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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

Looks like they’re selling for more than twice that on ebay.co.uk though. And considering MacBook airs are $1000~ devices that’s really high.

6 years is also beyond the service life of a(ny) machine.

If I look at 3 year old MacBook airs they’re selling for £600 on eBay, which is, what, half of the full cost. Not great for an already old machine with only a few good years left.

I guess you might save a bit of money using extremely old hardware and keeping it for a while. But this is a really poor argument against an objectively good evolutionarily improved cpu in my opinion.

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> 6 years is also beyond the service life of a(ny) machine.

That was the case for many decades. I think it’s no longer nearly the case. I’ve got a USB/DP KVM switch on my desk and regularly switch between my work laptop (2019 i9 MBPro) and my personal computer (2014 Dell i7-4790, added SSD and 32GB).

Same 4K screens, peripherals, everything else. I find the Dell every bit as usable and expect to be using it 3 years from now. I wouldn’t be surprised if I retire the MacBook before the Dell.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i9-9980HK-vs-Inte... shows the Mac to have only a slight edge and that’s a 2 year old literal top of line Mac laptop vs a mid-range commodity office desktop from 6 years ago bought with < $200 in added parts. (Much of what users do is waiting on the network or the human; when waiting on the CPU, you’re often waiting on something single-threaded. Mac is < 20% faster single-threaded.)

Yeah, desktops vs laptops.

20W parts vs 84W parts.

Honestly, I'm not sure what we're discussing anymore. If you don't need (or want) an all round better experience then that's on you.

But don't go saying that these things are too expensive or that the performance isn't there. Because it is.

If Apple had released something mediocre I'd understand this thread, but this is a legitimately large improvement in laptop performance, from GPU, to memory, to storage, to IO, to single threaded CPU performance.

Everyone kept bashing AMD for not beating Intel in single thread.

Everone bashed Apple for using previous Gen low TDP intel chips.

Now Apple has beaten both AMD and Intel in a very good form factor, and people still have a bone to pick.

Please understand that your preference is yours, these are legitimately good machines, every complaint that anyone had about macbooks has been addressed. Some people will just never be happy.

I was commenting only on whether “6 years is beyond the service life of any machine”, which I tried to make clear with my quoting and reply.

I’ve got no bone to pick with Apple and am not making any broad anti-Apple or anti-M1 case. (I decided to [have work] buy the very first MBPro after they un-broke the keyboard and am happy with it.)

Of the five to eight topics you raise after your first two sentences, I said exactly zero of them.

Oh. Sorry, in a very broad sense the support contract on any machine is only 5 years. After which you're basically living on borrowed time.

That's why companies aren't giving out 5+year old laptops/desktops.

(well, I suppose some do, but big companies simply wouldn't)

I assume the whole context of the thread and assumed you were defending the parent.

As the parent, I'd like to say... my entire argument isn't that top-of-the-line laptops are too expensive for what they do but rather that

(1) older macbooks are identical to mediocre new laptops in performance & price

(2) medicore laptops are very cheap for what they do

(3) desktops are far more economical when you need power.

If you spec out a laptop to be both powerful, light weight, and as beautiful as a MBP then you're going to pay a real premium. Paying for premium things is not the default.

> 6 years is also beyond the service life of a(ny) machine.

I'm still on 2013 MBP which doesn't show any signs of deterioration (except battery life). It's got retina, fast SSD, ok-ish GPU (it can play Civ V just fine).

I'd gladly pay for a guarantee that the machine will not break for the next 10 years - I think it will still be a prefectly usable laptop in 10 years from now.

No delamination issues with the screen?

> I guess you might save a bit of money using extremely old hardware and keeping it for a while.

If you get the best, and keep it for a while then even though it won't be bleeding edge anymore it'll still be in the middle of mediocre.

When it comes to computers, mediocre is actually pretty usable. A $600 computer can do pretty much everything, including handling normal scale non-enterprise software development. I didn't really realize it until I went back to school for science, but many projects are bound by the capacity of your mind and not the speed of your CPU.

If I do need computing power, I use a desktop.

6 years? I afraid that's just not the case. I have a cheap 2013 dell laptop that is all i need for office 2017 and a few other things that just work better in windows than linux (zoom/webex/office/teams). I gave about $150 for that thing and another $50 to double the ram. It's fine for what I need and use it with very little lag. I'll admit I cheated a little bit and put in an 256GB SSD drive that I have laying around.

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