[felixhammerl]

Wife uses a mid-2013 Macbook Air as a daily driver still after >10 years, works in academia. What happened is simply that CPU stopped being the thing that made stuff slow, so a mid-2010s upper midrange can still hold its own today, ssd was already good then, and memory plateaued around 8gb for entry level machines some 5 years ago. So as long as your thermals don't suck, your ssd doesn't smoke out, and your keyboard holds up, you can still use these machines today. If you maxed out memory then, that is.

[Unfrozen0688]

Even more so with desktops.

I am running a 2014 CPU i7 4790k with 32GB RAM and a 1070ti.

Due to it being a desktop w noctua cooler the temps never get high. Keyboard and mouse you just replace when worn out.

This year I am thinking about upgrading.

But my 2019 Thinkpad already feels slow... so I never got laptops for long use. They suck.

[seanp2k2]

Yeah, I got used to desktops with RAID, powerful GPUs, large nice monitors, etc back in the early 2000s and laptops never feel fast. They can’t be — I don’t care how many benchmark results say otherwise, a machine with a given size square inches worth of silicon at a given nm scale using a 130 watt power adapter isn’t going to break the laws of physics and beat a desktop drawing 800 watts with 2-5x as much same-nm silicon. Especially now that I’ve gotten into video editing and stuff like generative visuals for music, you really notice where they’re saving power on laptops when switching between a desktop and laptop RTX 4090 + 16-core CPU.

[secondcoming]

I also have a 4790k chugging along! I had to upgrade due to max RAM of 32GB, so I got a Dell Precision Mobile laptop with 128GB. I normally hate laptops, but with remote working meaning the occasional commute it was unavoidable.

[sy7ar]

Like the other commenter said, you haven’t tried Apple silicon if you think all laptops suck.

My M1 MacBook Air is way faster than my iMac with i7 7700. And now M3 pro is probably faster than my desktop i9 10850k.

[cdelsolar]

Clearly you haven’t tried Apple Silicon laptops

[marginalia_nu]

Atleast for PC hardware, CPU development was severely stifled by lack of competition most of the 2010s.

Intel had no credible competition until AMD got their shit together with Zen, and wasted no opportunity to rest on their laurels. This is also why both newer Zen and also Apple's new silicon is seemingly making such fantastic advances. It's essentially catching up to where we could have been all along if we had a healthier market.