers to me that a courier can get away with such a clause. You're paying them to ship something safely from point A to point B; it should be completely irrelevant what that thing is when it comes to paying you out for their mistakes.
[+] [-] poisonborz|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] redroyal|2 years ago|reply
Really? because a few years ago battery life was maybe 7 hours and now it’s 18. And with faster processors, thunderbolt 4 and USB C charging, wifi 6, better screens and lighter.
I keep hearing this argument for not buying a new laptop every year and it just doesn’t hold water. I say buy the latest MacBook, expense it, factor it in as a monthly cost. These are expendable and essential tools. They pay for themselves
And these framework laptops are pretty awful. They run hot and are poorly designed. The modular usb addons are a joke and exchangeable GPUs? heavy, power hungry, not for laptops. 3 hour battery life. The main product feature AFAICS is virtue signaling. These products are not open hardware either. Then, there’s this modularity argument. Like this is the last laptop you’ll ever own and forever will be replacing it piece by piece. Disassembling over and over. But that’s not realistic. You’ll have to upgrade to faster processors and the form factor of the mb will change regardless of what they say, and you’re counting on the company being around in a few years which is a poor bet. They can’t compete with Apple or even Lenovo
[+] [-] ac130kz|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fbhabbed|2 years ago|reply
And not being able to use it on the couch, on the toilet, outdoors in your backyard, on a plane, on a train and so on.
[+] [-] jcpst|2 years ago|reply
My daughter uses the one I was issued at coding bootcamp in 2013. My home recording studio uses a 2010 mac mini. My wife uses an out-of-warranty one from my work, as do I for my home dev machine. My son uses a really old cheap laptop that was laying around.
I installed SSDs and maxed out the RAM on all of them.
Maybe people are attracted to the latest shiny thing, or give up early on a computer that would go to scrap without a little TLC.
[+] [-] nperez|2 years ago|reply
Running large AI models locally is a bit niche right now but I'm doubtful it will stay that way, so I say it's a good time to value bleeding edge machines
[+] [-] easeout|2 years ago|reply
Is recent macOS accused of stealing or shown to steal personal data? Platform lock-in is not news, but that would be. This is an earnest question; maybe I'm in a bubble and missed a big story.
[+] [-] downrightmike|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pengaru|2 years ago|reply
It's too bad they had so many flimsy plastic parts until the X220 era, which still tends to crack palmrests and bezels with use.
If someone packaged a modern SoC beneath an X40/X60 keyboard in a rugged light chassis with all the modern display/battery junk I'd be all over it.
[+] [-] mpenet|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] YmiYugy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RunSet|2 years ago|reply
I find Firefox and derivatives are overwhelmingly preferred to Chromium and derivatives on older hardware.
Chrome has a history of disrespecting users' machines to make itself seem more performant.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/07/why-google-took-year...
[+] [-] kryptoncalm|2 years ago|reply
Adblock only helps a bit, and most websites don't work without javascript.
[+] [-] DeathArrow|2 years ago|reply
I don't think Gmail is simple. It runs a lot of Javascript in background.
[+] [-] mahogany|2 years ago|reply
I don’t do my programming on it, so I can’t speak to that.