I have this DELL Studio laptop released back in September, 2009, and it can still kick very well too if I decide to recruit it back to my "workforce". I retired it just 3~4 years ago because I got a T480. Heck, some of my code (old versions) for the same project that I'm currently working on is still on that laptop.
Before it's retirement days, it work 24/7 a day every day all year around, burned through two power supplies, sometimes 90 degrees C on the poor Intel Duo Core CPU etc. But it never dies.
So, me looking these Thinkpad posts, I never really feel quite impressed...
I absolutely love my cute little Thinkpad X230T, but finding a battery for that fits the T variant is a pain in the butt in my country, I tried like a 6-7 in the shop but they were all old and dead, very little market for them so they stayed unused and died out, I am limping along on my 15-minute battery for now.
I believe Lenovo could have designed the laptop a bit better to fit the more common battery found in the X220/X230, which I can find very easily, but Lenovo had a weird mindset at the time, a bit like Nokia, come to think of it.
Lenovo has had some missteps too, but I think their brand name is(was?) famous for a reason. In my country Lenovo/Dell/HP laptops from old American office discards are rather common, and I have had better luck with Lenovo than the other two, though it could just be my family's experience.
I am in the lookout for a reasonably priced T480, because soon windows 11 will become inevitable and I would like to be ready. Stupid TPM 2.0 requirements will cause a lot of good laptops to go bunk.
I have a 20yro TiBook. Both the RTC and the main battery are dead, and there's a tiny screen defect, but the machine is otherwise perfectly usable (if relatively slow). And by usable, I mean the desktop experience of Mac OS X 10.5 often feels more polished than that of some of the modern OS's...
The big bummer is that the modern web keeps raising a wall that's getting too tall for these machines to climb. TLS, JavaScript, and the firehose of new standards are making a lot of resources inaccessible.
(If you're in charge of maintaining a web server, please consider allowing unencrypted traffic on port 80 (rather than unconditionally redirecting to HTTPS), unless the Upgrade-Insecure-Requests[1] is present. Coupled with HSTS[2], it allows these "living museum pieces" to stay alive, while not compromising on security.)
[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Up...
[2]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/St...
Then, modern browsers will use https after the first load and older browsers will use https, but probably not fetch the favicon.
It doesn't really hurt to return content instead of a redirect to connections that come in via http, if the user is being MITMed, they could make a http request and the MITM could make a https request and the server wouldn't know, and can't do anything about.
http makes passive observation easier of course, but there's not a huge difference between having the content and having a redirect to content that an observer could also load.
With hardware that old and power-hungry, I'd expect a proxy hosted on a modern single-board computer in the local network to be essentially a rounding error on the electricity bill in comparison.
So we kneecap the security of the general public in favour of the convenience of a few hobbyists? No. Nothing is stopping you from using a newer browser such as one of the many forks of Firefox, some of which exist solely to fill that need.
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.
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.
Their monitors are good though!
You would think with less moving parts in those modern laptops they should fail less... not the case. Now days, simply pulling the USB-C charging cable too hard in the wrong way (say tripped over it) maybe enough to kill some boards. I learned it the hard way so just don't ever do it :)
I have an HP laptop that is only kicking the bucket because the plastic is starting to become brittle. The rest of the computer is fine (other than the battery). I know that for the type of HP I bought that is not normal for a computer from 2012. The MSI I bought to replace it is well on its way to rubbish after 2-3 years (less than that as I noticed these things a year ago).
Even back then, you could get almost a decade out of a computer in some sort of capacity. Give it to the youngest kid or mom, they only play clicking games.
To this day, I see people amazed that their $1000 laptop survived ~7 years. Meanwhile I have $550 laptops that are still being used for gaming(Minecraft/Steam) literally 9 years later.
I think the root cause is that people only spent $1000 dollars on a laptop when it had a glowing logo on it, and were impressed that a $1000 laptop would last more than 4 years. To any other nerd, they knew that the SSD was the real game changer.
Earlier this year I got a Dell Latitude for work. Both laptops are comparable. But the Thinkpad plastic seems cheap an "bendy" while the Dell just seems higher quality. I had never bought dell before but loved the finish, and so far it's been good. A glad extra is that i was able to choose Ubuntu and save the Windows tax (as I use Linux as my daily work desktop)
The newer, the more plasticky. Post the ??20 series the keyboards get progressively worse and worse.
> the poor Intel Duo Core CPU
Do you mean an Intel Core Duo? You both mangled the chip model number and didn't give the Dell model number at all, so I can't check.
If so, there's point #1. A Core Duo is a 32-bit chip. It maxes out at 3-and-a-bit GB of RAM. That's not much use in 2023 and it can't run common apps such as Google Chrome, which is 64-bit only.
Point #2 is not that these elderly Thinkpads still work, it's that they are still useful. I don't know what Dell you have but I own two Thinkpad T420 machines, as mentioned in this post. Both are still in use. Here is why:
They were high-end devices when new. That means no cheap crappy hardware like "Pentium Dual Core" or Celeron chips, but full-spec Core 2 Duos. They are 64-bit bit CPUs, so my i5 T420 has 8GB of RAM and dual-boots FreeBSD 13.2 and ChromeOS Flex. My i7 T420 has 16GB of RAM and USB3, and it runs the latest Win10, the latest Fedora, and the latest Ubuntu, in multiboot.
Point #3: they are expandable with cheap bits.
My i7 one has a discrete GPU. That helps: they're still quite quick. Mine can run 2 VMs side-by-side and remain useful, or 1 usefully-big VM and a few bloated Electron apps on the host and still remain responsive.
That's why people go on about them. They are still useful in a way a 12YO Core Duo can never be.
They also have great expansion, so my machines both have dual SSDs, as well as optical drives, as well as lots of ports. DisplayPort, which can drive HDMI (while HDMI can't drive DisplayPort) and SVGA. Mine have $5 USB3 ExpressCards in them, because why not? You can't have too many USB ports, or too fast.
Point #4: great keyboards, and 3 physical mouse buttons.
I am a writer. I demand a good keyboard. I am a heavy Linux user. I need 3 mouse buttons. I don't care much about trackpads and I don't want gestures, but I need that middle mouse button.
Now none of those might matter to you, but they do matter to some of us and that's why we use them and keep going on about them.
Just accept that other people like things you don't and move on.
fwiw, thinkpad/lenovo isn't the only team* can assemble a pc properly. its just that they tend to keep working even after you drop them and spill coffee on them and come with an escape key. <.<
*] it's really the sub-culture/team behind thinkpads that we appreciate, which ironically isn't normally distributed throughout all of Lenovo.
Indeed. I have a Toshiba laptop I use almost daily, I bought it used in 2010. So not sure exactly when it was built, probably 2008-09 or so.
MacBook Pro bought 5 years ago, failed three times. It refused to boot now.
I have used HP, Thinkbook, Dell, Mac laptops.
I trust Dell laptop most.
I usually paid 2/3rd of the cost of my upgraded model by parting out my old one. Thanks to Apple restricting parts (and their continued upgrades), the spare parts had good value. Sold everything (including the screws, people want OEM), except the battery.
Had to replace the battery, fan and thermal paste over the years - and it's surprisingly easy to work on, just a few screws on the bottom to take it apart and access to everything.
The discrete GPU ones (i.e MacBook pro) can eventually fail due to the video ram chips getting loose.
Replaced it with a Thinkpad T480.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_G3#PowerBook_G3_Fire...
No. I shall not.
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I have an old Dell workstation laptop and 15” MBP both manufactured around 2008, with 1920x1200 and 1440x900 panels respectively and they’re both much nicer to use than what you find in a lot of T-series Thinkpads, so it’s not even an age thing… Lenovo just used bargain basement panels.
It still looks good & comfortable to my eyes ; however all kinds of software just become unusable at that resolution.
Which is quite disapponting.
It's an awesome machine but it might as well be a desktop because it's so bulky and heavy that I never take it anywhere.
I travel with my M2 Mac but that Thinkpad sure is a sleeper.
It's thick, it's heavy, and it's comfortable. It doesn't tip over if the screen is opened too far. It even has an honest to god docking station, none of this USB-C dongle nonsense. It maxes out at a mind-blowing 90 Watts of power. Which is a blessing after having my wrists burned by my modern all metal laptop with the latest whizbang nvidia 48000000 GPU.
Yeah it's old and slow. It only has four cores and 16GB of RAM and a positively prehistoric GPU, but I love it dearly and I wouldn't trade it for anything.
For a time, I too fell into the trap of looking for "readily made laptop" with shiny specs, only to eventually notice that getting ripped off is an understatement. Like spot a decent CPU-specc'd machine but with with only 16 Gb RAM in 2023, want 32 Gb? Pay double!
So I took my brother's advice, which I also use for TVs and what else: buy the cheapest brand that offers the specs. All sellers are required to provide 2 years of warranty and at entry level price, worst case you can buy a brand new and better spec'd device if it breaks just after 2 years. But it usually lasts a lot more, by pure statistics: to ensure it lasts 2 years on average, it must me a lot more sturdy than that.
So what I do now? I'm buying "gaming laptops". For several things:
- They have decent specs. Relatively powerful CPU, good cooling so the solder won't melt on the motherboard if I compile a long program (happened to my nephew actually).
- I don't care about laptop's screen and weight. I'm a professional software developer which means 99.9% of the time the laptop sits on my desktop hooked to one or two 27 inch 4k monitors, along with a proper keyboard and mouse. And when it's not, it's just in my bag in transit to another desktop. When you look at LinkedIn pictures, people are being served the fairy tale of the "developer" who programs in bed or on a couch or in a coffee shop sipping a latte ... nothing but corporate bullshit.
- And first and foremost, they are UPGRADEABLE. I can take the laptop WITHOUT LOSING WARRANTY, open it and add more RAM and another SSD. Which means that the price of getting a 32 Gb of RAM machine is now about $30-50$ more and not another time the price I paid for the laptop!
Last laptop I bought was a Lenovo Legion 5, AMD Ryzen 5 6600H, 15.6" Full HD IPS 144 Hz, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 4GB GDDR6 for €500. It's not the main purpose but I don't mind if I can play CS2 at 200 FPS in addition to programming on it :P
step 1: disable rgb.
Honestly, I wish the "lunchbox" style laptops existed.
EDIT: I remember dolch lunchbox style laptops from a long time ago (search for "dolch pac")
EDIT2: wow, search for FlexPAC III
Of course, if these were a thing, somebody would bring it to starbucks.
Gotta have fantasies though. "When I'll have enough expendable money" I'll build myself some monster configuration. Which I'll probably use to run Geekbench (proving it's very powerful) and watch YouTube :P
This phenomenon is even more visible in smartphones. Desktop-level CPU performance and RAM / storage to do what? Browse Facebook and send pictures on WhatsApp. I could do that 10 years ago on a much more modest spec'd phone. Oh wait, I can still do that on the very same phone.
Unfortunately for me, recent AMD's offerings have greatly decreased the attractiveness of older laptops. But be warned, you gotta take the good with the bad and accept that a modern laptop might wake up at any time (even when stored in your bag).
It's so stupid, too. There is exactly one single case when I want my laptop to wake up with the lid closed: when I plug in the dock. Every single other case where it wakes up with the lid closed is a bug in my eyes.
* Excellent power usage. Pi uses ~0.7 W and the screen is listed at 3.6W, though I believe it's actually ~7W.
* Each part upgradable and replaceable in a whim. Can change your motherboard or RAM, or add an extra GPU or an entirely different machine, as all of them are up in the clouds!
* Extremely lightweight, 0.75 kg.
* Incredibly thin, 9 mm. Its stand is also its cover, requires no extra bag, except for the HDMI and USB cables. Powerbank? I carry it everywhere anyway. Keyboard? It has only a slightly larger surface area than an iPhone 15 when folded, can carry in my pocket, a cheap Chinese bluetooth one I had lying around (couldn't be bothered to troubleshoot the USB on the Pi.).
* Unmatched connectivity, I have unthrottled datacenter internet, and I can use my phone's LTE connection to connect to the server without skyrocketing my cellular bill, as the only thing transmitted is the screen. School dormitory Wi-Fi is not the best, it introduces extra latency.
OTOH, It lags while scrolling a web page. Bottleneck must be the CPU, because there is no lag when connecting via my iPhone 7. I used NoMachine with the same setup in the past and it had no such lag, could even play YouTube videos from what I remember. I also didn't overclock the Pi to the max and am not using a heatsink nor a fan, and didn't do any sort of performance tuning for the RDP at all. Because I can't be bothered, it works bearably for my school work, and gonna get my new iPhone next week anyway.
Now don't ask me how I managed to re-pair the keyboard with the Pi when it got unpaired and the Pi's local IP got reassigned randomly, from Alpine Linux running in iSH on my current iPhone 7...
I do like the sound of that setup, though. Portable monitor plus powerbank is neat, and I can't help wondering if that plus a wireguard network wouldn't be the right way to do things away from home. There are more efficient SBCs but if the screen is the big drain that's exactly the choice I'd make too.
I even built earlier zig compiler on zero1 because zig has no official 32bit arm release. I don't recall any significant wifi dropout with mosh.
Another work around is connect zero to a usb port of your computer/ipad/iphone and enable usb gadget on zero. Then you have a ethernet connect between zero and host that is more reliable than wifi?
"Each part upgradable and replaceable" -> super agree this point. You can clone microsd easily. So if microsd die, you swap the microsd. And if the board die, you just insert the microsd to another zero 2w and everything comes back the same as before. It's just like a "physical" vps.
I blotted up as much coffee as I could with some napkins and kept taking notes on the soaked keyboard. Worked like a charm. After drying it out, a few keys stopped working so I bought a replacement keyboard for ~$20 and swapping it out was rather fast (from memory).
I use an M1 MBP now, but I still have that thing in the basement. It still works, and I loved it. I don't miss carrying it around though (or the hilariously short battery life due to forcing discrete GPU mode so I could dock it for multiple monitors at home).
I had an X220 in university (same keyboard part as the T420).
I did wash my keyboard multiple times using dish soap and normal tap water and I only killed a single keyboard (when I didn't wait enough for water to dry out).
You could have most likely just washed the keyboard in warm soapy water, as long as you had enough patience to wait for it to be properly drier (2-3 days at least imho, depending on temperature in your home/area).
Friend of mine in college spilled.. I think beer?.. on this Thinkpad. He instinctively grabbed it (me, across the room, yelling to keep it stable) and turned it to the side. The fluid got into the fan intake and boom, dead it was.
Until I left it in my basement for a few weeks, i.e. in a slightly cold and humid environment.
Now, the keyboard is broken: I need to press multiple times on each key (it's better now that it has dried a bit, but not perfect).
The trackpad is also broken: only hard-clicking works.
Next step is to open and clean it up but I don't have much hope.
Also have a really old T60p. Might be close to 15 years old now. It has a bad fan.
What I did was put the machine into passive cooling and spin the fan up at boot! Kind of like a jump start.
Runs just fine.
If you download the Hardware Maintenance Manual (HMM) PDF for that model, IIRC, it'll tell you step-by-step how to replace the fan&heatsink assembly. Follow those instructions, but after you remove the assembly, just remove the thermal compound, pull the fan off, tape the new fan onto the old heatsink assembly, apply thermal compound, and resume following the HMM instructions for putting the 'new' assembly into the laptop.
Edit: The latest version of the HMM I could find: https://web.archive.org/web/20210429114642/https://download....
Lenovos build quality went down the drain in the last 10 years and their service is awful.
As for Lenovo, at that price, I can usually just buy a whole replacement machine either new with warranty or new old stock for around 2/3 usual retail price and get it next day. I paid 730 GBP for my T14 gen 3 for example. And I got to stick bigger RAM and SSD in it and the battery comes out in 30 seconds. Granted the battery sucks but meh, you can't win everything.
The previous 2 generations were good, but had their occasional issues. Like the drive cable on the unibody MBP. I got 7 years out of a 2012 Air. The jury is still out on the m1 era, but it's looking better. We'll know for sure in about 5 years.
They run Windows 10 perfectly fine once you put an SSD in, and they're small enough not to feel like 80's retro-futuristic Cyberpunk deck clunkers :-).
And yeah,
FWIW, the anniversary t25 has the good keyboard. It was expensive though not outrageous, so after talking it through with my wife, I bought it when it came out. It's still my primary driver, I use it 8++hrs a day for 6 years running(with no sign of stopping), so it mostly worked out. It's essentially a t470 so easy to maintain (external battery, SD card, and one screw for ram or ssd upgrade).
Otherwise, everything after the '30 series had the modern random ridiculous layout. We had a standard for decades, then apple decided each laptop will have unique layout and we all blindly followed - muscle memory is for wussies who don't stare at their keyboard to type! Rant rant grouch grouch :)
Also, I am not sure that the ram or storage won't become limiting within these 10 years, e.g. media is only getting larger (120GB+ for baldur's gate 3), LLMs,... . On a non-mac you can simply grab a 2TB ssd for like $100 and in 8 years can probably replace it with like 8 or 16TB for about the same price.
Again, perfectly nice, quiet, fast machine with a decent display, but soldered stuff sucks. If that were not the case, I would consider upgrading to it from my current 5 year old machine (also 14" 2k HDR ips screen, 16GB ram and above mentioned 2TB ssd upgrade). However, paying 2000€ just to match the ram and storage of my 5 year old laptop is definitely off-putting and you also don't get OS upgrades for the full 10 years, right?
And so long as you don't need a big GPU on-board, it's perfectly fine for most Linux-based developer workstation purposes.
My tl;dr advice for buying a computer on a budget is, get a T480s off of eBay. They are corporate cast-offs and there are so. many. of them. The R2v3 rating system has become popular. Get one rated C5 or better (cosmetic: minor usage marks only) and F4 or better (functionality: everything works). Spring for one with a backlit keyboard, and a power supply included if you want it turn key.
As of this writing this should cost around $250 and the machine should be fairly future-proof including official Win11 support. And excellent Linux compatibility - my fingerprint reader doesn't work, but literally everything else works perfectly.
In the intervening 12 years:
- I've replaced the disk at least 2x (going to SSD, and replacing a failed one with a current 1TB this year)
- Replaced the cooling fan (1x? 2x? I don't remember)
- Replaced the motherboard (that was fun: https://gergely.imreh.net/blog/2022/07/an-open-heart-motherb...)
- Tried to upgrade the wifi card for newer standards (that's a fail, as it seems to be locked down in the BIOS what cards the machine can use)
- Managed to set a max frequency to the CPU so now I don't have a thermal shutdown, it works rock solid and still reasonable performance.
It sounds like a lot of pain, but it's still my favourite device to work on ever since, ArchLinux humming away with XFCE. Not sure what my next machine will be, but this current one will give a run for its money...
That thing has been catching dust for about 2 years now since I upgraded to an X270, which is a faster machine but is nowhere near as nice.
It's only RARELY come up for me, but since I use my machine for work knowing I'm covered for 3 years is nice. This USED to be the period I'd keep a computer, too, but for about the last maybe 8 years (?) I find the upgrade-at-36-months thing isn't as much of a slam dunk as it used to be. I kept my last one like 4.5. My current one is 2-year-old M1 Macbook Pro, and it's still crazy fast to me. I can't imagine that's gonna change in a year.
This is also the closest I have come to considering abandoning Apple.
Physical issues aside, it runs Windows 11 passably for a backup PC -- Not bad!
The reason why I was open to buying a new laptop at all is because I had gotten used to watching youtube videos at 2x speed, and it literally couldn't handle it. The video would freeze and the audio would keep going and the only fix was to refresh the page multiple times per video.
I recently went on a week long trip, and needed a linux laptop, so I brought it with me, and was working on an OpenGL project. Practically every time I hit compile, the entire X session would freeze, to the point where the clock in the KDE taskbar wasn't even updating anymore, and the only fix was to hard reset the machine (I have never gotten magic sysreq working on that computer). I now have a framework 16 on preorder to be my linux laptop.
I also never got the webcam to be detected by linux (looking in lsusb, lspci, etc) even though it was enabled in the bios, the battery life wasn't enough to make it through a day of classes on one charge, and it ran too hot to be comfortable on my lap.
To its credit, the keyboard was nice, the trackpoint was fine, and when the trackpad died entirely, I was able to buy a new one (also on ebay) and swap them out without issue. With an SSD, it boots very quickly. That's about where my good things to say end.
"Just buy a used laptop from over a decade ago" is not good advice. Operating systems, the apps we use, the websites we use, are no longer optimized for a 10 year old dual core with 10 year old intel HD graphics. You're better off saving that money to buy something newer.
At the same time, keep in mind that the biggest tradeoff tends to be convenience. For example, a YouTube script plus local video player, such as MPV, works a treat on these older machines. Even if some video formats don't work great, you a) actually have an option for converting [0], and b) you are dropping all of the cycles spent on the non-video-watching parts of a YouTube video page.
Yes, that tends to make watching a 10 minute video kind of annoying when you spend a minute or two just on the overhead of downloading/opening/deleting it. Personally, I've sometimes found that to be a subtle push to read more text-based content instead of watching a bunch of videos. Similarly, it pushes me to favor longer-form videos that might involve more information and/or subtleties that the shorter videos might skip over (perhaps largely for SEO reasons).
All of that might or might not be a net-positive or even a possibility depending on needs, of course.
I've found a lot of personal motivation and fulfillment by looking for those sorts of alternate ways of doing things. Sometimes, slowing down (in more ways than just FLOPS) can lead you down rabbit holes that are not only fulfilling and interesting, but educational. [1]
Your point that it's bad advice to "just buy an [old] used laptop" definitely stands, but I'll just amend it with the caveat of "... depending on your needs/uses". To each their own.
[0]: There are also in-browser tricks/plugins for making the YouTube site itself lighter, but personally, I find throwing more instructions into the browser to be somewhat counterproductive. A bit like calculating how much extra fuel you need in order to carry the additional fuel, etc. The tradeoff is convenience, of course.
[1]: I'm also lucky to no longer have to deal with things like customers breathing down my neck with deadlines. So if I spend an extra 5 minutes doing something that used to take me 2 minutes, that's fine.
I've since switched back to the x220. Whilst I miss the extra memory and CPU grunt, it gets the job done. When this one finally dies I'm not sure what will replace it, but it certainly won't be another Lenovo.
My 2017 MacBook Pro on the other hand was comparatively coddled, yet in spite of Apple's quality engineering... one of the keys doesn't work, the coating of the screen has worn in places, the USB ports don't hold cables without them falling out, the touchbar occasionally flickers, it can overheat with worse performance than the X1.
Some of these are just luck (but the 2017 MBP was probably Apple's worst product in recent memory for me), but what can't be attributed to luck is the support. Okay, neither Apple nor Lenovo really supports either of those machines any more, but the Macbook will not receive the Sonoma update, and as a consequence at some point will no longer work with the latest XCode. The X1 on the other hand is still running the latest Windows 10 and probably will do for another 5 years.
The new 2019-2023 models are too recent to judge, but seem to be back on track resiliency wise.
Lenovo Z50-70 bought 2015. 8 GB RAM upgraded to 16 GB recently. It has got 4GB Nvidia graphics, does mild AI stuff as well. Hard Disc replaced with Samsung SSD few years back. Full HD screen. I even bought a 4K-27 inch monitor to connect to it last week. Thought it struggles to play beyond 1440p. Win10 works and is totally responsive. I hope it keeps going for 3 more years. :)
I use it as my main development PC, run Photoshop, edit 4K video on it. It was basically in a Dumpster when I found it.
We moved onto L390 Yogas afterwards, which takes up to 32GB of RAM - I've been very happy with mine.
Both have been pretty solid for me, though I think the X220 probably had a lot more rough treatment overall.
I've not tried that myself yet, though!
It has 2 internal batteries, and with older batteries, they can fail to switch from one to the other when they reach 0%. Models with a removable battery are a bit bulkier, but I think of greater value.
I also have a 2007 Sony VAIO in a cupboard running Ubuntu 20.04 just fine, as a backup. Its battery is only good as a UPS nowadays, but the computer works fine.
Its battery still runs for about 2h, its optical drive worked the last time I tried, and it runs 10.13 which means the current Firefox ESR still works.
I am planning to try OCLP on it and see if I can get Big Sur working. That's the last macOS that doesn't want a GPU that supports the Metal APIs, and it should run the latest Firefox and Chrome for a few years yet.
Luckily, there is Windows 10 LTSC bought from dubious serial code reseller. (OK, they possiblly pirate it, but.... Windows 10 LTSC is so good I recommend it to everyone. And MSFT won't sell it to me legally...)
edit: oh, this guy uses Ubuntu. I don't have nerves for Linux.
I also don't have the nerves for Linux. I want the computer to be a thing to solve problems not a thing to cause problems to solve :)
I think with an upgrade of 4Gb it could be still ok in 2023. Just avoid website full of JS and videos.
I have a Medium account. I still couldn't read it. It doesn't just need a Medium account, it needs a PAID Medium account.
Nice! Our two MacBook Air from 2013 died at about the same time, about six months ago. Despite putting in a faster SSD and changing the battery: eventually RIP is RIP (and thanks for the 10 years). Our recent MacBook Air M1 lasted... 13 months. Upon waking up one morning the screen was fuxx0red.
Meanwhile my 2017 LG Gram's screen is ultra flexible and sturdy and can deal with pretty much anything you throw at it, including its previous owner (a friend of mine) waking up one morning and stepping on it by mistake.
You can also throw it down concrete stairs and it'll keep working fine: (skip to 0:34... video not made by me but it's basically my experience with that Laptop)
They're not cheap laptops. They're not "retina display". But, darn, can they take a beating.
Not like the precious and ultra brittle porcelain that the latest Macbook are.
> I needed a machine that a) could run Logic Pro (the finest music-editing software available to humanity),
So saying
> If you want a modern, sexy, lightweight, high-powered laptop? Go get something pricey from Apple or Microsoft.
should rather be
> If you need to get modern work done, you will likely need to obtain a modern, high-powered laptop that the modern tools were designed for, and this will likely be something pricey, but not optimized for long service life from Apple or Microsoft.
I recently had to upgrade the OS on my moms Air and it was a pain in the butt because she ignored updates for so long that all the SSL authority certs expired and the internet didn’t work. Plus Apple’s upgrade software was no longer supported by the servers – server wanted 2fa, moms laptop was too old to know what that is.
After a few manual hops, she is now smoothly running the latest and greatest MacOS on a 9+ year old laptop. Everything works fine.
>a) could run Logic Pro (the finest music-editing software available to humanity), b) had a high-resolution screen for my lousy eyesight, and c) had a 1-terabyte hard drive.
And so then the article extols the virtues of buying a laptop that can't run Logic Pro, has a "fuzzily low-rez, which isn’t great for me, given my lousy eyesight" screen and was upgraded to only a 512GB SSD. What?
Great job. You sure nailed those requirements.
Yes, the 2016-2019 Intel Macbook Pros were terrible. I'm with you there. But you could have had a 2012-2015 Retina Macbook Pro, which would have run Logic Pro, all have remarkable high resolution screens, and can be outfitted with multi-TB drives with a little elbow grease. And were fairly indestructable!
... and then you won't want one of those if you have a 16GB Apple Silicon Mac.
Logic Pro is a great example. It requires MacOS 12 or greater. MacOS 12 will only run on 2015 or newer MacBooks.
I remember when the screen broke I got a perfect replacement for less than 40 dollars, and it was trivially easy to take the old one out and install the new one with a regular screwdriver and no other special tools. Similar experience when I broke the keyboard, easy to buy a new one and swap the whole thing out myself. I think I also replaced a battery when one started to drain a bit too quickly and the battery of course was something you just pop out and back in.
Now with my new MacBook any of those is easily hundreds of dollars plus either needing a trained repairman or seriously risking I break something using specialized tools to melt the glue or pop out the bezel or something like that.
I also have a Thinkpad X200 from 2008 and this one feel its age a bit so I use it to run my hobby operating system that only have a command line interface and no web browser.
I like that both of them are compatible with Libreboot+SeaBIOS and I'm sad that this isn't the case for new models anymore. This together with the ability to disassemble them so easily make them perfect for me.
I'm a bit worried about 10 years from now when I'll have to find a new computing platform.
I replaced the keyboard myself many times after the keys worn down (arrows or one on the left.) I upgraded the RAM to its max (32 GB) and replaced all its disks (HDD and DVDRW) with SSDs. It was born with 750 GB, it's 3 TB now. Furthermore its software got better along the years. It feels faster and the fan doesn't spin on much. It was born with Windows 7 which I replaced with Ubuntu 12.04 on the very first day. It's Debian 11 now.
Few years ago it has "fan error" on boot. So I dissemble whole laptop to get to fan (reserve whole evening) and finally put a tinny amount of vaseline on the fan shaft, put new paste on CPU/GPU and it still works. Silent and temperatures wont go above 60°C. Power comsumption on idle is however high to nowadays standard. About 42W.
I honestly cannot imagine more durable laptop that kids use today.
I went from a ThinkPad to a MacBook Pro in 2010. The screen was amazing. It was bright, it had viewing angles, it wasn't fuzzy... The trackpad, slimness, instant-on, speakers, and everything else was just icing on the cake.
Later on, I picked up a 2560x1440 ThinkPad X1 and the screen was great, Lenovo had finally leveled the playing field. But there was a pretty big gap in my life where I went without a ThinkPad.
All in all, you never know, YMMV .
However, it's not all sunshine. Especially during the T4xx era, many business Thinkpads had absolutely terrible displays by default (can usually be replaced with a proper one, but adds additional cost). The T440 had a horrible trackpad where they ditched the dedicated buttons (again, can usually be replaced it with a proper one). So do some research before buying. Also, before buying from a commercial refurbisher, check if there's a Thinkpad community forum or similar in your area of the world, you'll often find stuff much cheaper there.
Macbooks also went through a period of poor quality. I hope Thinkpad improves again in the future.
I've upgraded it to an SSD 4TB from the original 500GB 2.5" HDD, and I replaced the keyboard when one of the arrow-keys stopped working for some reason.
It was super expensive, but my goal with laptops is to buy something with sufficiently excellent build-quality that it’ll last for years.
That's my philosophy too, both with computers and with cars. In words that's stated pretty much as: "Buy twice as good and buy half as often". Laptops I keep as long as possible, cars usually about 10 years or more. A Mercedes is hardly run in at 10 years of age.
Point is, both of these machines are excellent, well-supported and Simply Work™ Great ..
- Display was replaced under warranty after 2 years due to ghosting
- Upgraded the 256GB SSD to a 1TB model after ~5 years
- Had the battery replaced by Apple store after ~7 years
- Mainboard was damaged by Apple store (USB no longer worked after battery replacement), after a lot of back-and-forth they replaced it under warranty
So I'll admit, not much of the laptop is still original, but the fact that I can still daily it for my development workflow is impressive. This thing just won't die.
For work I replaced the MBP with a Lenovo X1 Extreme, partially due to the praise of Lenovo here on HN. The total investment of the Lenovo was higher than the MBP, but I was planning on doing another 10 years with the Lenovo. Though the build quality is OK-ish, but I have never been satisfied with the it. Linux support (the main reason I bought Lenovo) is rather bad, the laptop gets very hot, fan noise and coil whine make it annoying to use. The battery completely died after just 2 years, and Lenovo could not supply a replacement (they actually recommended searching on Amazon for a aftermarket replacement!). SSD died after 3 years, luckily they are replaceable. One fan died after 4 years, had to source a used one from ebay since Lenovo no longer offers replacement fans. Had to replace the thermal compound on the heatsinks twice due to the laptop starting to overheat and shut down.
I know, I know, sample size of one and YMMV, but I don't think I'll buy another Lenovo laptop after this one.
I was surprised it still booted up and I was able to use the optical drive.
Could be a batch of lemons coincidentally hit the UK with both models, or it could be that Lenovo's quality is not up the mark lately.
The T490 and onward aren't good.
The problem though of old hardware is lack of CPU features needed by some operating systems and the presence of hardware vulnerabilities, and the obsolete ports they contain like FireWire, slow USB, and PCMCIA.
If I have to do just regular coding and no video calling, they are still the best.
The battery life on that thing was something to behold. Couldn't even last for regular "office work" during a 3hr flight.
The T40 and T60 lineup has a very special place in my heart, and I have a few of those laying around still operating as "headless" servers. The integrated crash cart is great!
Although for balance I did have a W520i that died. They're not all gold.
PS: guess what I'm typing this on :D
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Very unhelpful!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I would have liked to read the whole story
where is the non paywalled link?
It's been great. I bought it when two non-Apple laptops failed on me within weeks of each other. A Fujitsu-Siemens which was also great until then, and a Compaq.
I'd been avoiding Apple for years in line with the GNU project's stance, but after a big life event I decided to try it out. I transferred over my Linux installation from the previous laptops to a VM on the Mac, so I can four-finger-swipe between the two OSes as if they are running side by side.
The Mac's 16GB RAM is bit tight these days but that's mostly due to memory used by Firefox with my many tabs. The 512GB SSD has been annoying for a long time as I filled it up fairly quickly, and rarely find the time to clean things up. When I bought it, I thought I'd be able to upgrade the SSD capacity a few years later at third-party prices, much lower than Apple's prices. But it turned out to be a non-standard interface with expensive upgrades, and I didn't end up upgrading, just living with it. A few keys are getting a bit unreliable, but not enough to make is unusable.
The battery is still going surprisingly well after over 10 years of daily, intensive use, a lot of it on battery. It's down to 55% of design capacity. I think that's excellent compared with what I saw with the non-Apple laptops before, where I bought a number of third party batteries to carry around with me and swap, and they deteriorated faster. However the battery flakes out occasionally when the system is under load now.
I'm getting the battery replaced by Apple in a few weeks, at their standard battery repair fee (which is reasonable), and as a handy side effect of how they do this the keyboard issues should be fixed.
I'm in the market for a new laptop. But not because the current beauty doesn't work! It's just getting strained with not enough RAM and SSD for my needs now, and Homebrew no longer supported. (Especially precompiled binaries; some HB recipes fail to build, and some require several tens of GB free space to build and take over an hour per package, like I remember from my Gentoo days...). Whoever mentioned OpenCore Legacy Patcher, thanks for the reminder, that may help a lot!
I held out for the release of the Apple M3 over the last few years. Previously waiting for the M2 after I decided to take the leap from x86 to ARM, but that dragged out, and then I decided it was expensive and to wait for the M3 to see what 3nm would get us.
Now I'm excited to be planning to buy an M3 Max. I won't skimp on RAM or SSD this time, having learned it really slowed me a lot over the last few years, swapping (without realising for a few years this was why browsing was very janky), and often having to find things to delete to free up some space. Besides, the things I work on now use terabytes of storage, and for my tasks I think I'll find 128GB RAM useful too.
I plan to keep using my trusty 10 year old 2013 MBP as my main local x88, for x86 development and testing, running x86 Linux and Windows VMs, and as a baseline for GPU graphics dev where I want to have something near the slow end to target to ensure the software runs well for people who don't have the latest devices.
I bought the R60 cheap at a time where i was unemployed and - to put it mildly - dirt poor. My previous desktop system (a quiet powerful gaming rig) was fried by an overcurrent due to lightning strike and this left me without a usable computer. Which is bad if you are looking for work and need to write applications and CVs.
At that time it had an spinning 40 GB HDD, a cracked case, loose and wobbly display hinges, a battery life of about 15 minutes and an not very powerful Core Duo CPU. It was slow, looked like trash but it helped me getting back on track.
After landing a new job i started to fix the R60 and make it a bit more usable. The first thing i did was to order a new battery. Thankfully, the Thinkpad has an easy changeable battery: Just turn it over, push the quick release and put in the new battery (a feature that is utterly missing on todays laptops).
The next thing that i swapped out was the hard disk: At the time i had landed a new job but my financial situation was still very edgy, so i rummaged through local private ads until i found a very cheap (about 10 Euros) 120 GB HDD. This gave me a bit more "breathing room" and got me to a really usable - albeit slow - system i could run OpenBSD on. This was the setup i worked with for the next couple of years. At some point i had again the financial means to easily replace the system with something more up to date... but for what? I could code on this system and do everything i needed it for.
A couple of years later (at this time the Thinkpad had already got an SSD and an major optical overhaul), on one morning the display was broken. On one half it displayed everything ok, on the other half it was more or less pixel mush.
Thankfully, even that was no problem. I bought an replacement display of ebay for about 30 Euros (which came from an better model and had a better resolution), spend a few hours looking at a couple of repair videos on YouTube and read a bit i could easily change the display.
Now, a major problem was the Core Duo CPU (being 32 Bit), a couple of months ago i looked into the matter if i could future proof the R60 a bit more... and yes, no problem! I found out that i could easily switch out the CPU for an Core 2 Duo, so i again looked into ebay and bought a brand new (ok, NOS) CPU for about 10 Euros, spend an lazy afternoon taking the R60 apart (and as i had it open already cleaningit) and switched out the CPU. The Core 2 Duo may be still an outdated design, but it was a major power boost and made especially surfing the modern web (a thing i try to avoid but is sometimes nescessary) much more palatable.
So... with the story of the Thinkpad written down, will i at some time replace it? Yeah, very likely, but this is a day in the far future and even then i will perhaps go for something like the MNT Reform (in my mind a spiritual successor of the Thinkpads of the olden days). But as i said: Not now or in the foreseeable future
Also, fuck Medium. "Log in to continue reading..." paywall.
Okay, log in.
"To continue reading, subscribe to $AUTHOR..."
Useless waste of my time.
There's no doubt about it.
> To be fair, I’m not using this machine as my main, daily laptop. If I did, it’s more likely something might have busted a while ago.
Exactly!
The thing that so many people misunderstand is the choice of machine for your work essentially represents a B2B business between you and the company selling these devices.
When someone who truly needs a MacBook, that means they're usually making so much that the price of the machine they're spending on is little in comparison to the profit they're making from it.
On the other hand yes, I do believe companies like Apple are really taking this too far.
Side note: Don't get me wrong here, I also have an old Dell Precision, but not as my main, daily machine. It's just ironic how some people really try so hard to integrate these machines for their work environment.
