A lot of 7 year old computers are still totally usable, PCs aren't advancing like they used to. My 2012 retina Macbook Pro is a little bit slow in some cases, but it's still a great machine for normal tasks.
Yeah, I actually bought a 2011 MBP like 2 years ago for 200 bucks. Use it as my main driver for my home music studio. Big projects load a bit slow but aside from that everything works fine.
Only thing I don't like is that there isn't really a cheap and decent way to have 2 external monitors on it AFAIK. Which is why I built a low budget Ryzen 2200g build which is perfect for audio and coding and now share my work between the two.
There is no reason you shouldn't be able to use this hardware 10~15 years from now. People use old Apple IIs and C64s from decades ago. The trouble is the locked bootloaders, secure boot and all the binary blob drivers.
I don't know about Apple II's but some C64's died due to bad power supplies. You can still find working ones, but that doesn't mean you can count on any particular device to last. They weren't designed for that any more than today's computers.
Chromebooks are designed to preserve data. The hardware is presumed vulnerable to failure.
Yes, exactly. There are vulnerabilities to be aware of (primarily, losing control of your account, which would be catastrophic), but at least replacing the hardware is just a shopping trip.
This is much better than getting an elderly relative off Windows XP.
I don't see a similar situation happening where I'd have to do that. I can buy a new Chromebook easily, so no need to worry about hardware obsolescence, and ChromeOS auto-updates.
People still run Commodore 64s. There are demo scenes, old hardware enthusiasts that squeeze crazy performance out of old hardware, even a guy who use a Raspberry Pi to emulate an NES cartridge and get his unmodified NES to play SNES games:
Old hardware can often be repaired. If you told a C64 user back in the day his machine would break in two years, he or she wouldn't shell out the $$ on it, but today people buy $400~$800 cellphones that turn into garbage.
Unsurprisingly, there's even a few hacks out there for upgrading old C64s with newer/better components, too, if you want to get another couple decades out of it. There's even new manufacture C64-compatible enthusiast boards being produced [1], although I believe you may have to supply your own SID chip. The latter doesn't count much for this topic, but it illustrates there's some interest. Further, the parts that are likely to break over time are fairly trivial for someone with soldering skills to replace. I know of at least a couple people who preemptively replaced capacitors on old C64s they bought and refurbished.
> If you told a C64 user back in the day his machine would break in two years, he or she wouldn't shell out the $$ on it, but today people buy $400~$800 cellphones that turn into garbage.
I wouldn't put money on that. A C64's starting price was $600 in 1982 dollars. For $154 in 1982, quite a few people might have been willing.
When was the last time a Commodore 64 received a vendor-issued software upgrade? Because that's what we're talking about. Not how long will the hardware last, but how long will the manufacturer release software updates.
"If you told a C64 user back in the day his machine would break in two years..."
That was pretty much expected. Hardware upgrades were just as fast and furious as they are now, if not moreso. Backwards compatibility with years-old systems at the consumer level was a byproduct, not a plan.
I'm just saying support for a few years would typically suggest 2-4 years. 6.5 years is considerably longer than "a few years" would imply. Particularly in the context of the other common computing platform - phones.
Is 6.5 a magic perfect number? No, I'd like to see more like 10 years honestly (which matches what Microsoft supports with Windows). But let's at least use the actual numbers and not easily confused vague terms like "few"
It is still planned obselescence, even at 6.5 years.
I still use a lenovo t420 that is almost 8 years old. I bought it with the fastest processor available back then, and it is still plenty useful as a Debian desktop.
That's a perfectly fine Linux workstation for most non-GPU purposes. I use a slightly older model ThinkPad, in which I upgrade the CPU, RAM, and keyboard. (It does mean running my own GPU server, over the network, for Tensorflow, etc., which is an inconvenience compared to onboard. But "cloud" is en vogue anyway.)
First, Windows 8(.1) is supported until 2023. Second, Windows 8 drivers will usually work smoothly under Windows 10, and I see plenty Windows 8 drivers for the T420 in Driver Matrix. There's even a BIOS update from 2018-06-25.
My T430 (one generation later) received a BIOS update in February and I expect more to come.
If using outdated drivers on unsupported hardware is your idea of full vendor support then enjoy. Your mention of a newer model doesn’t change anything about the op.
My newest computer (the XPS I'm typing this on) is 7 years old. My desktop computer is about 11 years old (upgraded to quad core Phenom, 16GB) and is more than enough for anything I'll need for many years to come (maybe provided an upgrade of the GPU).
6.5 years is not what would usually be described as "a few years."