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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

I would have kept the same hardware forever too, but for some reason my tools seem to take more and more resources every year.

Silly example is gmail, which loaded in 1s on my 2011 MacBook Pro when new, if it load it again today (I just tried) it takes 35 seconds before I can click anything.

Another might be everyone’s favourite software to hate on: Teams.

On my 2011 MacBook Pro: fans squealing, UI of the OS becomes unresponsive, beachballs. But chat/video software of the era was not so heavy.

What annoys me is that this machine is supposedly faster than yours, (i7, 8GB, SATA SSD) but the capability of the machine has been whittled away over time.

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> Silly example is gmail, which loaded in 1s on my 2011 MacBook Pro when new, if it load it again today (I just tried) it takes 35 seconds before I can click anything.

Gmail currently does easily over 50 HTTP requests when loading, and browsers limit the number of connections:

https://docs.pushtechnology.com/cloud/latest/manual/html/des...

The net effect is that you wait at least 8x (but probably much more) your ping to the server for the page to load.

It's sort of a plague in enterprise web apps and stems from the fact that nowadays you have small teams working on independent modules, which do their own requests. Banking apps are the worst offender here.

Also some people are simply unaware of/ignore the issue. The other day I inspected an e-store my friend paid decent money to set up and the first thing that I noticed was that it was firing 200+ requests, because the devs neither bundled nor minified their code.

I thought this was because it was still in development - nope - another store by the same company had the same issues, causing the site to load 12s+ on a good connection, and 30s+ on a 4G simulator.

I know this isn't your main point, but for GMail there's always "Basic HTML view": https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/1pq68r75kzvdr/?v%3Dlui

The fact is the normal view used to be very fast even on the hardware of the era. Nowadays normal view has the same functionalities but is much slower even on modern hardware.

My gmail was great on my commodity 2010 Windows laptop until a couple of months ago, and then it suddenly fell off a cliff. I've tried everything I can think of, but I think Google just messed something up and made it at least an order of magnitude slower quite recently.

I used basic view for a while, and didn't miss any of the advanced features. What made me stop was the fact it inserts newlines into messages to keep lines below 70 characters. (I guess this is in line with the RFC, but my recipients didn't like it.)

To be pedantic, the correct URL is technically https://mail.google.com/mail/h/, which then expands in practice to https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/ and then gets the jumble of characters near the end added on which appears to be an everything-compliant cache-busting mechanism. When typing the URL manually the "/" after the "h" is required; "mail.google.com/mail/h" will not work.

You can also use https://mail.google.com/?ui=html

Initially it takes me to a page that asks, "Do you really want to use HTML Gmail?" I need to click "I'd like to use HTML Gmail" button to proceed to HTML Gmail.

Wow, it's insanely fast. Incredible.

They're doing their best to kill it. Last time I checked, they stopped honoring the setting that used to allow you to permanently switch views. Now they always use the default slow view unless you use a specific URL.

In my experience, that's the only sane way to use it even on modern hardware.

This is going to sound like fanboy talk. But both Mac and Windows tend to feel slower and slower over time, each upgrade somehow pushing your 'old hardware' to new limits.

On Linux it's often the opposite and a new update may even makes your old machine faster than it ever was.

yah this is it; software doesn't stand still unless you use old applications. I've read about folks keeping old systems around to use their old licensed software or some other application they know the ins-and-outs of and can get stuff done on it without having to break their mental model of the application behavior each upgrade with all the UI scramble and revamping. I'm starting to get a dose of that myself with some applications I keep running.

Rather than keeping old systems around (though we do that too, still having 486 systems running), we keep diskless version of old OS versions around, complete with installed applications (IDEs, compilers etc). Anything from WinXP to Win10 works fine over iSCSI (presumably 11 does too), DOS using etherboot and MSNET, and diskless linux has never been a challenge.

My first iPad, I believe it was the third generation: I would have never used it if it were as slow as it has become today. It also lost some synchronization options, though I don’t recall what it was.

That being said: I kept my 2013 MacBook Pro retina until a few months ago, one year after a battery replacement which ended up breaking other parts and becoming to expensive to fix. Otherwise it ran perfectly fine and the high quality screen was almost on par to current screens.

I’m still using my 2013 MPro Retina as a nice backup computer (when I need to do MacOS things), I refuse to sell it. It had the last good keyboard before the butterfly came along.

> It had the last good keyboard before the butterfly came along.

Wasn't the last of those the 2015 Macbook Pro?

It indeed was the 2015 model. I have an early 2015 MBP sitting in my desk as I’m typing this which I use primarily as a slack machine and it still has the old good keyboard.

Oh my bad then! Still. The retina screen and it still being supported natively is just chefs kiss.

I have the second gen iPad (iPad 2 3G) and I still use it for reading books and comics. The battery is still reasonable for the little usage it sees.

Unfortunately, upgrading to iOS9 makes it utterly unusable so I have it still running iOS8. The only issue is Apple doesn’t let you download older versions of apps unless you’d bought them way back.

I really wish Apple let alternate firmwares on these devices, I would love to run KOReader on my iPad over Linux.

My same iPad was real slow until one day I did a system reset on it and it was good as new. It progressively has slowed down slowly since then, but I haven't installed the same amount of apps on it. It makes a big difference, maybe try it.

About your MacBook fans squealing: I had the same problem with my 2012 MacBook Pro. It turned out that the grilles through which the fans blow out the hot air were completely clogged up with dust and the Macbook would overheat.

I cleaned both and now the fans rarely spin up to full speed, because the hot air can actually leave the case again.

See this guide (the guide does not show cleaning the grille, but that is the important part).

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/How+to+clean+your+MacBooks+fan+...

Did the Alpine mail reader stop working with Gmail? I switched to self hosting after Google kicked me out of my account with a broken password reset so I haven't had to switch to a different mail reader.

Gmail supports IMAP (and even POP), so you can use just about any e-mail client with it:

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7126229?hl=en

I believe Gmail requires (or soon will require) authenticating with OAuth2 in order to use IMAP and SMTP. Thunderbird supports it, but I'm not sure about other email clients.

FYI, I am running Arch on a Macbook Air 2011 and it handles Teams OK ;-)

This. People seem to think their hardware somehow slows down, when in reality their shitty OS just got more bloatet.

Find that hard to believe too.

My laptop since 2017 has been a Dell Precision 5510, (Xeon 1505v6, 32G) running Arch and honestly it's not smooth in the slightest.

Granted, last time I used Teams was 2 years ago, maybe it improved a lot, but the UI lags so hard that it almost bugs out, along with pegging and entire CPU core, sometimes when the program has been on a call but is no longer... Teams should be sitting idle.

I still use my 2011 macbook air, not as a main driver but still quite a bit. I had to put linux using xfce on it for it to actually work in a non painful way, MacOS not being able to update properly was part of it, I did find a way to force the updates since I thought I may use it for iphone dev and still use xcode on it, but it wasn't viable. It's mostly used for web surfing via firefox, and if I run something like gnome or cinnamon it struggles quite a lot more than xfce.

That seems strange. I run multiple older computers, Core 2 Duo CPUS, 4GB RAM, cheapest possible SSD. They load gmail fine in about 5-7 seconds. And I have 67,000+ unread messages and multiple gmail addons installed too. 35 Seconds before you can click on anything seems crazy.

I also find it strange - my Core 2 Duo[1] has 2GB RAM and spinning rust HDD (no SSD) and gmail loads in about 10s.

[1] I'm still using this laptop productively throughout our regular brownouts. It takes a bit of time to boot, but from login window to a completed WindowMaker startup (with a few xterms on startup + wicd app) it takes about a second.

>Gmail

I feel the early-00s PC I had at the time gmail came out would explode and kill everyone in the room with shrapnel if I tried opening gmail with it now, while remarkably, the 2005 (?) version had all the features I ever cared about

Very true. Reminds me of a video by Luke Smith: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7lG4bont7g&t=7

While teams is super inefficient, 10 years ago no one was casually streaming 4k with a webcam feed in a remote team session with 2-10 people.

> no one was casually streaming 4k with a webcam feed

aren't most webcams on laptops firmly in the 720p-1080p territory? I know most people receive 480p streams.

I'll grant you that 10 way calls were much less common then, but even now Teams only shows 4(?) of them depending on UI layout.

720p as webcam is very new.

My teams shows up to 8 I think.

gmail just loaded in 1-2s for me.

About 2s here as well.

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