I have a Thinkpad that I purchased in early 2014 that is still going strong except for, as in your case, a degraded battery.
My grandparents used to play Freecell on a very early IBM Thinkpad (manufactured in 1993, I think) that I picked up for free in a garage sale in 2001. This machine lasted well into 2005, and probably still works today.
Highly recommend trying them out. These days you can get equivalent performance to Macbook Pros for maybe 60% of the cost.
Limitatations can enable innovation.
I also have a T40p, from 2003-ish, with the same 1400x1050 display. This is an even nicer computer to use in many ways - the keyboard in particular is even better than that in my T60 - but the difference in performance between 2003 and 2006 is striking. It's almost as much as the difference between 2006 and now. The T6x used Intel Core CPUs, but the T4x was still Pentium M days - single core and quite substantially slower. The T4x still has a PATA drive, so it's harder to put in a modern SSD. It's limited to 2G RAM for reasons I can't remember. It's also much less robust - the T60 series has a completely rigid chassis (and my T60 still looks like new) but the earlier T40 would bend if picked up from the front, which would cause both the case and the tracks on the motherboard to crack (the USB sockets stop working first, then everything else).
The T40p is a lovely, lovely computer - in some ways the best one I own - but it's for occasional document-writing only, not really for development any more.
Maybe I should look for a fancier one, if only to pick up the motherboard and CPU from. I imagine they're quite similar in terms of performance, but the extra compatibility would be nice.
I have a T500 Core2Duo T5600 w 4GB RAM sitting in the cupboard. I pulled it out and put an SSD in it and installed Lubuntu, works fine but I have some software licenses I’ve paid for that are only available on MacOS & Windows.
Do you think it would run Windows 10 ok? I’d need to buy a license, but at this stage that might be cheaper than a new / secondhand laptop.
Memory hungry apps like Chrome slow down pretty quick, but the OS itself is snappy.
This is a very good point. I think the user experience, on average, would be quite a bit better if developers weren’t so prone to chasing glitzy new hardware that can “mask” performance problems.
On the other hand, developer’s productivity matters, so I’m not really sure what the right balance is here...
Also, I find that new developers think they would benefit greatly using the fastest machines to learn to program, but then never develop a good sense of algorithmic complexity as everything just screams. On slower machines you can have the opportunity to feel the difference between O(1), O(log n), O(n), O(n^2), etc.
Indeed an early 2014 Thinkpad is my main work development box. It's a T540p with the excellent 3K matte screen. Admittedly I use it like a desktop computer, plugging in a keyboard and mouse (and, now, camera), so there's very little wear and tear, but in my mind it's basically still a new computer.
Add a concurrent video conference - all too frequent these days - and it practically freezes every so often. Only 16G really doesn't help.
Am looking forward to something bigger, soon...
Fortunately most ThinkPads of this era had removable batteries, so this isn't as big of a deal as it would be for most laptops today. I'm currently using an X230 that I bought off eBay as my main personal laptop; it needed a new battery when I got it, but otherwise works great.
From my cold dead hands.
I still semi-frequently use a 2007 consumer-grade Dell that served as my only machine for 4.5 years, and as my primary laptop for another 5. It took six years for it to need a repair other than replacing a battery, and even today I get two hours of life from its latest replacement battery, and can swap in the next-oldest for 75-90 minutes more away from a power outlet.
Apple laptops do tend to last a long time, but if my goal were to buy a laptop I could use forever, I'd buy something else that was more repair-friendly instead.
At some point I expect I will stop getting MacOS updates which will force me to upgrade to a newer model.
With a tweak I was able to get Mojave on it, and another tweak to get Xcode to compile for iOS 13 on it. That should do me for a while, until either the video cable exposed through a hinge breaks, or they can’t get the latest iOS to compile on it. But I’m loathe to get a machine that won’t let me keep it alive the next 10 years.
Intel CPUs haven’t advanced that much since this machine's 2.66x4 i7. The video probably hurts more. It points to a future where we can just expect to put some money into maintaining our computing machinery instead of consuming it like it's a service. But given that John Deere has moved this way, I’m not hopeful that computers will go back that way. Support right-to-repair bills!
Exact same story here. I finally bought a Lenovo last fall after giving up hope that Apple would make a machine I could also get 3TB into. I still use the old MBP for photo management.
2006 had a bad run of MacBooks, so this is not an indictment of Apple equipment in general. But Apple equipment is not universally particularly durable, nor is Apple the only vendor to make durable laptops. They've taken a lot of shortcuts recently, and currently they've set the expected service lifetime of a new MB at around four years.
I was actually surprised how usable the computer still was after all this time, although the thermals suck quite hard. I imagine the 2011 thermal paste is nigh on useless at this point. Granted, I don't use the laptop much these days, but it'd still serve for basic browsing when needed.
It's nice to have things that run well with relatively small changes.
I wonder if the current MBP lineups can last 8 years of constant software development use like this 2012 model.