Ask HN: Can a 5 year old i7 laptop compete with one made today?

[WheelsAtLarge]

Moore's Law is mostly dead, so current i7s aren't much faster than the ones made many years ago. I'm thinking of buying a 5-year-old Dell i7 laptop, which will mostly give me the same speed as the latest model. Am I right? Is it worth saving the money? I mostly use spreadsheets and web apps.

[pveierland]

Nice CPU benchmark for year-on-year performance here: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/year-on-year.html

The data shows that the average laptop CPU in 2024 has 56% better thread performance, and 123% better total performance, compared to the average laptop in 2019.

Laptop thread 2019: 1689 avg. score

Laptop total 2019: 6396 avg. score

Laptop thread 2024: 2643 avg. score

Laptop total 2024: 14288 avg. score

For the specific case, just look up the benchmarks for the CPUs you are comparing.

[osigurdson]

For me, intel hardware is basically the same: slow, hot and noisy. ARM is fast, cool and quiet.

Once a company stops being cool it dies.

[firecall]

It’s not just CPU either!

The GPU and other I/O makes a noticeable difference to quality of life IMHO.

[dotnet00]

Worth thinking about efficiency/battery life. Might be fine performance wise, but if you tend to need it to last a while unplugged, a more recent laptop will be much better at the same performance level. I had kind of sworn off laptops because last time I had one, the battery life just wasn't useful. But nowadays they're actually good enough to treat as proper portable devices.

[gardnr]

This is the real advantage. Any crapbox with 16GB of ram is good enough for most things (unless you work on JVM microservices), the main benefit of the new laptops is the unreal battery life.

That, and USB-C charging is handy if you spend a lot of time on the road.

[jolmg]

If you get a laptop with removable batteries, it doesn't really matter. Just carry a backup battery if you need it and you outdo modern laptops with non-removable batteries.

[sandreas]

Performance wise a 5 year old notebook is more than enough given that it has enough RAM and an nvme 4.0 or higher.

What you should keep in mind is the following:

- degrading battery: replacing can get expensive to impossible depending in the model.

- Temperature: old thermal paste may need replacement, Core i7 are getting pretty hot and throttled, maybe an i5 is the better choice

- Display: dead Pixels, degrading colors, lower contrast

- touchpad: smaller, less accurate, no glass

- Connectivity: no Bluetooth 5.0, no wifi ax

I would buy a used one but only because i'm willing to do replacements and repairs. If your time is valuable and you are not an expert, it's probably not worth.

[sdwr]

Laptop CPUs run hot, there isn't a lot of room for airflow or cooling. Hardware degrades with time/heat/cycles, so if it was used hard, it might be close to the end of its usable life.

[ivraatiems]

If you mostly use spreadsheets and web apps, you can safely buy a 10-year-old i5 and you'll be fine.

I regularly sell refurbished i3/i5/i7 machines with first/second/third generation processors to customers for very low prices (think $60 for a laptop that used to cost $800). They work fine. You can check your email, do spreadsheets, use Discord, watch Netflix.

This is an extreme example, of course, but the truth is the idea you don't need something new to do the same things you were doing ten years ago. If your expectations are to do reasonable normal people stuff, you'll have no problem at all.

Minus the caveats others have mentioned about battery life, charging speed, and portability, you'll be fine.

[ChrisNorstrom]

My main desktop is running on a 14-15 year old Intel Core i5 750 and I've got 20-30 google chrome windows open each with about 100 tabs (sorry I know... I'll clean them up eventually) and I photoshop all the time and multi-task with excel spreadsheets and VPNs and Thunderbird email client with 10-20 accounts, etc... And my numerous laptops are running on 10 year old processors just fine. I've got a 16 core AMD threadripper PC for intense cases but I haven't powered it on in months.

It depends on WHAT you are using them for. Generally the public has reached a point where we don't need more processing power. Unless you're into gaming, streaming, editing, or a specific CPU intense use case we have enough computing power. The only thing left to do is make them more energy effecient.

[glax]

It depends on what you are doing and what compromises you are willing to take. I'm still using my dell M6800 and t430 for work, they are decade old laptops.Ubuntu for Os and it's been working great. It's an i7 system and i work on php projects and sometimes dabble in python and some ml projects. Never ever disaapaointed me. It's been showing it's age when some ml projects throw that the current cuda library is not supported by the nvdia graphics that i currently have.

I buy and sell used laptops and computers parts as my side hustle. There afew points that you should keep in mind, while buying used laptop. 1.Don't buy U variants or any other low power variants of the i7 processor. 2.Don't buy dual core i7 variants. 3.Try to buy 8th gen or above. Better battery life and performance ratio. 4.If you are not everyday carrying or portablity is a must , stay away from slim and designer ones, that do not have adequate cooling. 5.Check if the display is TN or an IPS panel. TN is a straight no no. 6.Do not buy the models that are targeted towards students and home users, buy something that for professional users. They are more durable and tend to last long. Example lenovo T-series, W-series, HP also has some, Dell M-series, Precision-series. 7.Check the number of output ports. 8.Physical condition of the laptop, if it is kept clean or not. The fans might be clogged, hinghes are loose, some keys might not be working. Some usb ports might not be working or loose, etc etc 9.Reapply thermal paste , even if it's running fine. Factory ones dry out quickly, so you will get the chance to clean up the fans as well

[linguae]

I was using a 2018 MacBook Pro with an Intel Core i7 processor and 32 GB RAM as my daily-driving laptop at work from early 2019 until this summer when I resigned and thus turned in the laptop. I had no performance issues with the laptop at all, and I still wouldn't have an issue using it as my daily driver today.

The more pressing matter is the amount of RAM the laptop has, especially given that many laptops have soldered RAM. I have a Surface 7 Pro (released in late 2019) with a Core i5 processor and 8GB of RAM that performs quite fine for Web browsing, Microsoft Office, and some programming. I don't do anything heavy-duty on my Surface Pro, though; I have more powerful machines with much more RAM for that.

[fifilura]

IIRC the limiting factor for late Intel Macs was cooling. It would frequently throttle the CPU down to 20% to cool it down.

And even if the numbers are great on a sunny day (or rather a cool day, to fix this I would have to sit with it in an open window), this is a real performance sink.

[jorgesborges]

I’m using a 2018 MacBook Pro with 16gb RAM and just sent a ticket for an upgrade. I run a lot of docker containers and between that, jet brains IDEs, multiple browser, etc it’s pretty slow.

[willcipriano]

Check out 'refurbished' ThinkPads when trying to get a deal on laptops. Many are off lease business machines that were lightly used, best value for the money imo.

What you described sounds fine also.

[michelledepeil]

Highly recommend this: you can hit 50% to 70% discount from original price, plus contribute to reducing e-waste.

I've been using a third-hand T480 for many (5? 7? Can't even remember anymore) years now, and it's probably the best Linux experience anyone can hope for. Performance vs. efficiency is crazy - easily hitting 20 hours, screen-on battery life after all this time and many full discharges.

[wmf]

Let's say 60% single thread improvement and double in multi thread in the last five years. https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/8244301?baselin...

It's true that performance was already good enough in many apps, so better than good enough might not be noticeable.

[edgineer]

Performance difference between the slowest [0] and fastest [1] "i7" processors is ~100x so it's best to specify the model.

I suggest >9000 passmark score like the 10th gen i7-10710U [2] or newer, or earlier if it is a higher power chip.

[0]https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-2630U...

[1]https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-14700...

[2]https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i...

[AnthonBerg]

You’ll probably be fine!

As an axis of comparison, I work on a really snappy and fast 5800X3D desktop with a couple of 180Hz monitors. My laptop is a 15" Macbook Pro i7 from 2018. Comparatively, the most sluggish-feeling part of the laptop is the 60Hz display. Everything else feels fine. Comparable. Laptop-y.

The differences between laptops now and 5 years ago are subtle – finer photolithography processes mean lower power draw which means longer battery life and/or faster charging. Screens are sharper, more responsive, have better color. Little things that make a difference to some and not to others.

Generally speaking, as long as it has a NVMe SSD, it’s modern? maybe?

[castlecrasher2]

I had a 2019 MacBook Pro until last year when my work issued me an M2. It's noticeably snappier and its battery life is far better than the 2019's was.

[dcminter]

My personal laptop is a Dell 7490 running Ubuntu. It's from around 2019 and the cpu is the i7-8650. The ram and nvme card are replaceable so it currently has 64G and 2TB respectively. In this configuration it's very pleasant to use and I see no compelling reason to move to a newer machine. Parts or entire replacements are cheap.

I think if you want to run Windows it might be more painful as the upgrade treadmill might force you to a place where drivers are no longer available.

Battery life is poor compared to a Mac but about average for a PC (I've replaced the battery once so far though).

[dyingkneepad]

Performance will be significantly better. Power consumption will be way way way better. Integrated graphics (Intel) will be extremely better than 2019. Just check the benchmarks. Your drivers will still be supported for years by all vendors (even on Linux that matters somewhat: although everything is always supported, vendors tend to put most of their resources on the newer stuff).

Also, you'll have USB-C ports, the newer hard drive standards, memory, latest wifi protocols (I don't know if there is one, to be honest), etc etc.

[diffeomorphism]

You are off by a couple of years. My seven year old laptop (8th gen Intel) has usb c/thunderbolt ports, more than fast enough nvme ssds, which are easily upgradable, wifi card upgradable (except for whitelist nonsense), a 500nits, 2560xsomething IPS screen.

Performance of my new laptop (amd 7840hs) is better, yes, but it is much, much less significant than you would think. If not for hardware issues, I would not feel any pressure to "upgrade".

[khedoros1]

My "fast" computer uses a 5-year-old Ryzen 5 3600. The laptop I'm using right now is a Lenovo T460 from 2016, with an i7-6600U and 16GB of RAM. It's been perfectly fine for web browsing and some little programming projects (8-bit game system emulators, some reverse-engineering of old DOS stuff).

The 16GB of RAM and the SSD I put in here are what're keeping it usable. That, and I'm not trying to use it for heavy gaming or any giant programming projects.

[MattPalmer1086]

I'm still using a ThinkPad T560 bought in 2016, with a i7 and 16Gb RAM, running Pop!_OS. It has discrete nvdidia graphics as well as integrated. Battery life is still OK for my needs (I got the larger battery option originally, and I still get about 6-7 hours).

So it works fine for everything I need to do. I sometimes look at new laptop models, but there is nothing much they have that would make any difference to me.

[oysterville]

Kinda surprised that no one has pointed out than an I7 is grossly overpowered for "spreadsheets and web apps". Seems better to get something that has long battery life with a CPU that uses less watts.

[palata]

Only half joking: "web apps" include ElectronJS stuff like Slack, that are not exactly lightweight.

[WheelsAtLarge]

OP here, my thing was that I would get an i7 in case I need to run a once-in-while resource-hogging app but you have a point there's no need to waste the watts if I don't have to. Also, not being able to run Win11 will mostly kill my future ability to run most of those types of apps. It's something to think about.

[woleium]

exactly, the total lifetime cost of operation for an old i7 may be much higher, depending on the cost of your electricity

[klooney]

Everything local on my 2015 laptop is fine, but the web, it's super laggy.

[cm2187]

If you are not doing gaming, there are still things that can make them obsolete. Driving big screens (like multiple 4k screens), hardware acceleration for video playback (hevc/av1 is on recent models only, you need hardware acceleration particularly for 4k playback). Also for laptops that actually travel, TPM is a bit of a must to me. It's bad enough if your laptop is lost or stolen, it's a lot worse if your private data is freely accessible to anyone who finds it. TPM wasn't standard on laptops.

Otherwise agree, my main work computer remains a i7-6700k, plenty of power for anything I don't run on a server, plus low idle usage. Never needed more than 64GB RAM. I have no use for PCIe 4 or 5 speed (any nvme speed over 2GB/s is kind of wasted on me).

[edit] and watch the battery. I had batteries starting to swell after 4-5y on many laptops. You might even want to replace it preventively and while you can still find the model.

[deafpolygon]

> I'm thinking of buying a 5-year-old Dell i7 laptop, which will mostly give me the same speed as the latest model.

Heck, no. Moore's law applies to the doubling of transistors. But efficiency gains are still being had every year.

An i7 mobile chip released 5 years ago would likely be the i7-8750H (high performance). An intel chip released recently would be the 'Raptor Lake' generation - let's say i7-13650HX (also high performance).

The i7-13650HX is at least 50-80% faster (single-core) and over 100% faster in multi-core.

While it is true that an i7 from 5 years ago is probably sufficient for basic tasks, RAM+SSD is perhaps more important than raw CPU performance than anything else these days. If you have at least 8 cores, you'll probably have a good time.

[aurizon]

There are 2 big leaps in laptop speed (SSD adoption and ARM CPU)as well as incremental battery improvements and then the ARM lower power/cycle = where we are now. For most tasks the time used is minimal compared to human reaction time. Only with computationally intense tasks, video edit, matrixes etc will humans see the difference in minutes/hours where task time can be charted. I find adding an SSD to an older thinkpad makes it good enough for Word etc. I tolerate the shorter battery life, and mitigate this with new third party battery packs with good reputations at a good price. Very low cost ali-express packs are avoided due to fire risk. So that 5 year old will serve quite well for you.

[ekianjo]

Yes you will be fine. Of course benchmarks wise recent laptops will be faster for sure but for regular work a 5 years old laptop is still a beast, especially if you use Linux.