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Comment by gozzoo | Hacker News Reader

> After using it, I've become so excited about its possibilities that I donated 15 combos of iPad + Magic Keyboard + Pencil to Hack Club to distributed to Black teens and other disadvantaged folks in America.

Am I the only one who thinks that the author is showing off here.

For the price of 15 iPad setups he could have bought 100 second hand Thinkpads in great condition and his donation would have much bigger impact.

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For a non-American the idea of buying and donating Apple products is the same as the idea of buying the latest $200 Addidas fashion sneakers to barefoot kids in Africa.

I don't even understand how it could be showing off, it's just stupid.

> Am I the only one who thinks that the author is showing off here.

It is a little unusual to criticize someone who donated to the needy, just to say the donor was showing off and to point out what they could have donated instead to make a much bigger impact.

Let’s say you donated 100 Thinkpads (you should), but then you were criticized for showing off when you could have donated 5,000 meals to children who lost access to free school breakfast/lunches due to covid school closures. It’s a real issue, but you should pick and choose your battles (probably just like I should).

> you should pick and choose your battles

Well it's the same battle - it's about giving the kids access to information and an opportunity to learn coding. You can't compare that to free meals(which is of course important, but as you said it's a different battle).

This is a cultural clash. In some culture it's a no no to tell you donate or how much you donate.

There's an entire field of study for this called "effective altruism" and well worth anyone's time who wants to donate any amount of money.

There is a factor to consider: Having an awesome setup, is something underprivileged kids also need. To show off, yes, but also because it gives them the feeling of not being ten social classes below. Once you break that feeling, they are able to reach much higher.

Imagine you are going to a new company. The company is doing all their development work on a remote server (e.g. Visual Studio Codespaces) accessed by browser. What would you think when they give you a 5 year old, second-hand, ugly ThinkPad to you as a developer earning your $100k-$200k (or whatever a dev in California earns nowadays). The company would do the right thing, but the typical developer would be insulted. You would ask where your MacBook/Carbon X1/whatever is.

I am also not a fan of people showing off. But the act itself is still good.

I agree the author is showing off. That’s the premise of every working-on-iPad article out there. Just cmd+f for “magical”, “amazing”, and “delight.” It’s all the same breathless descriptions of sending emails and annotating PDFs.

That said, nearly everyone who makes a donation could’ve done something “better” and made a bigger impact with their money.

I’m willing to roast the author for writing a boring article but not for their donation.

The author didn't specify whether the donated iPads had LTE connectivity but did say that they very much enjoyed LTE on theirs. This is an edge for the iPad I think? Not sure how the cell plans would be worked out but having an always on, semi reliable connection could be a big positive here.

My 200 Euro Thinkpad has a slot for a SIM card, which I use for 3G connectivity. I'm sure a newer one would have LTE, or I might even be able to replace the card in my Thinkpad to get LTE. Also, having internet on a laptop while on the go is fucking awesome (without the fiddlyness of turning on a hotspot).

Including ThinkPads with Wacom tablet screens.

But then how would the 'disadvantaged folks' get locked into the closed-off and pricey Apple ecosystem?

Which would you personally rather have? Poor people want the same quality as rich people.

Yeah but then we'd have to subject another generation to 1366x768.

My 4 years old Thinkpad is 2560 x 1440.

Those iPads will maintain value for much longer, they will be able to sell those for 70% of their original cost

Thinkpads would be trashed after 3 years

While I have been using MacBooks as my personal and work computers for the majority of the past 10 years, I used to work exclusively on Thinkpads, and used two generations of them as my personal computers. Both of them still work and I expect them to keep working thanks to their almost unlimited repairability. While I still prefer macOS over any other operating system, I think young people with lots of spare time on their hands could benefit a lot from spending a few years working on Linux, to pick up command-line skills and general computing awareness that is useful on any platform.

You’re being downvoted but this is probably more true than most people here want to admit. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a Thinkpadhead myself - I have “a few.” But time and again my 11 year old’s iPad “just works” while I’m hacking on my Linux and the rest of my family comes to me with various Windows problems.

As the extended family’s bonafide IT admin, I looooong for the day when business apps are so effective on iOS that I can retire everyone’s W10 machine!

I dunno. I love the iPad, but my wife still works on her 2009 Thinkpad T400s 8+ hours a day.

I keep trying to buy her a new one but she doesn’t want it, it still works fine.

Thinkpads can really last these days.

I love my Thinkpads. And only one of them is new (I bought the AMD version and I love it). I should have clarified that I was speaking more about the non-tech's perspective on something that "just works" versus something that needs regular tweaking, restarts, updates that halt all other operations for some time, and all the other joys of living with a Microsoft OS that we've learned to live with.

ThinkPads are the one thing that would survive. Our 2010 iPad still works (barely), but no longer receives updates. My 2006, 2008 ThinkPads of course still receive updates and are obviously much more productive.

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