Stunning. My high school roommate (1996-7ish) had a Sparcbook. He let me use it a few times, and even at the time it just felt good.
I still have the dot matrix printout of everything I ran / wrote on a TI-99/4a in the early nineties. I wish my parents hadn't s#!tcanned that machine when I went to college, I bet I could write markdown with a modem and some kind of VCS on it to publish content even on the modern web with that old dog.
Anyway, that's not to hijack your comment - even at the time, probably almost 15 years after the TI-99/4a came out I felt like there were restrictions on what you could do with a machine that kept you focused on the task at hand in really productive ways. So I totally understand.
How are the keys in such good shape? My keyboards wear out within a few years on the meta keys, and sometimes particular letters. They typically lose some of the lettering and the plastic is shiny or worn down.
Note: I keep my fingernails quite short. I do type a lot, though.
That keyboard (and trackpoint) is begging to be touched. I'll guess it's a thinkpad k/b.
I do love vintage gear, but as a daily diriver, the rest of the machine looks, um, very vintage. Check those bezels! Though the LCD is barely visible anyway.
Computers can last a long long time. I built a pair of dev computers in 2012 for about $2500 each, using one of the fastest CPU’s on CPU Benchmark that was also quite cheap (about $350 per CPU). I still use one of them as my main dev computer. Nothing has ever broken inside it, not even a fan. The original SSD raid setup is still in place. It works as well as it ever did. I don’t notice any issues when all of the different IDE’s and tools I need are open.
Same here, not into upgrading continuously for no good reason.
My primary home server (ZFS pools and hosting many VMs) is one I built in 2010, still nothing wrong with it. I keep wanting to upgrade to a new one but there's nothing wrong with it so can't really justify change.
My desktop mac mini is from 2014, works just fine. My windows laptop (toshiba) is from about 2009-2010 (I bought it used in 2011) and still works just fine (I don't use windows generally but have a bunch of niche astrophotography programs which are windows only).
Meanwhile... A Mac work laptop from 2021 lasted a year before the right side usbc ports both died. A Mac laptop from 2021 lasted a year before the screen died completely. The new machines have terrible quality problems.
My first personal desktop computer was old enough to start high school before I upgraded, though in its final years it was little more than a minecraft, youtube, and web browsing machine (a typical 14 year old). It was an old machine from our church in 2004, it had a Core2Quad and a 512MB Radeon graphics card, with 4GB of DDR2.
I still have one of those small form factor Dell Optiplex 9020 (with i7 4790) and with the RAM upgraded to 16G and SSD this things feels super nice and snappy for what I use it for. I paid around $100 for it last year. I’m really starting to wonder if newer hardware has any real advantages for me.
Still use one cheap HP Compaq XP business machine from 2006, Pentium D which is really just two 32-bit Pentiums on one die to equal an early 64-bit AMD64. Runs W11 just fine once you coax it into existence on a BIOS PC. Linux too.
A slightly older XP Dell only has a single-core 32-bit CPU so no W11 for you, but W10 32-bit is still current and there's only 4GB of memory anyway. Debian on 32-bit looks like it may be supported for somewhat longer. Uses parallel PATA and/or serial SATA drives.
Both have floppies, parallel printer ports, serial COM ports, dual DVD readers/burners and telephone modems.
Same here, see my comment below. I should add that I do plenty of compiling programs from C# for a specific application and it's still almost instantaneous.
You bought that computer at the exact right time when the bulk of the industry talent went into trying to make mobile processors more power efficient rather than making desktop processors more powerful.
I've been daily driving a 2013 MBP. After occasional memory upgrades, hard drive upgrades, and battery swaps this decade-young computer of Theseus runs great.
But the real reason I'm not upgrading is because of software compatibility:
1. This is about as new a machine I can get that runs Adobe CS6 & Lightroom with perpetual licenses. (F your subscription)
2. The new M machines do not appear to run the Intel-driven CAD software I currently run in Bootcamp, not even in emulation. (I'm not keen on owning 2 machines for my dayjob, nor wholly converting to Windows.)
Meanwhile my less mission critical software has gotten cheeky lately and started telling me my machine is too old. Spotify and Signal both refuse to update further and launch with big nastygram windows saying so. Wheeee.
For #1, I can’t imagine either switching over to open source or an Adobe competitor isn’t going to easily surpass CS6 with how old it is. I have to think GIMP has caught up with and surpassed CS6 by now.
For #2, I think if it was me and I really wanted to stick with the Mac and upgrad I’d just run Parallels. Sure, it’s yet another license, but it runs a lot of stuff pretty well, including some 3D games, so I think it might be worth trying.
Another part of me wonders if Crossover/Wine could run that CAD software.
Of course, you want to be able to run these on a trial before you buy any hardware.
If you’re not aware of OpenCore Legacy I might as well mention that in case you need a newer version of macOS on that hardware.
my current dd laptop is also an early 2013 MBP, which I had installed Linux on a few years ago. however recently I picked up music again and preferred to use Mac for certain software. oh man was the reinstallation process a nightmare. the recovery install didn't have a browser that would render the Firefox download page. the Mac app store didn't have downloads for the highest version of macOS I could install on Intel architecture. it was problem after problem but now in finally running the last version I'll be able to run: 11.17. funny how much can change or become obsolete in only a decade :D
What an incredibly wasteful world we live in. A 16g ram core i7 laptop from 2017 is considered vintage? When it comes to cars, vintage is like a century ago.
How has software qualitatively improved since 2017? Even since 2010? We are still slinging the same sht around together with an ever increasing amount of 'node modules' on our disks.
The cause of climate change is not the use of fossil fuel, but the extreme extraction and processing of raw material for releasing the next new thing that will increase quarterly revenue targets leaving in its wake extreme waste that no one knows what to do with except force third world countries absorb it.
Indeed. My old Intel Atom netbook just doesn't handle modern web at all. Even sites with just text such as Medium are unusable. I guess all this at least makes modern web developer experience great since as an user I don't get any benefits?
I myself still run a decade old macbook air - with most hardware parts replaced for a second or third time, except the mainboard: On the Ventura with all security fixes instead of Big Sur. Its awesome.
Luckly I went for 8gb and i7 back then. And swapped the NVME with an adapter + vanilla drive, so no pricey upgrades. The computer has 4tb diskspace now ...
Last year, I upgraded to a new daily driver: ThinkPad T520, manufactured in April of 2012.
Linux (Debian Stable) runs great on it, and it has TrackPoint with a non-chiclet keyboard. And if you drop it on something, the something will probably get hurt more.
It doesn't seem "vintage". My previous one, made in 2009, also still runs Debian Stable well, including when running 3 different Web browsers and a couple other bloated programs at once.
I’m still on my 2012 W520 as daily driver. Runs Ubuntu 22.04. It’s a tank - it just won’t die. And if something does wear it, it’s easy to repair or replace.
I’m actually thinking of purchasing a X220 or X220T as a smaller, more portable model of the same era. To me, this era of thinkpad is the pinnacle of laptop design. Unsurpassed. Robust and practical.
And a 7-year old machine isn’t necessarily obsolete either.
Apple uses those two words to mean specific things (vintage: >= 5y, < 7y; obsolete: >= 7y) as it relates to their support policies. Full support up to at least 5 years, some support up to 7, no support from then on.
Honestly, it’s pretty refreshing to be able to summarise 99% of a company’s product support lifecycle in such a small paragraph.
I'm still using the macbook pro i bought new in april 2015. Nearly 9 years of use! You never got that in the 90s. And to think some say progress has stopped!
In 1990 you’d still have quite a few 1980s era machines, and even into 1995 there would be old 8086 machines doing their thing.
But then everything changed when Windows 95 attacked, suddenly the upgrade treadmill was on and those older machines stopped being used not because they were to slow or broken, but because upgraders were dumping used hardware, and you might as well.
Somewhere after the proliferation of SSDs I feel it slowed down again.
We have a rack with two servers (internet-facing) from around 2000/2001. They haven’t been rebooted since a facility move about a decade ago. They are still in continuous use.
The author says that most time is spent either in a web browser, or in a terminal in ssh sessions. Talk about the year of desktop Linux; I bet most web sites and most hosts to ssh to are Linux-powered.
A 2017 MPB is still my daily driver. The only thing having me switch to a M3 at the moment is I'm finally done with that horrible keyboard. Battery life is getting a bit annoying, but otherwise it's chugged away ever since I got the thing on release day.
That said, the M series laptops are such a huge step forward it's a little mind blowing!
Mine is a 2012 MBP. I am only just now seeing real performance issues; until about mid last year it worked as well as the day I bought it aside from some battery degradation (I put an SSD in it around 2018). Pretty excited to upgrade and hope I can get at least 5-6 years out of a new MBP. This was my first MacBook, and 12 years of use is pretty insane value.
I'm running the last(?) Intel MBP from 2019 for rust and web development and haven't found any reason to upgrade.
Interesting observation: my remote junior colleague has a M2 Pro MBP with more memory than me. We're running the same OSX and node versions. Spinning up a development environment in a project using vite and a Java DB process running inside docker is about 3x faster on my old Intel than on their M2 Pro. The problem isn't anything trivial, and I'm struggling to help them figure it out over Zoom.
Not saying it isn't fixable, but I suspect there are still ARM potholes you trip on.
It's always using a VM so I am guessing Rosetta is involved and a x86 emulation ist happening. (Again, this is a guess!)
If docker is a priority, Asahi Linux might be a great option, but this will of course create new problems, as it's far from done, and switching to Linux is a project on its own.
I for myself use a Debian ARM64 VM in UTM to have the most control over the VM and then just use docker in there. Works much better than I anticipated.
A customer of mine was running the full test suite of a Rails web app in 50 seconds on his M1 Mac, in a docker container. I ran it in 75 seconds on Linux on a 2014 laptop. 50 vs 75 could be a large improvement but not as much as one would expect from the difference of hardware: CPU, RAM, bus, everything is much faster on the M1 Mac and yet it's wasting too many resources running an x86 docker on ARM.
I just bought a used Thinkpad T470, and with arch linux (btw), hyprland, and neovim, I’m starting to like this machine more than my M1 macbook. The one thing I always thought my M1 couldn’t be beat at by an IBM compatible laptop is battery life, but the T470 actually has very good battery life. I’m not using the T470 for anything CPU intensive, but it’s the same with my MacBook. Just hobby projects, mostly writing code. I’m starting to wonder why I paid > 1k for a MacBook when a $200 used thinkpad is totally fine.
Same. I just bought a t480 off eBay a week ago while I already have a m2 pro MBP with 32gb RAM. I don’t know what compelled me but it’s just so cozy. By all measures the Mac is superior. Thinkpads are like the vinyl records of laptops.
My (project machine) Dell Inspiron 15R SE 7520 laptop has started hanging while powered off or sleeping, with the power LED still blinking but the machine not responding to any external inputs (opening the lid, pressing the power button, holding it down). I assume the EC microcontroller is hanging, but I don't know why that is. I took the laptop apart, took the coin cell battery out and put it back in, and the problem stopped for a month or so but has returned.
What's causing the issue? Perhaps the coin cell battery is drained (and I didn't know the right way to test CR2032s at the time, so I thought it was good)? Or is the EC fried or corrupted, perhaps because I did a botched BIOS reflash which corrupted the EC, and had to reprogram the EC in flashrom over multiple passes while skipping "hung" flash blocks (the pin to hold the EC in reset didn't make flash properly writable)? Afterwards the laptop would boot, but dumping the EC flash again revealed the image was changed again. Or did the EC die due to flash corruption that occurred afterwards (either from flaky chips or because I damaged it earlier)?
My daily driver has been in for repairs, so for the past couple of weeks I've been using my Raspberry Pi 4-based "Hack-in-the-box" cyberdeck that I built in 2020.
The more I use it, the more I love it: Everything I need is readily available through the package manager. There are no interruptions and no nag screens. There is an unobtrusive icon at the top telling me that an update is available, but I get to install it on my schedule.
I've resisted the urge to sign into Google for Gmail and YouTube and my other social media accounts and I'm actually amazed at how little I miss it (though I still use those services from my phone, but I've been using them less)
Also, it being a home-built computer it comes with a couple of quirks: Its fan is extremely noisy, when you scroll the mouse wheel you hear a crackling noise on the speakers and the keyboard is very uncomfortable, but all of these gives it a "personality" that only endears it to me.
That's awesome. I build my own desktop for $1700 in parts in 2012. Not unsubstantial, but definitely not breaking the bank either. I had really come to take it for granted over the course of the last few years, as it's just one of multiple boxes I work on these days.
I started working on it pretty intensively again in the past few months and... man, for being 11+ years old it keeps up. Turns out I got lucky with the longevity of the i7-3820, GTX 770, and (what at the time was a ridiculous for a home machine) 32gb of ram in it.
Benchmarked (anecdotally) against a more modern (2021 build, 3x the cost) desktop, raytraced renderings still take 8x as long. But if I'm designing / modeling in 3d or BIM there is LITERALLY no dropoff.
I'm still going to make a new build soon because I'm getting back into not having time for that 8x hit on renderings. But I had no idea when I put this thing together 11 years ago that it would serve me so well for so long.
I also have a 7 year old laptop I bought for $140 new that I've put #!++ on and which keeps up just fine for most things the average punter would need in a machine.
I was able to get a Dell Precision T7820 off of Ebay. 2x Xeon Gold 6136, 128GB of RAM and an 8GB Quadro P4000 card for $500. Runs Linux great and is pretty zippy at tasks that hit all the cores of the CPU. Will probably spring for an AMD video card in the future.
I am using a desktop pc I built in 2012 for around 350 USD. It's running 24/7. I had to replace the mainboard, psu and ram over time due to failure (with similarly old components). The CPU AMD A10-5800K is still going strong though.
[+] [-] jasoneckert|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bpye|2 years ago|reply
[0] https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/sparcbook3000st-the-coo...
[1] https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/sparcbook-teardown/
[+] [-] WarOnPrivacy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justsomehnguy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Duanemclemore|2 years ago|reply
I still have the dot matrix printout of everything I ran / wrote on a TI-99/4a in the early nineties. I wish my parents hadn't s#!tcanned that machine when I went to college, I bet I could write markdown with a modem and some kind of VCS on it to publish content even on the modern web with that old dog.
Anyway, that's not to hijack your comment - even at the time, probably almost 15 years after the TI-99/4a came out I felt like there were restrictions on what you could do with a machine that kept you focused on the task at hand in really productive ways. So I totally understand.
[+] [-] metadat|2 years ago|reply
Note: I keep my fingernails quite short. I do type a lot, though.
[+] [-] jseliger|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacknews|2 years ago|reply
I do love vintage gear, but as a daily diriver, the rest of the machine looks, um, very vintage. Check those bezels! Though the LCD is barely visible anyway.
[+] [-] emchammer|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jbeard4|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] evanjrowley|2 years ago|reply
I facepalm'd when I realized the image itself was in the same article.
[+] [-] apantel|2 years ago|reply
11 years of daily driving.
[+] [-] jjav|2 years ago|reply
My primary home server (ZFS pools and hosting many VMs) is one I built in 2010, still nothing wrong with it. I keep wanting to upgrade to a new one but there's nothing wrong with it so can't really justify change.
My desktop mac mini is from 2014, works just fine. My windows laptop (toshiba) is from about 2009-2010 (I bought it used in 2011) and still works just fine (I don't use windows generally but have a bunch of niche astrophotography programs which are windows only).
Meanwhile... A Mac work laptop from 2021 lasted a year before the right side usbc ports both died. A Mac laptop from 2021 lasted a year before the screen died completely. The new machines have terrible quality problems.
[+] [-] webignition|2 years ago|reply
It has no moving parts and I hoped this could lead to it lasting well beyond what I would normally expect.
Regardless of part wear, or the apparent lack thereof, it feels to me as performant as the day it was born.
[+] [-] xerox13ster|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wkjagt|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fuzzfactor|2 years ago|reply
A slightly older XP Dell only has a single-core 32-bit CPU so no W11 for you, but W10 32-bit is still current and there's only 4GB of memory anyway. Debian on 32-bit looks like it may be supported for somewhat longer. Uses parallel PATA and/or serial SATA drives.
Both have floppies, parallel printer ports, serial COM ports, dual DVD readers/burners and telephone modems.
[+] [-] Duanemclemore|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shalmanese|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davee5|2 years ago|reply
But the real reason I'm not upgrading is because of software compatibility:
1. This is about as new a machine I can get that runs Adobe CS6 & Lightroom with perpetual licenses. (F your subscription)
2. The new M machines do not appear to run the Intel-driven CAD software I currently run in Bootcamp, not even in emulation. (I'm not keen on owning 2 machines for my dayjob, nor wholly converting to Windows.)
Meanwhile my less mission critical software has gotten cheeky lately and started telling me my machine is too old. Spotify and Signal both refuse to update further and launch with big nastygram windows saying so. Wheeee.
[+] [-] dangus|2 years ago|reply
For #2, I think if it was me and I really wanted to stick with the Mac and upgrad I’d just run Parallels. Sure, it’s yet another license, but it runs a lot of stuff pretty well, including some 3D games, so I think it might be worth trying.
Another part of me wonders if Crossover/Wine could run that CAD software.
Of course, you want to be able to run these on a trial before you buy any hardware.
If you’re not aware of OpenCore Legacy I might as well mention that in case you need a newer version of macOS on that hardware.
[+] [-] LesZedCB|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krmboya|2 years ago|reply
How has software qualitatively improved since 2017? Even since 2010? We are still slinging the same sht around together with an ever increasing amount of 'node modules' on our disks.
The cause of climate change is not the use of fossil fuel, but the extreme extraction and processing of raw material for releasing the next new thing that will increase quarterly revenue targets leaving in its wake extreme waste that no one knows what to do with except force third world countries absorb it.
[+] [-] AHTERIX5000|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kappuchino|2 years ago|reply
I myself still run a decade old macbook air - with most hardware parts replaced for a second or third time, except the mainboard: On the Ventura with all security fixes instead of Big Sur. Its awesome.
Luckly I went for 8gb and i7 back then. And swapped the NVME with an adapter + vanilla drive, so no pricey upgrades. The computer has 4tb diskspace now ...
[+] [-] neilv|2 years ago|reply
Linux (Debian Stable) runs great on it, and it has TrackPoint with a non-chiclet keyboard. And if you drop it on something, the something will probably get hurt more.
It doesn't seem "vintage". My previous one, made in 2009, also still runs Debian Stable well, including when running 3 different Web browsers and a couple other bloated programs at once.
[+] [-] jbeard4|2 years ago|reply
I’m actually thinking of purchasing a X220 or X220T as a smaller, more portable model of the same era. To me, this era of thinkpad is the pinnacle of laptop design. Unsurpassed. Robust and practical.
[+] [-] pdpi|2 years ago|reply
And a 7-year old machine isn’t necessarily obsolete either.
Apple uses those two words to mean specific things (vintage: >= 5y, < 7y; obsolete: >= 7y) as it relates to their support policies. Full support up to at least 5 years, some support up to 7, no support from then on.
Honestly, it’s pretty refreshing to be able to summarise 99% of a company’s product support lifecycle in such a small paragraph.
[+] [-] tom_|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bombcar|2 years ago|reply
In 1990 you’d still have quite a few 1980s era machines, and even into 1995 there would be old 8086 machines doing their thing.
But then everything changed when Windows 95 attacked, suddenly the upgrade treadmill was on and those older machines stopped being used not because they were to slow or broken, but because upgraders were dumping used hardware, and you might as well.
Somewhere after the proliferation of SSDs I feel it slowed down again.
[+] [-] prmoustache|2 years ago|reply
That was quite an upgrade.
[+] [-] rsync|2 years ago|reply
A classic tower workstation, beautifully engineered.
[+] [-] gumby|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nine_k|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phil21|2 years ago|reply
That said, the M series laptops are such a huge step forward it's a little mind blowing!
[+] [-] tommychillfiger|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ttiurani|2 years ago|reply
Interesting observation: my remote junior colleague has a M2 Pro MBP with more memory than me. We're running the same OSX and node versions. Spinning up a development environment in a project using vite and a Java DB process running inside docker is about 3x faster on my old Intel than on their M2 Pro. The problem isn't anything trivial, and I'm struggling to help them figure it out over Zoom.
Not saying it isn't fixable, but I suspect there are still ARM potholes you trip on.
[+] [-] verwalt|2 years ago|reply
It's always using a VM so I am guessing Rosetta is involved and a x86 emulation ist happening. (Again, this is a guess!)
If docker is a priority, Asahi Linux might be a great option, but this will of course create new problems, as it's far from done, and switching to Linux is a project on its own.
I for myself use a Debian ARM64 VM in UTM to have the most control over the VM and then just use docker in there. Works much better than I anticipated.
[+] [-] pmontra|2 years ago|reply
A customer of mine was running the full test suite of a Rails web app in 50 seconds on his M1 Mac, in a docker container. I ran it in 75 seconds on Linux on a 2014 laptop. 50 vs 75 could be a large improvement but not as much as one would expect from the difference of hardware: CPU, RAM, bus, everything is much faster on the M1 Mac and yet it's wasting too many resources running an x86 docker on ARM.
[+] [-] wkjagt|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jerednel|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vosper|2 years ago|reply
Remap the useless Caps Lock key to Esc in system settings (no third party tools needed) and problem solved?
[+] [-] arrakeen|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nyanpasu64|2 years ago|reply
What's causing the issue? Perhaps the coin cell battery is drained (and I didn't know the right way to test CR2032s at the time, so I thought it was good)? Or is the EC fried or corrupted, perhaps because I did a botched BIOS reflash which corrupted the EC, and had to reprogram the EC in flashrom over multiple passes while skipping "hung" flash blocks (the pin to hold the EC in reset didn't make flash properly writable)? Afterwards the laptop would boot, but dumping the EC flash again revealed the image was changed again. Or did the EC die due to flash corruption that occurred afterwards (either from flaky chips or because I damaged it earlier)?
[+] [-] wernsey|2 years ago|reply
The more I use it, the more I love it: Everything I need is readily available through the package manager. There are no interruptions and no nag screens. There is an unobtrusive icon at the top telling me that an update is available, but I get to install it on my schedule.
I've resisted the urge to sign into Google for Gmail and YouTube and my other social media accounts and I'm actually amazed at how little I miss it (though I still use those services from my phone, but I've been using them less)
Also, it being a home-built computer it comes with a couple of quirks: Its fan is extremely noisy, when you scroll the mouse wheel you hear a crackling noise on the speakers and the keyboard is very uncomfortable, but all of these gives it a "personality" that only endears it to me.
[+] [-] Duanemclemore|2 years ago|reply
I started working on it pretty intensively again in the past few months and... man, for being 11+ years old it keeps up. Turns out I got lucky with the longevity of the i7-3820, GTX 770, and (what at the time was a ridiculous for a home machine) 32gb of ram in it.
Benchmarked (anecdotally) against a more modern (2021 build, 3x the cost) desktop, raytraced renderings still take 8x as long. But if I'm designing / modeling in 3d or BIM there is LITERALLY no dropoff.
I'm still going to make a new build soon because I'm getting back into not having time for that 8x hit on renderings. But I had no idea when I put this thing together 11 years ago that it would serve me so well for so long.
[+] [-] Duanemclemore|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vondur|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Loranubi|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WarOnPrivacy|2 years ago|reply
My work notebook is an upgraded 2012 T430.