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Comment by knlje | Hacker News Reader

I will never buy a computer again. You can find lots of very powerful computers in trash bin (e.g. my current 2013 MBP). People buy a piece of very precious materials and throw it away in 2 years. I think this is one of the most unethical things a man can do.

You think that you need your computers up to date because you are a geek and you must stay up to date to remain competent. This is not true. You can manage with less and you more than anyone else know how to handle a computer with slightly less resources.

These kind of numbers from a company advocating this throw away culture makes me very sad.

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You must live in some super privileged place; I wish I could find a 2013 Macbook Pro in a trash bin...

I must say that I was slightly surprised of it as well. I had to replace a fuse on the motherboard (screen was black) but otherwise it was in a pristine condition. Before this I had a 2011 Thinkpad x200s which is a more typical finding at waste electronics racks.

>You think that you need your computers up to date because you are a geek and you must stay up to date to remain competent.

Nah, I think I need a new computer because the $900 one I have (4 core haswell oc to 4.6 Ghz, 16 GB ram, 3 drives) and the $600 server I have (4 core Sandy, xeon, 32 GB ram, 5 drives), take anywhere between 2 days and 3 weeks to finish the tasks I throw at them regularly.

Between the MLC SSDs, tons of RAM, ton of CPU power, for $1500, I wouldn't even look at MBP from the current batch, let alone one from the last one.

I am a geek, I am competent, and I am fully planning on two new computers this year. Just waiting to see how Zen turns out.

64GB Ram / ea. 1 GB SSDs, probably on ZFS, 8 cores / 16 threads (to stay in the cheap consumer range). This will probably be doable for under $2k.

So, as a geek, this is what I do to remain competent, hardware wise.

TLDR: You can't just assume that because you don't need a more powerful hardware for blogging or what have you, that the rest of us also don't need one.

I can't manage with less, because life is short.

I don't assume that people blog only. I do HPC for a living and pay for resources on demand. Not everyone can manage but more of you could if you wanted.

Can't you just use AWS or an equivalent cloud service instead of owning a server?

I look into it every few months actually. It always turns out to be substantially more expensive. The disk performance in vms also either arent there, or are just too pricey.

Another part of the story is that if you roam the local sell forums, you'll find an older Xeon servers for cheap.

So, that leaves electricity, which is not that bad.

> These kind of numbers from a company advocating this throw away culture makes me very sad.

When did they advocate that? They just now EOL'ed my 2011 MBP.

Also, where do you suppose your discarded computer came from if not from someone who bought it new a few years ago?

They soldered my ram and ssd to the motherboard. I don't mind if its made by a particular company as long as I don't give them money.

For development, sure. For VR, yeah I need to basically be at the bleeding edge right now.

I don't think you can put people with modular high end PCs in the same box as people throwing away smartphones every year and laptops every 2-3.

At least modular PCs can be valuable again (or repaired) with a single component upgrade and those old components usually go straight onto ebay for other people to take advantage of.

> For development, sure

As a developer, I say give me more cores and more ram! Faster build and test times means more development time.

I can't tell if this is sarcasm or real but...new computers (a) get faster over time, so upgrading is worth it, but old computers also (b) become damaged over time, for many of us at least, though this is less of a problem with MBPs than say with Lenovo's.

Yes, I could do my work with 10 year old hardware, but no, I wouldn't really want to. These days, I don't feel the need to upgrade very often, 3-4 years seems to work out, but something new and faster is always nice.

As for the environmental costs, these are real and should be considered. That being said, it is difficult to not consume while remaining competitive with your peers that are at the same time (they have a faster computer -> get work done faster than you -> you get a pink slip).

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