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Comment by 2OEH8eoCRo0 | Hacker News Reader

I wish that I needed a laptop so that I could buy one. I sincerely hope this company succeeds so that they are around when I do need a laptop.

> Yesterday, I put my 2019 Thinkpad on my pile of "laptops to refurbish and donate." I've bought a new Thinkpad almost every year since 2006. I think that's over.

wat

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It's addressed in the article and elsewhere in these comments, several times. They donate them after a year in order to upgrade. Seems a perfectly reasonable and responsible use case if you want a new laptop every year.

Why the hell would you want a new laptop every year? Doesn't seem very "reasonable and responsible" to me.

Literally just click the link and read it. He answered it there.

Having read the article, I don't think he really does. He buys a new one, refurbishes it and gives it away. Why that's a reasonable idea isn't explained (or at least it's not to my satisfaction).

Buying himself a new laptop every year was his motivation for quitting smoking, as he realized 17 years ago he spent about two laptops worth on cigarettes every year. It’s in the article, near the end.

I guess I don't understand why it's a continuing thing :)

Why do some people buy sport cars? Why do some people buy flowers? Why do people buy insert thing that isn't completely necessary

I think you know the answer.

> I sincerely hope this company succeeds so that they are around when I do need a laptop.

I sincerely hope they're around long enough to make a 15" version. My old eyes can't do 13" any more, unfortunately.

Yep, this is where I'm at too. 13" is just not enough space for me to get anything done productively. On my 13" MBP with my standard font size, my code editor can't show a full line of code without me having to scroll (VSCode with mostly default settings, font size 12).

FYI - I have Two of these for my machine: https://i.imgur.com/NiHzTzx.jpg

They are super light and all three fit in my backpack really easily....

I HIGHLY recommend.

Please get checked for glaucoma if you haven't already. Goes for anyone reading this comment who feels their vision is slowly getting worse. I started getting it in my 30s, it can strike early.

OP used that as a reward to help him quit smoking. If it worked, it worked.

>wat

"Self described early adopter consumer sees early adopter friendly project and supports it"

One might see some cognitive dissonance between the state of mind of being pro recycling and supporting reduce and reuse and being an eager consumer. However early adopters dance this line and lead the way for the masses to come after.

All a matter of perspective or framing.

If it's any consolation, I've bought a used Thinkpad every year since 2015.

how do you get rid of the doubly used Thinkpads?

Only one of them has broken so far, and it was only an issue with the display. I repurposed it into a homelab/Podman host and it's been able to work just fine!

As a quick aside, if you're ever one of the 15 people who will likely do this, buy a Thinkpad dock. They're cheap, and it basically triples your I/O!

Just to continue the question, what do you do with the other laptops? You should have at least 4 or 5 more which are unaccounted for. I imagine only one is used currently.

I gave an old workstation to my mom and a spare T440p to my brother, now the x201 and T460s occupy my tinker station and bedroom respectively. Oh, and there's also a T420 that my other brother uses as a media server, but that's not really mine anymore :p

Not them, but I keep a long trail of old laptops and generally do in fact keep them all in active use on a regular basis. For me part of the appeal was that I like distro-hopping, so multiple machines made it easy to keep rotating OSs without much trouble. The core bits (browser profile, password manager) are synced, and my projects live in version control that's easy to pull to any machine that happens to not have it yet, so I just... grab the closest machine when I want to do something and go. (And I tend to have them laying around multiple rooms so there's always one at hand)

That's kinda cool, it's like you have dumb clients in every room.. except they're not dumb but synced instead heh

Not them, but I also buy a slightly used Thinkpad almost every year on Ebay. Old ones go back to ebay as well.

Hint: "used" is a boolean, not a counter.

It was a joke. I was gonna write "used used laptop" since the poster used a used laptop. I thought doubly used would be slightly less confusing.

And I’ve had a used 2016 Thinkpad running MacOS Catalina for almost 2 years. I looked at the prices and they are the same as when I bought it.

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