How and Why I Stopped Buying New Laptops (2020)(solar.lowtechmagazine.com) |
How and Why I Stopped Buying New Laptops (2020)(solar.lowtechmagazine.com) |
There is a very dire need to have those with hardware hacking skills assist the larger freedom software community in "liberating" newer machines.
Someone recently got Libreboot running on a ThinkPad T480
https://ezntek.com/posts/librebooting-the-thinkpad-t480-20241207t0933/Why the SD Card thing when you can just use the built-in OS cloud syncing capabilities in Windows or MacOS?
Also you can take my M3 MacBook Air 15" from my cold dead hands. That laptop is ultra-lite, perfectly quiet, and ultra-fast. Wouldn't trade it for a 10 year old laptop.
I'd be willing to bet your use cases and goals don't align with the author's. Which is fine, but remember the article is about why they did not why you must also be the same.
The only issue is cloud costs which are high for 2tbs in the cloud at this point.
A single key for 15€?! I remember ordering one from an online shop specialized in replacement laptop keys at some point in the 2010s and it was like 2€ total. Browsing through similar shops now, it seems like the minimum is 5€ per key nowadays, but still a far cry from 15€.
>After spending more than 100 euros on plastic keys, which would soon break again, I calculated that my keyboard had 90 keys and that replacing them all just once would cost me 1,350 euros.
Someone who breaks keys this often could just buy the whole keyboard assembly FRU for ~30-50€ and take spare keys out of that, assuming it's not always the same ones that break.
So long as I know where the N and M keys are, that's all that matters :)
Unlike my daughter's friend's Dell, where basically everything had to come out of the laptop to get at the keyboard (battery, speakers, motherboard, etc), AND it was plastic-riveted down. I must have spent 2-4 hours replacing it, because I had to do it twice (for reasons I don't remember).
Some Thinkpads, more specifically x2xx series (ie x250 - x290) require removing all internals to get to the keyboard to replace it (batteries, storage, wifi, motherboard, speakers, CMOS battery, and a few others). Dell Latitude E5470 on the other hand allows replacing its keyboard by pulling out a small plastic panel and removing one screw.
I have had a similarly positive experience with older laptops, in particular ThinkPads (x230) and Latitudes (e7460). The older machines often also have much better keyboards than more recent laptops, IMHO.
As the OP writes, swapping out HDD for SSD (1 usually prefer at least 1 TB) and maxing out RAM are affordable things that you won't regret.
That said a used laptop is perfect for web browsing, office stuff, casual development and light gaming. When it dies you have no regrets. It is almost 20 years I have not bought a new laptop. Of course my kids have used laptops too. At some point they had Fujitsu Siemens with a Wacom stylus/digitizer. I do not think they still make those. They were rock solid and quite fun to use.
I only buy new laptops for my wife. She is very careful with her stuff, they last ages. I bought her a new one recently only to offer her a better screen.
All bought used, never spent more than maybe $250 and $200 for max RAM and nice SSD.
Unfortunately, with the advent of soldered ram and storage, this isn't feasible any more for more taxing uses. Most of the used devices will have the default ram and storage and you'll have to buy new so you can order the thing with enough resources.
I care more about all of those features than the replaceable parts.
Gaming like laptops are a no no for me, sorry. And I doubt there's anything just slightly larger than a macbook pro but with upgradeable components.
''The accessibility of this website depends on the weather in Barcelona, Spain''
At least at this time, Windows 11 is not that much heavier/resource-needy than Windows 10. There's a small but non-negligible number of people running Win11 on things like Thinkpad x250 or T450 (Inter 5th gen CPU), for example.
The regular Joe Schmoe prob won't be able to do that, but he's not likely to use 2015 laptop in 2024 to begin with...
Alternatively, can the community come up with some interesting uses for all the machines?
Google has targeted this model with ChromeOS Flex.
Everytime Microsoft does something that apparently pisses off people, we get tons of suggestions that now everyone is finally going to migrate in droves into GNU/Linux, and then nothing happens.
Meanwhile the only Linux based devices that are actually successful among normies, are those that hide the fact there is the Linux kernel running underneath, expose no CLI, and have everything done in basic graphical workflows without any FOSS religion.
Chromebooks, Android, DVD and BluRay players, TV setup boxes, SmartTVs,....
This is true for everything, not just laptops.
Any purchasing that occurrs on a fashion cycle is largly a rip off...
For instance, I would pay a lot to get my BlackBerry back, screw all that app bloarware nonsense. Fast email, phone, a good keyboard and long battery life, that is a winning combination, from a user's perspective. (And I actually prefer devices with no camera or microphone in it, for security reasons.)
Also, given that this is the author's work laptop, what's the economic justification for not investing in the primary tool you use for work?
The author explains that there are motivations not related to money (we live on a finite earth, the manufacturing of a laptop encompass a considerable amount of energy and raw materials for mining, etc).
Shouldn't the burden of proof be on the obverse - Why should one buy a new laptop when an old one will do? Your framing sounds to me like a post-hoc justification for consumerism. Why not "invest" in getting the absolute best in the primary means of transportation, or couch, TV or random product category?
1. Lack of USB-C ports means I wouldn't be able to safely use any USB-C only peripherals (since the USB spec explicitly bans adapters in that direction)
2. Lack of security updates for firmware, microcode, etc.
3. Hard to find replacement batteries from reputable sources
4. The CPU and memory requirements of software are steadily increasing
2+3. depends on the specific devices.
4. 10-15 years ago maybe that was still true. but the power and speed of devices no longer increases at the same rate. it has slowed down to the point that a 6 year old laptop performs just as well for my daily tasks as a 2 year old one and i run the same OS on both. the difference is only noticeable for modern games and some CPU/GPU intensive tasks. i also remember the same experience with even older laptops (i don't have one here right now, so i can't compare directly). what made the older laptops slower/less powerful was less RAM.
4. Not sure if I can agree. Most software I use just got more efficient over the years. Only exception being the IDE or code editor. #justlinuxthings
What I do instead is buy a moderately powerful new one and just use it until it dies -- I don't upgrade before the laptop is truly dead.
In other words it is more than possible to use laptops beyond those 8 years as long as you buy the right ones. Performance is fine as long as you run the right software, i.e. not software made by a hardware vendor who depends on a regular replacement cycle.
Bravo for you, but surely you realize that almost nobody does this? Hardly relevant to an article about getting some more useful life out of an old laptop.
The Old T430 I got from a relative who went to a MAC is also quite adequate for daily use. I have NetBSD on it and just finished upgrading to 10.1, so this was typed on that T430.
So unless you are a heavy duty gamer or work on complex 3d graphics professionally, any recently used laptop will work just as well.
Aaaaaanything but a nice efficient PC!
How’s the battery life? Going days without thinking about where my charger is can be really nice.
What resolution does the screen run?
So, just shy of 2 hours the level was at 5%, I usually run at Frequency 2200, the range is 1200 -- 2601. The lower the frequency, the longer the battery life. You can set on NetBSD freq. using:
sudo /sbin/sysctl -w machdep.cpu.frequency.target=2200
I set it via an entry in root's cron on reboot.
For resolution via the laptop screen is 1366x768, that is the highest on the Laptop monitor. As you can see it is a bit odd for some reason. On my external monitor I can go to 1920x1080 at about 60Hz. I think there were various models of the T430 and some had higher resolutions.
Note: The battery is original and is the larger Thinkpad battery. You can find new batteries on the WEB. I always use the T430 plugged in.
You had a laptop that didn’t meet your needs?
It is one of those big beasts with a number pad and decent GPU. I use it as a gaming PC. I was just last night playing Dead Island Riptide with default settings. It is probably the best computer purchase I have ever made.
My advice: keep an eye out for Dell refurb deals on slickdeals.com. They occasionally have half-off deals, which is what I scored.
But for rando ebay/web: is there some part of the supply chain where thousands or tens of thousands of machines hit a single point where it's scalable for, say, a software rootkit to efficiently be put on them?
E.g., I know universities typically buy a shit-ton of the same model. Where do they eventually unload them if they don't end up selling through their official used channel? Same for police/govt/etc.
I don't think the economics of, say, rooting a bunch of machines in the hopes of hacking a big Bitcoin wallet need to even make sense. There just needs to be an easy point of access to many machines, so that a confidence man can sell some poor schmuck on the idea that if they buy a rootkit and install it on all of them they'll make millions in Bitcoins (or whatever).
In 2023 I managed to get a barely used 2017 17" HP for $80 that runs Windows 11 fantastically and even happily runs some smaller LLMs.
A crappy laptop can be totally transformed by swapping out their spinning HDD for a super cheap SSD and adding another 8GB of cheap RAM.
Should I rephrase: computers are getting ridiculously powerful, but JavaScript cancels out everything? Or just low-quality software in general.
PS: I'm using 2014 laptop and only wish WWW wasn't such heavy garbage.
The best explanation I've had for this is that the rubber components degrade over time. But it makes me leery of buying older hardware because of that.
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25486191, 279 comments
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32674830, 111 comments
It's had no failures at all in its life apart from the battery. My two year old work laptop went in the trash after its USB ports all died.
This thing has been around the planet twice and it just keeps going.
Say you buy the laptop with a crude 3d printed case and when new money comes in you buy the titanium case. Spending the weekend swapping the parts over is a bonus.
It should be modular but extra crappy. 2 GB memory is a lot.
Ideally go full ship of theseus.
The specs are improving, but the experience is not improving in lockstep with it. Browsing & similar normal usage cases just doesn't need it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36646791
374 points, 530 comments
>I am still on my MacBook Pro 2015 because of the Keyboard and Trackpad. So in about 2 years time this will be 10 years of usage. I dont intend to replace it any time soon. For browsing it is fast enough. And if you look at the Louis Rossman Channels it seems newer MBP just aren't built the same. It may be worth looking at it again I 2025. How little ( or big ) the past 10 years of Laptop has changed.
May be time to look for a new MacBook especially when all of them now has 16GB memory by default.
I couldn't understand how a 2022 device would run so much worse than 2017 device and assumed it was faulty. Returned, given a replacement, same issue. It is quite literally not built to hand the heat from the Intel chip doing very minimal stuff. I refuse to use a laptop that sounds like a jet engine when Microsoft is doing basic background stuff.
Returned and ended up buying a used 15 inch T-type Thinkpad with an AMD chip recommended by Reddit for $500 NZD. Runs great, cool, and quiet. It's much bigger and bulkier that the Dell but I don't mind.
Note: Not a Thinkpad fanboy, work has given me an X1 Carbon that I dislike for the same reasons I didn't like the new XPS 13 - it's useable, but it's still much hotter and louder than I would like.
And then testing newer Linux distros is also not working with the nVidia K2000M discrete graphics system.
Am thinking it may be time to give-up, harvest the RAM, the SSD's and the screen and recycle the rest of this one...
So how to get Windows 11 running seems entirely off topic.
I also installed Linux on them too and the battery life was not great either. I could be an outlier but I've not had good experience with Thinkpads even though I liked them. My older Macbook actually lasted the longest.
buying used hardware is also hit or miss. i got another used laptop for $250 which is decent, but it has some strange hardware issues that i can't pinpoint. unfortunately the choices for used hardware are limited and i could not find any comparable devices in the same price range. (any alternatives would have cost more than twice as much)
so generally, when i can afford it, i do the same as you. get something new with a good price/performance ratio and use that as long as i can.
> just shy of 2 hours the level was at 5%
Ouch. That is unworkable for me, and would be very hard to deal with.
> For resolution via the laptop screen is 1366x768
Oh wow, that is a very low resolution, and wouldn't be good enough for editing photos and video.
> I always use the T430 plugged in.
I'm always shocked to see this. What is the point of a laptop you just use plugged in? Lower quality (and res) screen, bad thermals, lack of cheap expansion, and you're just tied to a desk anyway. It seems a basic desktop would run rings around it.
I was traveling recently and got a lot done on an 8-year old tablet. I was very productive, I suspect the combination of being offline (no 5G modem), no random notifications, just me, the terminal and a Bluetooth keyboard. The compact size & weight, and not having to worry about losing or having an expensive iLaptop stolen made for a worthwhile trade-off. Any productivity gains would have been marginal at best, and not worth the cost.
Now though, we’re talking mainly laptop keyboards. My desk keyboard is a low profile keyboard with pretty thin keys (Keytron K2). If you hit them at the right angle, there’s not much plastic there to absorb the shock.
that's about the only use case I can think of for this approach, as well as where to find the few hundred people doing it.
that said, wearing walmart pants and hoodies, a face mask, and using a $200 laptop you got off of gumtree or kijiji or craigslist or FB marketplace at coffeeshop probably works just as well. bragging and laziness gets you busted, not a lack of local LLMs to check lexicon.
- a client (company I do contract work for) sees a different source address that is different than the source address I use for casual browsing+posting.
- two SaaS used for purposes of servicing agreement with "client" don't see the same source IP address as used for other clients.
- a bank I use, and PayPal, always sees the same source IP address dedicated to my VPN account only and for this purpose.
- the tunnel (VPN) provider I use for casual browsing+posting does not see the destination IP address of my client's VPN.
- whatever first-hop ISP I use sees one single Wireguard tunnel and nothing else ever.
- the first-hop Wireguard tunnel is paid for with a pre-paid debit card, but any outbound TOR traffic is encapsulated by a secondary tunnel paid for with crypto.
- the TOR circuit used for browsing purpose A is not also shared by browsing purpose B.
- any arbitrary outbound tunnel is specific to the container or VM I intended to use but doesn't carry, nor has any risk of carrying, any of my other traffic.
There is no crime within Common Law for any of the above. Nor is there any violation of any statute for which any of the above is, per doctrine of minimum contact (such as with a pre-paid debit card), within jurisdiction of statute.
Perhaps some users do operate with some concern of being "busted", but most users that do outbound network path management do not operate with this concern.
Its like saying, not good enough for video editing 8k.
Qubes makes outbound network path management easy enough but it's not too hard to do on Linux and FreeBSD, so it can also be done on machines with modest compute resources (which may or may not be subject to the machine being an older machine) as well.
but if i have a tendency to buy older devices, then i likely also have a tendency to avoid getting such modern drives. they will be coming though, thanks to USB4, and there will be a day where i can't avoid needing a laptop with at least two USB-C ports (because one of them will be used for charging), or get a USB4 rated USB-C only hub. and hopefully by then even older laptops will already have at least one USB-C port too (even if it doesn't support USB4 yet).
i'd accept soldered RAM if it is at least 16GB, (though 32GB would be better) because i'd rarely need more than that. but a soldered SSD never. that holds my precious data, and even if i have a full backup, i do want to be able to take out the SSD when the laptop dies, or replace a broken or worn out SSD (as i had once). the risk of not being able to recover data from a soldered SSD is just not worth the few grams saved in weight.
My important documents are synced with cloud storage, my photos and videos are synced with iCloud, Google Photos and OneDrive.
My code is pushed to a remote git repository.
I can add more external storage. I would be more concerned about RAM.
Same with my phone.
And that 14 hours turns into 8 going back and forth between conference rooms with it powering a USB C portable monitor which is getting power and video from one USB C cord.
The Framework laptop has way too many compromises
https://www.theverge.com/24185827/framework-laptop-16-six-mo...
They’re noticeably bigger and run warmer with less battery life than a Macbook Air.
Assuming Framework remains solvent and doesn't change the physical layout of their motherboards, I don't anticipate ever needing to buy another laptop.
I don't think we can blame Framework for that on their own, Microsoft must surely have a contribution to this.
But still, after getting used to apple's offerings I don't think I'd like a laptop where you need to check if it actually went to sleep instead of just closing the lid and moving along.
> They’re noticeably bigger and run warmer with less battery life than a Macbook Air.
Bigger is fine to a point. Less battery life, same. But the heat and noise when you have alternatives that don't have the problem...
Ofc, it's easy to run prices through a converter so I wonder where they ship from and where the warranty is located...
https://knowledgebase.frame.work/what-countries-and-regions-...
In terms of shipping, they have multiple warehouses around the world.
That's the miracle with apple's OS. And I say OS because I'm sure it filters out accidental input in software. The trackpad is made by whoever makes them for the x86 laptops too, but I really can't remember when it registered a touch when I didn't want it.
(I'm sure it happens occasionally, but not enough to be worth keeping track of.)
They fixed the keyboard and the trackpad has been good even in the emoji keyboard models.
Do get one with 32 Gb ram if you can. You never know what you'll want to use it for next year.
[*] Of course, if you compile/run renders etc you may get to hear the fan and it won't last 20 hours.
I actually have one with my previous company and they are still not as good. New Scissors has a key travel distance of 1mm instead of 1.5mm, and trackpad is too large that causes false positive compare to zero on my MacBook 2015. Was rather hoping Apple to walk back these two thing by the time I get a new MacBook for myself. But looks like not.
I made the mistake of getting an emoji keyboard model in like 2019 and this new M3 Pro felt like I could breathe again :)
You can play some pretty taxing x86 3d games on my M3 pro laptops, in spite of the two layers of emulation. Those Lunar Lake laptops would need a GPU for that wouldn't they?
Have they in the Wintel world figured out why Apple trackpads can actually act like a mouse replacement yet?
You do have to be pretty determined to squeeze 10 years out of this sort of laptop. macOS gave up on my laptop a while ago (it runs macOS Monterey), and the app store moans at me occasionally about not being able to upgrade this or that because I don't have a recent enough macOS. It seems Apple gave up on selling replacement batteries for it at some point last year, too.
Portability in terms of weight it might be close. But according to the reviews I’ve seen they run hot and loud.
Because of timing and layovers, I spent an entire day going from ATL-LAX-SJC. Not having to worry about battery life and actually being able to use it on my lap without having to worry about infertility from the heat was a godsend.
> The fact that the battery lasted over 14 hours on a single charge in our battery life tests again shows just how good the 13-inch MacBook Air is for people who want a compact laptop they can use almost anywhere.
I’m not a laptop user myself and don’t consider even Apple trackpads (I actually own one of their desktop trackpads) anywhere close to a viable mouse replacement, so no further comment on that.
[0] e.g. https://www.extremetech.com/computing/first-intel-lunar-lake...
On my apple laptops i've succesfully played stuff like Minecraft or Path of Exile without a physical mouse. And never missed a mouse while doing software development.
> reasonably powerful integrated GPUs.
Path of Exile is anything but reasonable to the GPU. And on an older M2 mac mini I was lucky to get 20-25 fps. However, the M3 pro on my laptop can mostly run it at 60, to my complete astonishment. Especially considering it's a windows application that is ran by x86 wine that is translated to arm by rosetta 2...
And when you are traveling you don’t keep your important documents backed up? What happens if your SSD goes bad?
And if a restore would be inconvenient when you are traveling, getting a new laptop and hypothetically connecting your SAD wouldn’t be?
with a replaceable SSD i can (and in fact just did a few weeks ago) take the SSD from the old laptop and put it into the new one. took me 5 minutes.
restoring all that data from the cloud would have cost me a few hundred dollars in mobile data fees. or several weeks of visiting a restaurant which has free data, but would also have racked up a restaurant bill not to mention the time that would have been taken away from working.
so sure, there are ways to get around the limitations of a soldered SSD, but so far i have not seen any that are worth the benefit of a few grams saved in the weight of my laptop. because that is what we are arguing about here.
backups are good, and everyone should have one, and they are certainly covering several failure modes regardless of whether the SSD is soldered or not. but an unsoldered SSD also covers a few failure modes that a backup doesn't cover. at the cost of a few grams of extra weight. my goal is to maximize the recovery options. so i have backups and a replaceable SSD.
the ultimate solution would be a laptop that supports two SSDs so i can run a raid mirror like my desktop. one of those SSDs could even be soldered in that case.
But soldered versus non-soldered is a secondary issue to you not having up to date backups somewhere that are easily accessible.
But even then there are backup solutions for Linux that backup to S3 and S3 Glacier is cheap. I have 3TB and my AWS bill is $4 a month.
And “RAID is not backup”