That's incorrect, and at this point, it seems like you either don't know Medium or are engaging in gaslighting here. The Medium paywall is not always a choice, as Medium has placed many stories behind it without the creators' consent and doesn't pay everyone either. Furthermore, you guys display those paywall ads on all articles now. I'm not referring to the OP's case but speaking generally. Although it does seem that Clive, being a blogger, is apparently under a secret contract with Medium to write premium content for the website.
The paywall is the author's choice and anyone is free to reject creating a Medium account, no damage done on either side. OP's second objection on the other hand looks less "rejectable" than a paywall because the damage is done before you have the chance to reject it:
> By using Medium, you agree to our Privacy Policy, including cookie policy.
Medium's implicit assumption that by clicking on their link the user accepted the policies is illegal under GDPR. It doesn't give the chance to reject before being tracked.
You misunderstood me, it wasn't OP's implication, it's Medium's. Medium implies that by clicking on their link I agreed with their ToS/cookies (so tracking). This is not just a wrong implication, it's an illegal one.
The person I was replying to above only referred to the paywall issue when I think the main basis for the initial plea to avoid Medium was the second point, Medium's objectionable or illegal practices (not just "terrible") against its users. It's sensible to plea not using it or at least not promoting it here.
This is another Thinkpad festival post? Let me just cold you down a bit by telling you that a 12-year-old laptop still kicking isn't that big of a deal.
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...
Excuse me sir, you are interrupting our Thinkpad circletrek, begone with your Dell heresy.
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 wonder if Microsoft will eventually hard-code the requirement into their OS - they've stated the registry fix will work as a workaround, but "you might not get the latest updates".
> a 12-year-old laptop still kicking isn't that big of a deal.
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.)
This —- I really don’t care if my blog with no user registration or comments gets accessed over HTTP/1.1 without an SSL cert. Further, I find the way Chrome handles HSTS pretty gross, as some of us actually tinker with stuff that REALLY doesn’t need encryption, like little dev boards and projects running locally. Chrome makes those exceedingly difficult to use, thus the need for extremely convoluted workarounds like https://github.com/ip2k/I-Dont-Care-About-HSTS-For-Localhost (it’s my repo).
I do care. I don't want to have my name attached to any advertisements that shady airport routers may insert into the html for instance. TLS is a very good thing and we should have more of it, not less. Sorry that your unupgradable software comes from an era where security was not important.
> Sorry that your unupgradable software comes from an era where security was not important.
TenFourFox[1] continues to be maintained through community effort, and receives regular security fixes/backports. The problem is not software (although the project desperately lacks manpower), but the 20yro single-core CPU that literally sweats to push the crypto (let alone the CSS&JS).
Don't get me wrong. The relentless push for TLS is good, and I'm not arguing to take a step back - that would be insane. The change I'm asking for is, rather than doing [2] in your nginx.conf, do [3]. It doesn't change anything at all for modern browsers (when you hit that path, you're already at the mercy of an intercepting proxy), but makes your site more accessible for my ancient junk ;)
People don't care because they haven't seen what "advertisements from shady airport routers" even means. This has never been a real thing in most of Europe for example. I didn't care either until I traveled to US and had to check the homepage of my then employer. The experience can be compared today if you visit a ad-heavy shady news site with Ublock Origin on at first, then off.
My favorite pattern is serve all the content on http and https, but set the favicon to be fetched via https, and serve that with hsts. Preload hsts if you can. (Handling Upgrade-insecure-request seems good, too)
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.
If modern encryption is that big of a performance drag, would using a proxy that deals with the encryption sidestep that issue?
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.
That would kinda kill the last hope of using one as a portable device. You'd either be chained to your home network, or have an extremely inconvenient dongle hanging from the side. (Unless you'd do the TLS termination e.g. on your phone.)
But that gave me some ideas. While the G4 PowerBooks are recent enough to be officially blessed with WiFi capability (via PCMCIA), Macs that are even older have to resort to community-made devices, such as BlueSCSI[1]. Perhaps it would be feasible to cram an SBC with on-board Wifi/BT into a PCMCIA form factor, and - in addition to providing physical network connectivity - use it for TLS?
This sounds like something an ESP32 or other wireless-capable microcontroller could do. It would probably be easier to fit a system-on-module than an off-the-shelf single board computer in a crammed space.
The proxy can also be hosted on a cheap virtual machine somewhere.
Personally I have a small proxy that convert HTTPS and Gemini to HTTP/0.9 with an option to use a readability library to keep only the content of the articles I'm browsing and not show anything else.
>(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.)
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 agree with your stance on every single count but one. If your request already hits the plaintext 80->443 redirect, you've already lost; there's nothing the server can do to guarantee security, and refusing service altogether does not complicate the task for an intercepting proxy, because they can still make an upstream HTTPS request and serve it back over plaintext. That game was always lost, which was the original motivation behind HTTPS, and then HSTS.
This scenario is not hypothetical; it's literally what you must do if your hardware is not capable enough (my G4 struggles along, but older CPUs are the true test of patience). I wrote TLS-stripping, HTML-rewriting proxies for fun, and every HTTP client that trusts the web server with redirecting to HTTPS is vulnerable. If this affects you, the problem is that your web browser is likely more ancient than mine - HSTS with preloads has been a thing for like a decade.
Wife uses a mid-2013 Macbook Air as a daily driver still after >10 years, works in academia. What happened is simply that CPU stopped being the thing that made stuff slow, so a mid-2010s upper midrange can still hold its own today, ssd was already good then, and memory plateaued around 8gb for entry level machines some 5 years ago. So as long as your thermals don't suck, your ssd doesn't smoke out, and your keyboard holds up, you can still use these machines today. If you maxed out memory then, that is.
Yeah, I got used to desktops with RAID, powerful GPUs, large nice monitors, etc back in the early 2000s and laptops never feel fast. They can’t be — I don’t care how many benchmark results say otherwise, a machine with a given size square inches worth of silicon at a given nm scale using a 130 watt power adapter isn’t going to break the laws of physics and beat a desktop drawing 800 watts with 2-5x as much same-nm silicon. Especially now that I’ve gotten into video editing and stuff like generative visuals for music, you really notice where they’re saving power on laptops when switching between a desktop and laptop RTX 4090 + 16-core CPU.
I also have a 4790k chugging along! I had to upgrade due to max RAM of 32GB, so I got a Dell Precision Mobile laptop with 128GB. I normally hate laptops, but with remote working meaning the occasional commute it was unavoidable.
Apple Silicon truly is phenomenal for dev stuff. But gaming ... oh well. And you obviously can't heat your room with them, so your feet may feel cold. ;)
The last time I considered Apple Silicon I discovered that there were a few compatibility issues. I can't recall which softwares specifically, but it put me off "for a generation or two" and I ended up buying a Framework instead.
Atleast for PC hardware, CPU development was severely stifled by lack of competition most of the 2010s.
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.
That's not normal for Dell. Believe me. We bought a boat load of very recent Precision series and getting 12-18 months out of them would be considered a miracle. I've got a dead 5550 in the cupboard (thermal failure) and my 7670 is dying now as well. Also I have so many blown up Dell docks I look like a far Eastern recycling slum at the moment.
I think the problem here is "recent". Many vendors stopped making laptops as they used to.
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 :)
Yeah that last one gets me. The USB-C connectors should always be on a replaceable board. The ex wife threw a cushion at me and broke the USB-C connector off my T470 motherboard. Fortunately it has a traditional charger hole in it that still works. That was one of the many reasons I divorced her :)
Same experience with Dell Latitudes. Failures we've had: ethernet port broken, motherboard dead, bottom cover cracks, paint flaking off 5 minutes of being outside the box, battery swollen, touchpad buttons broken, USB C ports broken, heating up like crazy and draining the battery whilst in standby, keyboard missing keypresses, ... And that's just off the top of my head. After 5 years we're now using HP ProBooks and EliteBooks but already had to service some of those too unfortunately...
All fleets of computers have that 'oddball' that lasts forever. That he has a dell that will not die is kind of interesting.
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).
I don't know. I have a couple of old Dell laptops that still work fine, a 2008 Core 2 Duo Latitude and a 2010 1st gen Core i3 Alienware M15x. I didn't even bother to replace the HDD or upgrade the RAM, just switched them from Windows to Debian.
I think due to $100-$200 laptops floating around in the late 2000s, people started getting impressed with computers serving more than 4 years.
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.
About a year ago I bought a Thinkpad for personal use after looking for a windows laptop (after a windows surface died). I thought I'd made the best choice after heavy research.
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)
Your rant is rather incoherent so it's hard to be sure what you're saying, but it seems to me that you're missing several different points.
> 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.
if you know you know: thinkpads do make for happy compute.
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.
I am a Thinkpad fanboi, my oldest fully working one is around 14 years old. I am also super-impressed that my partner's 10 year old Macbook air is still doing fine. It's been abused to the point that it is a bit bent! The software is a bigger problem though...
The 420 with Windows 7 is my personal idea of the peak of desktop computing. 2011 was also around the peak of computing in general considering it was right before social media turned hellish psyop and smartphones became distraction / disempowerment devices.
What are you claiming was improved compared to Win2K? As far as I can remember everything after that was dumbed-down UI and pointless security clickthroughs.
Win+arrow keys for docking to sides I use all the time. Much better multi monitor support. Grouping taskbar. Start menu that lets you search (ie to run notepad, press win then start typing note.. and hit enter)
Vista added a lot of usability features like window snapping and start search, but it's underlying OS was literally unfinished. 7 became what Vista, could've been and even Vista became usable when enough updates were applied.
7 disabled a lot of the security prompts for usability. It didn't remove them, it actually just automatically approved them. These days, most software doesn't need admin privileges anymore. You could always turn off all of the prompts if you wanted to, I think there were 4 levels of prompt severity?
I have a T530 and it's perfect. It's been around the world with me and has one single crack in the plastic to show for its decade of service. I have no clue how many times I've disassembled it for cleaning or upgrades or just plain tinkering. I have a new extended battery that hangs out the back like a tumor, but this bad boy gives me five whole hours on a charge. My modern work laptop lasts 40 minutes, maybe.
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.
I had a T420 in college. One day in a CS class, I bumped my (uncovered) cup of coffee and it spilled into the keyboard. I knew the laptop had ducts to drain water out, but never tested it (for obvious reasons).
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).
> 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 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.
I spilled an entire mug of tea on my X1E when it was just new. That would have killed any Macbook, but the Thinkpad was fine. Turned it off, unplugged the power, let it drain through the bottom. Next morning, open it up, clean it out, turn it on, and it's fine.
I have a MacBook 13 inch from 2011 that now plays YouTube videos daily for my daughter when she is eating and Netflix until we canceled the subscription. Still going strong with only a replaced battery and the hard drive replacing the dvd spot. I have an older 2004 Toshiba portage m200 tart also won’t die. The only thing that seems to die on these computers is the battery, which used to be a lot easier to replace.
Yeah, my 2013 MacBook Air is similarly still trucking along. I wish it used a more standard storage medium; upgrading the chip did not look particularly cheap or easy.
I can relate to this. I needed a laptop quickly and found a factory display piece on eBay. It was an x230. It must have been atleast a year old. I bought it. That was in 2013 or so. I'm still using it. Upgraded the Ram once. The current problems are a slow fan and a poor battery. I haven't fixed them yet but can probably do so. The thing still works. It's running an old Debian and is my primary machine.
Thank you so much for that link! Also in the X230 club and my battery died not long ago. Will give that battery a shot. I think the display needs to be changed as well and also unsure if purchase a replacement. Do you have any idea about a good screen replacement?
If you want to make it like-new... The T60* fan is a few-dollar part on eBay (plus you'll need a little ordinary PC CPU heat sink thermal compound, and some tape), it's not too hard to replace, and there's documentation.
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.
I don't have a medium account so I can only see the first paragraph ish, but I will comment that I used to daily drive a thinkpad T440p that I bought off ebay for ~$140, and ran arch linux on it. I was living the dream every article or think-piece like this seems to believe in. I now (for a laptop) use an M1 pro macbook pro.
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.
It's definitely good advice to be mindful of one's needs. I have my own personal anecdotes about getting burnt by underestimating my actual needs when attempting projects like daily driving an older laptop.
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 had a T420s I think? It got me well through college and for some years after, although I eventually retired it. It was a workhorse that stood up to a lot of abuse being thrown around in my backpack every day. After I wasn't using it all the time I set it up as a dedicated server to mess with and kept it constantly plugged in and running for a few more years.
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 think the same is true of Apple stuff. I mean the current line of soldered SSDs, RAM and pain in the ass to remove batteries is quite frankly annoying as hell. And Apple service isn't much better (it has been 2 weeks and I'm waiting for them to refund AppleCare on something but they have a bug in their system that is preventing it that no one knows how to fix).
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.
My 2018 15" MacBook Pro has been used daily (since 2018) and still works great. I have never had a single issue with it.
My M1 MacBook air has had a logic board replacement, and is currently getting a screen replacement because it shattered from the light pressure of my finger while adjusting the angle of the screen. Both of these issues seem to be very common across the internet.
Before someone chimes in saying that I closed the lid on something and cracked the screen. No, It cracked while the lid was open, when my finger touched the display. Also it is the inner actual LCD that cracked. The outer glass sheet has no damage at all.
Yeah agree there. I had a 2010 MBP that I rather liked.
The M1 era isn't looking good based on the number of bricked/dead and iCloud locked machines I see on eBay either corporate discards or damaged and not worth repairing. Also low quantities of parts on the market as well. Older MacBooks and PCs were usually pretty heavily shredded for parts but the same is definitely not true for the new ones. I suspect we've entered a new era of e-waste more than anything.
I think their build quality went down only in a relative way. Everybody is making pretty well build machines today and Lenovo hasn’t been improving fast enough. I think design is where they have been losing ground the fastest. Their machine thermals seem especially atrocious. My P1 really doesn’t need an LED to know it’s on because I can hear the fans.
Agree to disagree. Lenovo Thinkpad are quite well built, other models are horror shows. I'm using a E480 that does not come with an SSD, yet I can still run Windows 11 smoothly with all the required stuff for development.
I recommend getting the X230 over the X220, if anyone decides to play with these old Thinkpads. I have both machines, and I found heat dissipation has been significantly reduced on the X230 for otherwise the same performance, thanks to Ivy Bridge's die shrink over Sandy Bridge. Most components from both machines are interchangeable with the exception of their bottom covers and motherboards (an EC firmware hack is available for interchanging keyboards and batteries).
I have both i5 and i7 X220s. The i7 has USB3 and 16GB of RAM, plus dual SSDs, and it remains 100% usable today. I just wish it had a slightly higher-res screen. I'm perfectly happy with the colours and the viewing angles, but it's a bit cramped, which is one reason I still use Unity.
I said "an EC firmware hack is available for interchanging keyboards and batteries" for a reason. X220's keyboard works nearly perfectly on the X230 with this firmware hack and a slight hardware mod (insulating two LED power contact with masking tape). You can also bring your existing X220 monitors and batteries to the X230 during the upgrade.
I looked into it. I also looked at a keenly-priced X230 from a friend to do it to.
I decided, reluctantly, too much work and too difficult. I like my X220 as it is and I have a to-do list so big I will die before I make a dent in it. Life is too short for customising laptops.
I feel like this story is also relevant to the 2012 MacBook Pro and Air. My partner kept her air going for more than 10 years, and I saw people who for whatever reason (maybe keyboard or Touch Bar) hold on to those pros long past normal. So consider that another anecdote. Real data would be great here.
Only thing that "killed" my older Air (I want to say 2016, but 2012 probably would have had the same issue): it couldn't run Zoom backgrounds without a green screen.
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.
I still use a fully specced out (i7, 8GiB memory, 512GiB SSD) Macbook Air 2013 daily . With OpenCore Legacy Patcher [1] it runs Sonoma well enough and dual boots OpenBSD for an even more lean experience.
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.
Agreed, I have two MacBook Pros from 2010 and 2011 which have been chugging along great since then; daily drivers up until 2020, then stuck on a shelf without any power conditioning for two years. Dusted them both off and put back in service. They're easy to clean, look basically brand new, and work just fine now as home servers after purchasing a USB-C to Magsafe adapter so I could recycle those old bricks. Now those I definitely went through a few of over the years.
I had a 2011 MacBook Pro that I used until end of 2022 when the discrete GPU failed for the second time (first time in 2016 Apple replaced the logic board).
I came here to add this, as a x230 user, the other laptop that has Mercedes diesel like longevity is the 2012 Macbook Pro. I've kept numerous alive for friends.
+1 to this. got a 2012 MacBook Pro as a gift for middle school, upgraded to a 1tb drive and 8gb ram in high school, again upgraded to an ssd and 16gb ram after starting college in 2019. Kept using it until last year when I got a 16" M1. I still occasionally use it for Windows shenanigans, best gift ever.
Conversely I had a classmate who used to joke about the fact that by the end of our degree, his macbook air had become a 4 "page" (mac)book as both covers were splitting.
All these replies makes me want to buy yet another battery for my old 2014 MBP. But the last two gave up very quickly - so any ideas as to where I can get proper batteries for the old MacBooks?
Is it feasible to keep old MacBook up to date with regards to security patches? I have an old Mid 2014 MBP, but unsure how "dangerous" it would be to keep using it still?
My personal laptop is a Thinkpad T440p from 2013 with a modern SSD. I use mostly the command line and a web browser on ArchLinux. For my usage it is just as fast as my modern work laptop!
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 have a crazy idea that would vastly improve modern laptop design. You would build in some sort of a reversible conduit interrupt device (may be lost tech but I hear rumors that it's possible) that would allow the end user to disconnect the battery. This would solve the #1 problem with laptops which is that sometimes I need to use the laptop and it's out of battery because it decided to turn itself on in my bag.
This. It seems to me that nowadays, you can either have a well-behaved older machine or a Ryzen-equipped mobile powerhorse that will glitch every now and then.
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).
I could perhaps tolerate the wakeup, but it should notice it's in the backpack with a lid closed sensor and a thermometer and maybe go to sleep again instead of trying to melt itself and set the car or house on fire? Just throwing out this million-dollar idea for free here.
I've had bouts of battling hot laptop bags. It's almost always been software other than Microsoft or Intel causing the device to wake and start chugging away heavily. Usually some misconfigured security tool or bad drivers constantly sending wake events.
Personally I really like having my device automatically connect to the Wi-Fi when I get to the office, reconnect VPN, get chat and email synced, get ssh sessions reconnected, etc all before I even unlock the machine. It's a great feature IMO, just every now and then there's some boneheaded app that decides 9am is the time to wake the machine and scan every file modified in the last several weeks regardless of the current power state.
IMHO if Microsoft wanted this it is clearly them to blame. It is a bit like going back to the MS-DOS era where applications should behave as there was no memory protection.
The simple/partial solution is: if the system is in S0ix (modern standby) state then under no circumstances it is allowed to get warmer than some reasonable temperature (i.e. 36°C / 97°F) - a fan should absolutely never spin up.
That is clearly on Microsoft and Intel to omit such an obvious limitation.
The problem usually isn't that its heating up while in that sleep state, the problem is applications then request to change the current state to a higher power state.
Sure, keep S0ix in a low enough power state that it can easily be passively cooled and not allow it to get high enough. What's to stop that av software to once again decide "S0ix? Nah, need to scan NOW, WAKE UP!!!". If there's any way to change these states in software, the apps causing hot bags today will just move to call that instead.
I would argue it is still a problem with the sleep state if it is allowed to be changed by software without restrictions. If the user decided to put his machine in the S0ix state there should be no way other than opening the lid or pushing a button to change it. Maybe there could be a hatch to allow the user to select what has higher privileges. I would worry that the corporate mandate would make all kinds of things in there, so I would vote against that. In general either you fit inside the state or you do not get a ride.
AFAIU not every app can be a driver and most probably no app you installed without administrator rights. There could also be an easy restriction that there can be only one lid open driver or limited to the manufacturer. There are lots of things that could be tried and I will not excuse a billion dollar company that mandates S0ix in the first place.
I guess also that most things that do wake the computer up aren't really doing anything fancy, but Windows just is too nice for them.
That’s only started to happening in the last few years. Before 2015 laptops had good manners - when they were told to shut down, they kept being shut down.
I thought I was alone with that problem. Do you know what the culprit is? What keeps randomly waking up modern laptops?
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.
Its the removal of S3 sleep states from the BIOS/ACPI tables.
Now the processor is kept powered on (in a low power state) but any poorly written driver or software can jolt the machine back into a higher power state and superheat your backpack.
Intel's rationale is that PC's should function like smartphones and you should be able to stay connected and receive notifications while asleep. I'm not convinced.
I think that's actually MS who wants that. I'm not sure there's anyone other than them who's convinced.
Fortunately I moved fully remote when COVID started so this hasn't been a problem and also switched to a mac last year - macs seem to be well behaved in this matter.
My ZBook 15 will be 10 years old next February. It's still the machine that pays my bills because it can be upgraded and repaired.
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.
That is nothing, I am still using my lightweight ENIAC from 1951.
So far works perfectly and I only sometimes have to replace the power plant that runs it.
I can’t even bear to look at a low DPI screen for more than a few minutes. Anything under 150dpi just looks so awful to me at this point. Basically ruins all older laptops from my perspective.
Normal “low” DPI screens I can deal with, but the panels that used to be built into many ThinkPads until pretty recently are some of the worst screens I’ve ever used… washed out, terrible viewing angles, mediocre brightness.
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.
Starting with the *40 gen they changed from LVDS to eDP screens and got access to better screens. This was the start of 1080p being available at 14" where it was only in 15" models before. There's a panel from one of the Razer Blade laptops that was popular to put in the ThinkPad T440p. 1080p IPS. Looks nice.
On the older models you can also do a mod to sacrifice your DP port for use internally with an eDP panel. There's one for the X220 to do that. Although if you're okay with 1366x768, the X220 Tablet models all have IPS panels from the factory and don't look too bad.
I did the 1080p mod on both my T420 (AliExpress PCB) and X220 (nitrocaster mod).
The X220/X230 mod uses the docking port's DisplayPort lanes, instead of the DisplayPort port. I'm still able to use the DisplayPort port on the X220.
The T420/T430 converter doesn't use DisplayPort, but simply converts LVDS to eDP.
I used the B140HAN01.3 (AUO panel) for my T420, which my friend also got for a T440p. Colors and viewing angles are great on it, likely the Razer Blade panel you mentioned.
The X220 mod was a pain to install IMO - soldering to tiny solder points on the motherboard, soldering the sense wire which needed burning off the enamel from the enameled wire, and having to cut out (I used flush cutters) parts of the top case for the new display to fit. My first install wasn't great either, with a cold joint causing issues I solved later on by reflowing the joints.
The AUO 14" panel has better color gamut (IIRC 100% sRGB coverage) than the available 12.5" panels for the mod.
I have one of the lcdfans modded Thinkpads. It's a "T70"—a T60 with an i7, 16GB of memory, the old style keyboard, a giant SSD, and, importantly, a high DPI display.
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.
A friend of mine works with his laptop connected to some 40+ inches 1080p monitor or probably just a TV screen, I never checked. "But you can see the pixels", I told him. "No, I don't because I have such a bad eyesight", he replied to me.
Basically me. I spend a lot of time with an old MacBook Pro 13” with non-retina 1280*800 screen, and I see no pixels and see very little actual difference with my workflow, while comparing to my other retina 13” MacBook Pro. Just watching videos is very different, all other tasks are the same to my eyes.
Yup. The T420 itself is quite big and clunky these days; but I have a couple of T420s ('s' tends to be the slightly smaller version of any given generation of the mainstream T series) in active use around home, and have setup and given a few to friends and family as well
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 :-).
I'm posting from my X220 (circa 2013). It's a laptop of Theseus at this point, but bits of the original still survive. (The keyboard is the single most-replaced component, and I'm on my third motherboard.) I can't stand more modern laptops - I've yet to find a newer laptop keyboard that's comfortable to type on. Performance-wise, it's perfectly adequate to run Linux Mint or Windows 10. And I get a kick out of having an SSD, an MSata, and a M2 drive in the ExpressCard slot (plus the SD card, which I use for additional backup). And at 12"x9" its a very convenient carry size. (Only better carry laptop I've had was a Fujitsu P1120.)
>>I've yet to find a newer laptop keyboard that's comfortable to type on.
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 :)
I dislike trackpads, and use pointing sticks (or external mice, or trackballs) instead. (I know, I'm extremely picky on my input devices.) The first thing I do with a new Thinkpad is disable the trackpad, and then I never think about it again.
trackpad is useful as a scrollbar. Main mouse is the nipple, or an external mouse when I'm at my desk, but for scrolling I do find the trackpad useful. My window manager has "disable while typing" set, and scrolling set to edge scrolling, so I can use my right thumb to scroll without moving my hands.
While everyone is bragging about their old ThinkPads, I am typing these on a Pi Zero 2W. I spilt coffee on my ~8 years old HP Laptop two weeks ago. While waiting for my parents to buy me an iPhone 15 Pro (with its USB-C to connect to the monitor) I am using a Pi Zero 2W + Asus Zenscreen Portable Monitor + 10.000 mAH Powerbank setup, connecting to my server via RDP. Github Pro student credits on DigitalOcean, all free.
* 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...
The problem I have with the zero 2w is that building anything on it seems to knock out the wifi. I've got a couple on the local network as terminals and if I try to build (e.g.) a recent python interpreter, the ssh connection dies to the extent that I have to power-cycle them. I presume they're just going into swap, but they never come back. Now that's not your use-case if you've got a remote server and all you're using them for is a thin client, but they aren't exactly usable as general purpose devices.
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?
I love my zero 2w as a development machine. For web browsing I try to use w3m when possible. In headless model (using mosh to access), I can even disable 2 cpu cores with acceptable performance.
"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.
Keyboards are a matter of taste. To my fingers, the T420 is the last of the T series with a really good one. Older Thinkpads are easy to repair. I've replaced the keyboard once, and after near daily evening use for many years, I'm about to attempt to replace a failing fan. I'll miss this laptop when its time comes. It's run various releases of Ubuntu like a champ.
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>> I needed a machine that 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. It was the only machine that fit the bill.
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
I kept trying to convince myself to buy a desktop but the difference in performance from a laptop isn't so staggering to make up for the loss of convenience. It's easier to move a laptop and I can carry it to places where I don't have an external monitor.
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.
i was referring more to the price difference. Typically a desktop will get you much more for the same price compared to a laptop and is much more upgradable. Combined with a lightweight M1 air with top battery, you get best of the both worlds.
For me, top performance in smartphones means lack of lags on 90-120hz smooth screen and easy of switching between apps without being afraid of them being unloaded from memory (nowadays apps are really heavy: look at combined instagram, firefox browser, some messenger like whatsapp/telegram, youtube, linkedin, etc... and suddenly RAM memory fills pretty fast and you'll also typically need a good battery life for top perf, meaning you need better processor with smaller nm)
I have ThinkPad x201 since 2012. Still working as new.
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 was using a ~2011 x220 as my personal laptop until 2021 or so, when I replaced it with an X1 carbon. This lasted almost 2 years until it stopped charging, and Lenovo wanted more than the laptop was worth to repair it.
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.
I was thinking about this the other day when I was using my 11 year old X1 Carbon. It was used an abused for most of those years and aside from the battery which doesn't have the life it used to, everything else works just as well as it did when it came out of the box (oh, and the 3G modem that will stop working soon)
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.
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. :)
Agreed. My dad (74 now) uses an IBM Thinkpad T23 (2001, fully upgraded to 1Gb of RAM) running Linux with an old version of Rocrail to control his model railroad.
Anecdotal evidence is obvious but Lenovo has at least tried to keep up their quality (don’t buy anything other than the thinkpad line) but Mac durability in the long term may can have issues. I remember that I had to get a repair of two Mac’s I have owned (but one time Apple upgraded me to the newer version so that’s why I am loyal.)
I'll second this: Non-Thinkpad Lenovo laptops are poorly designed trash heaps. Thinkpads have largely retained the build quality that everyone brags on.
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.
Do you mean "T480-s" as in plural of T480, or T480s, as in the smaller version of T480?
The reason I'm asking is - "T480" is the last nicely modular ThinkPad with removable external battery. Which means if you get a used one and need to replace the battery, it's literally a 2 second job - you push a button, slide it out, and slide the new one in :)
The "T480s" though is a slightly smaller version with only an internal battery, like all newer ThinkPads, which not everybody will be comfortable with.
And yeah, I have 2 T420s-s and 3 T480's around me today and love them :-)
I did mean the T480s, singular. The increased portability is valuable in my opinion, but I'll grant that it's a tradeoff. Replacing the built in battery is a 3 minute job if you know how to work a screwdriver. (Literally just a Phillips.) Unless the battery is completely shot I'd argue that you should perhaps leave the OEM one, unless you know how to identify a genuine replacement.
I have a T480s as well as a T25 (let's not talk about the x300, x220 and earlier stuff I have, being used as bookends; I did have a 701 but sadly threw it out, much to my chagrin in recent years), and the T480s gets used more often, simply because it's more portable. Plus, a rare slim laptop with that neato expandable RJ45 plug, when newer slim laptops nowadays forgo the same.
The internal battery can be readily sourced and replaced easily enough.
My latest toy is a GPD Win Max 2, keyboard isn't too bad actually, but I doubt it will last anywhere near as long as the T480s.
For people eyeing a T480s, make sure both batteries inside don't have too much degradation. At some point, the switch from one battery to the other doesn't work properly and the laptop will most times suddenly switch off when battery #1 reaches 0%, even if the 2nd one is at 100%, no matter how many recalibrations you do.
Maybe it will work. But mine has more than 50% degradation on both, and I run Nixos from RAM and don't do serious work on it, so I don't care about the shutdowns.
Yep, with companies doing laptop replacements on a 3 year basis or 5 year basis depending, there are so many on ebay.
And looking at my own work provided ThinkPad, I keep it closed and docked 99% of the time, so the keyboard looks brand new despite being a 4-year-old laptop now.
But that just depends on the user/site it goes to.
I've done what you described multiple times. One other tip is buy one with a lower resolution screen, and then replace the screen with a higher resolution one. Be sure to research this, though, some of the highest resolution screens need a different mobo with a higher pin connector.
I think that advice depends on whether you're looking for "a laptop" or "a project" :)
I'm a massive thinkpad fan, as per sibling comments I have half a dozen in the room with me right now, but have never and don't plan to ever replace a screen. My time and hassle are worth more than $0-$30 I'd pay for one that already comes with higher res, and the risk / pain / fidgetiness is outside of my own personal threshold. Not so for others!! But my message is you don't need to replace screens and 3d-pring and dremel new keyboards to get value out of ThinkPads :).
1. Awareness that not everybody can or wants or dares to do that or be you. There's other people in this world! :)
2. LoL-ing other people for not being you
Entirely you choice! :)
-----------------
e.g. I can change tires and oil on my car and am aware that majority of people can't or don't want to - even handy, technically oriented ones.
There's simply a vast, vast majority of people to whom:
1. I'd happily recommend a ThinkPad because I think it'll serve a wide swath of people well
2. I would not come anywhere near suggesting they replace their screen; not only would that likely lead to disaster, but it'd 99% turn them off from considering ThinkPad in the first place.
While possible, I've never found the dollars-per-research-time conversion ratio to be particularly good for this upgrade. My advice is aimed at someone who doesn't want to become a thinkpad nerd (although that route is always available!).
Is there any tl;dr equivalent for upgrading screens like you described?
My primary machine was a 2011 MBP until maybe 2018 and it was pretty sweet, but I'm pretty hard on my machines, and there was also a hardware issue that Apple wasn't able to fix. The Thinkpad I had working for IBM a-decade-and-a-half-ago was an absolute beast. I wish I could still get my work done on one of those old reliable machines, but having transitioned to heavy 3D Graphics stuff and working with game engines precludes this kind of thing. The increase in display capability alone has been a huge game changer for this work, let alone the kind of video cards you can get in these machines. The top-of-the-line 2022 Razer machine I use now will be essentially obsolete even for lightweight professional work within two years.
I'm more amazed that someone can live with that atrocious Lenovo screen for that long. I can live with the thickness, the not so great battery life (unless you go with that monster 'slice' battery), and the heat. But the screen...
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.
I have 2 Dell Inspiron 1525 from 2008, still kicking bottoms as DAW under Manjaro.
I used to have a a Dell Latitude d630 from 2007 running Debian fine in 2018 but I gave it away.
Compared to my 2008 macbook pro, that cost me 1400€ at the time, and suddenly died on me 4 years later for no obvious reason (this series was subject to a recall campaign due to its nvidia 8600 gpu, but I missed the elegibility window by a few months).
TBH though, my dad uses a 2009 macbookpro with W10 and it runs just fine with an SSD.
Plastic makes such a difference. I can, and do, keep using Thinkpads that have been dropped, even when they get cracked. Because who cares? But a bent MacBook Pro is often ruined.
Depends on the mac. None of the corners on my 2012 are undented at this point. Even the lid with the screen. This thing has been down cement stairs. When you open it up you can see theres actually somewhat of a crumple zone. Not sure if the newer models are so bullet proof. One of my friends ran over his 2012 with an f150 and it still worked minus spiderwebbing on the screen.
We used to use refurbed Thinkpad X220s for all engineers in the business - cheap, widely available, capable enough and with a docking station to use as a desktop. They'd take 16GB of RAM, though the official spec said the maximum was 8GB.
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 have a laptop from the 90s that still works. So a laptop that does not die is, in itself, not that big of a deal. The main reason why I pretty much exclusively buy old business Thinkpads is that they are incredibly serviceable, and you can get replacement parts for many years (and also very cheap if the laptop is older). Also, there's a big community for running Linux on Thinkpads, so the hardware is usually very well supported, including kernel modules for fan control and stuff like that.
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.
- 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...
I patched out the BIOS whitelist from my X201 and ran the image through me_cleaner.
All that stopped working was automatic fan control, I needed a daemon running constantly to set the fan speed.
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.
There are also older Macbooks that outlasted my Thinkpad. Maybe the X1 Extreme was a poor choice, but there are also a lot of people who say that Thinkpads just aren't as good as they used to be.
Macbooks also went through a period of poor quality. I hope Thinkpad improves again in the future.
My 13-year-old T410 Thinkpad is also eternal. I've bought and thrown away several other laptops since I got that one back in 2010.
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.
I'm so happy with this post. I needed to buy a cheap laptop for a family member and I went so all in on Mac a decade ago that I really don't know the lay of the land when it comes to Windows. I'll just get a Lenovo Thinkpad second hand :)
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've got a $150 T480s. It only has one, non hot swappable battery. Though it can be easily replaced. The T480 non s has 2 batteries. One external and one internal. Unless you count the cmos battery, which can be replaced on either. The build quality on the T480s is also higher.
As much as I'm fan of Thinkpad and I hate the idea of buying modern laptop, I don't want to buy a decade-old laptop. I just want a modern-ish laptop with decent CPU and easily-replaceable battery, upgradable RAM and SSD. That leads me to Framework laptop (but it is so much more expensive than buying old thinkpad). Thinkpad T420 is already showing its age and is too slow to run some modern or cpu-intensive apps (I wish it weren't true). Also, eventually ARM cpu might take over the x86/64 cpu, and when that happens, I'd be sad but the T420 would be relegated to running Home Assistant or for playing retro emulation.
My M1 MacBook Pros keyboard and trackpad quit working after almost exactly one year. Apple now wants 600 to fix the issue. This is the closest I've come to considering abandoning Apple but I don't know what to switch to.
My conclusion, drawn from decades of electronics purchases, is that AppleCare is the only extended warranty worth purchasing.
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.
My M1 MacBook Air has had two hardware failures now. Both would have cost over $500 each to repair without Applcare+. Applecare has been essential, but it adds extra cost on top of Apple's already premium prices. It has also made me loose trust in this machine. I had to buy an emergency laptop because I was in Europe and nowhere near an Apple store with the most recent failure.
This is also the closest I have come to considering abandoning Apple.
Failure 1. Logic board failure, randomly one day the MacBook would not turn on.
Failure 2. The LCD cracked from the light pressure of my finger when I was adjusting the angle of the screen. The outer glass sheet was undamaged, only the physical LCD below the glass shattered.
I have a few of these I use in the garage. Slap an SSD and fresh battery in them and install a lightweight Linux and they're damn near perfect as a workbench computer. My only complaint is HD video playback can be a bit slow.
I still have an x131 that I use whenever I need something portable. running openbsd. it sleeps flawlessly, has three physical buttons, an actual ethernet jack. It's pretty great. The only problem was the radio, and that was mainly a problem because of lenovo infernal radio whitelist. It is not enough to get a radio that works, you have to get a radio from lenovo that works. still bitter about that. but I found a lenovo branded intel card and it has been smooth sailing for more than... ugg, ten years now, probably closer to 15. makes me feel old. But still a damn fine little laptop.
Nice machine but 1400€ while the laptop in the article is $200. So you could replace it 6 times and still come out ahead... and drive more than 1 external display.
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?
Fwiw my 2012 mbp still runs. Takes in plenty of dust working outside and on account of the plastic hinge turning brittle and falling apart years ago. Once every two years I will open her up and blow her clean again. Thats about all the maintenance she needs today. Ironically it has somewhat stronger specs than gps new m1 air, considering I also have 16gb memory, but then 1.5tb of storage and 2 operating systems.
I'm still rocking a 2012 built HP EliteBook 8540w which I bought second hand in 2015. The weight of the thing is a little bit annoying and the battery is dead. It has never failed me, running Windows 10 now. It has always come back from standby and hibernate without fail. By far the most reliable computer I own. But it is showing its age though, not because of the hardware but because of software. Windows 11 doesn't run smooth on it unfortunately :-(.
HP Elitebook 8460P of similar vintage owner here. I also bought it second hand, it came with an SSD and a bigger HDD (that died), I replaced the battery a few years ago, bumped the ram to 12GB (I should bump it to 16GB while memory sticks are still available) and it has been running on Fedora Linux for years. It is kind of a heaby brick brick but it works well, everything is still fairly smooth on Gnome with wayland.
2012 Samsung Series 9 here, going strong with Debian Stable! I might end up ditching it for something with an OLED screen, but I am sure it will still be running fine.
I have a 2013 Samsung Ativ Book 6, the younger brother of your machine! The display broke twice, the keyboard is 85% unresponsive, HDD got replaced with SSD, and jampacked a larger (Ativ Book 8) battery inside.
Physical issues aside, it runs Windows 11 passably for a backup PC -- Not bad!
My Samsung qx410 died miserably (motherboard gave up the ghost) after only 2 years. Bought in 2010, died in 2012. Replaced it with a hand-me-down thinkpad t510 which is still going strong after 11 years. (Not my primary machine anymore of course but it still works quite well)
My "just won't die" laptop is my trusty MacBook Pro 2012 pre-retina. I have owned it for 8 years and it is still perfectly usable. I can get it to run Ventura with OCLP and honestly, it is only that I now really, really need something with Apple Silicon for dev work that I am considering an upgrade. It is a beast and I believe it even has the original battery (I got it used, so not 100% sure.)
My 2009 Macbook still works fine, thanks. The battery is a spicy pillow and the Superdrive is dead, but it works, albeit slowly. It's mostly running Debian nowadays (the last supported MacOS release, 10.12, doesn't even run a modern browser nowadays).
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.
I have such a laptop, but it doesn't survive update to Windows 11. Installing Windows 11 on old Thinkpad makes it go slow.
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.
Windows 11 is horribl.e My exit plan is to move to windows 10 LTSC. I have some MSDN keys. I'll worry about that one day in the future though. I just exited the Apple ecosystem so I'm still getting my stuff together.
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 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 :)
That is only true of Linux for specific things like gaming, or if you cannot resist the temptation to try stuff and tinker.
Even having moved to a relatively unstable/problematic Linux distro (Manjaro) do not find myself spending any more time solving problems than when I used Windows (which as a long time ago, so not applicable to current Windows).
It's really not though. I've run Linux on physical hardware as a side concern for the last 25 years and it's mostly a pain in the ass, even right up to now with things like sudden power drain, sleep problems, WiFi fucking out, high DPI issues etc. I don't have the time for that shit.
I'm slowly boiling myself into a portable software space. I have a couple of hard requirements that force me to use windows (or macOS) that i can kill in the next 2 years. I can put the LTSC migration off until 2025 and I can then push the LTSC EOL decision off until 2027. That's 4 years. A lot changes in that time.
I too have a Thinkpad of this variety, living long and rocking onwards, but I also have a 2015 Macbook Pro running Ubuntu Studio that gives the Lenovo a run for its money. In this configuration, the Macbook Pro is my favourite since its a much more physically comfortable machine to work on.
Point is, both of these machines are excellent, well-supported and Simply Work™ Great ..
I have a X62 (x61 with a custom mobo with updated everything) sitting in a box now. My build is 6(?) years old and still works like a champ. But the battery is the main reason it’s in a box. You have to use it like a desktop and keep it plugged in within a hour or two which really defeats the purpose of a laptop…
Reading this using a 2010 MBP, the first generation of retina ones without optical disk drive. I no longer use it for work for continuity reasons, but I could, it runs all my applications without breaking a sweat (back then this was the maxed out i7 option with 16GB ram)
- 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 just booted up my 2009 MacBook Pro since it's the only machine I still have with a CD/DVD drive. Some keys are not working (eg R, T, P, probably others) so I had to use the accessibility on screen keyboard.
I was surprised it still booted up and I was able to use the optical drive.
The T480 was last non-Apple cargo cult, repairable design.
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.
My thinkpad around 11 years old and another Acer Laptop 14 years old (my dad still uses it regularly) are still working but they are too slow for modern video calling softwares.
If I have to do just regular coding and no video calling, they are still the best.
I still have a working X60s from 2006. Really liked that laptop. Unfortunately, for modern standards, the battery life is not great, a couple of hours at most. And the resolution is just a little bit too low, 1024 × 768.
hey friend !
I gave my mom the X61t, from the same era. For what she does, it is a marvel, from XP to 7 to 8.1, I bought her an Ipad last year since 8.1 droppped the support.
I think with an upgrade of 4Gb it could be still ok in 2023. Just avoid website full of JS and videos.
Unfortunately after a lifetime of being a Thinkpad fanboy to the point of absurdity, the T410s is the laptop that made me move to Apple and not look back since.
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!
I just had my T420 die on me the other day. It simply will not power on. I do have some spare parts but I think I'll finally cave in and buy a new laptop.
thinkpad x200s from march 2009 - steadily approaching 15 years -, still works great to read news-sites, browser hackernews, watch some vidos on youtube etc. ... using the current version of linuxmint / mate edition :))
I have the exact model, but despite my best attempts at software, firmware, hardware maintenance it still overheats and takes about 5 minutes to boot up. Nothing to rave about.
I'm using a Macbook Pro retina from late 2013 as my daily driver, for work as a software developer and other things. It recently passed 10 years, being used every day including weekends.
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 use an Thinkpad R60 since about 11 years ago as my daily driver. Why? Because its - for me - the perfect laptop. Yeah, i know that there are more modern systems out there that would have a much better battery lifetime, are faster and lighter (and as the systems guy / head of it for my employer i tested quiet a few) but no laptop i tried so far has achieved the level of "thinkpaddieness" my old R60 has.
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
> 12-year-old Thinkpad has outlasted two high-end Macbooks
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)
I keep forgetting that LG is not HP and that, in contrast to HP, LG makes very durable and high quality things (especially white goods and TVs). Thanks for reminding me. I had never considered their laptop before. I would trust HP because their TV is quite ethical and ie compared to Samsung and other brands, it has never served me Ads and asks permission before collecting my data.
Author kinda summed up the problem a few paragraphs in.
> 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.
I've had 3 Macs so far since work is on the Apple train. The first failed due to the discrete GPU desoldering itelf. The second didn't technically fail but the battery swelled up to the point the laptop was almost 1cm from closing at the edges. At least the latter problem is not so much an issue with a removable battery since it's, well, removable :-)
> If all you need is a basic machine for doing stuff on the web, making video calls (Zoom, Microsoft Teams, plenty of Linux-specific video-chat works tres well), listening to music or using Discord? It’s perfect.
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.
This is bizarre. There's a hilarious contrast between the stated requirements for their laptop:
>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.
You can just run older logic thats compatible with like catalina or mojave. Thats what I do for adobe suite and its fine for my use cases. There are also third party patches to install more current os on older hardware.
... and so do Windows machines. Windows 10 will EOL in July 2025. My Threadripper 1950X, still outperforming most of today's mid-range CPUs, isn't allowed into the Windows 11 world. Why? Who knows?
But yes, I didn't realize that Logic Pro was no longer compatible with macOS versions before 12. So, if this person wanted an indestructible laptop that could run Logic Pro, have a hi-res screen and be upgraded to a 1TB drive, a 2015 Macbook Pro would certainly have been the thing. Hey look, they're $300 on Swappa!
We know exactly what the hard cutoff is for CPUs. This feature is what the official CPU list is based on. (with the exception of 7th gen intel systems added due to the surface linup)
Soft support is actually just Secure Boot and TPM1.2, so you could probably install from ISO, the installer will not warn you about any issues. I have tried this on 6th gen i7 laptops without an issue. Technically you are just blocked from recieving an update to 10, but not from running or using 11. You can even get 11 working on systems without a TPM, but that is more tricky.
I would say OS support is still better overall on the windows side, you can get a still supported OS, on 15 year old systems (win10). And on the EOL date it will be about equivalent. We will see what the future holds for 12.
I think a key difference between Windows and MacOS is that Microsoft has (historically at least) not stopped you from installing newer versions of Windows on older hardware, provided it's fast enough to run it.
Trying to run newer versions of MacOS on 10 year old Apple hardware is next to impossible.
Windows 11 has a requirement for TPM 2.0, which older hardware doesn't have. I believe that requirement check is relatively easy to patch out and install anyway.
No. I shall not.
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