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Comment by rdevnull | Hacker News Reader

I don't want to sound dimissive but if you code anything more than 90's stuff an 11 years old desktop won't cut it. Especially if you have an apple computer. Such a model is not just obsolete but would open a lot of security issues.

Invest in a laptop? With the current prices pretty much everyone that uses a computer professionally can afford a laptop.

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Until last year I used a 2011 iMac with Linux, 24gb of RAM and an SSD. Quite a bit better in performance and security than laptops I've seen engineers issued last year.

Way faster FireWire and DVDR speed too

sure and no way to look at your photos in icloud, connect to music or interact with apple tv (or develop or test any app).

But sure, you don't need icloud if you got your photos on DVD right ?

DVD? zipdisk over firewire has all my sony mavica 640x480s.

the key is "with linux". Try developing iOS apps or do anything within the apple ecosystem (e.g. check your photos?). Not viable for 99.9% of mac users.

My computer was too old for Apple, a characteristic similar to saying 90% of brand new laptops are too blonde. There are very few modern Apple development machines but anyone with an old desktop can make most modern software. (There are also plenty of exceptions where an Arm laptop isn't usable in software development, so nothing is universal.)

In case you're not aware: OpenCore Legacy Patcher

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32614135

https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/#readme

> running and unlocking features in macOS on supported and unsupported Macs

Thanks, I didn't know much about that and it could be helpful with relatives, etc.

Most of the Apple hardware bought for me has been by employers who understood I wasn't going to use Apple software. In the big scheme of things, it is better to have a reduced set of drivers and pay a bit more than have an employee fiddling on drivers because Acer skimmed another $1 off their motherboard cost.

11 years ago was only 2011.

My 2011 desktop has a 3.5GHz 4-core i7 processor, 32GB of RAM and of a 1TB SSD.

In the interim there's been the adoption of USB-C, improvements in energy efficiency and widespread 4K display support - but raw performance numbers aren't much changed. Go to Dell with $2000 and with the laptop performance penalty they'll offer you... pretty much the same specs, except the CPU will have some extra 'efficiency' cpu cores and be called '11th generation' instead of '2nd generation'.

Are you perhaps thinking of some previous decade, where 10 years meant 20x the clockspeed and 2x the cores?

You can definitely code in Node and Python with a 10 year old laptop. My 10 year old desktop that my son uses is a Core i3 3.66Ghz with 6GB RAM.

I do all my development on a remote server, so I really just need a terminal emulator and an internet connection. I could work with a raspberry pi if I needed to. Sure, fundamentally it's just moving the problem of where the expensive computer is, but now there's only needs to be one of them.

Aren't you then just perpetuating the problem though.

If all developers have the latest and greatest computers, the software works great for them, meanwhile the plebs are forced to upgrade to keep up.

Maybe developers should have to use an older computer if only to check usability for everyone else.

This is what finally convinced me to move from a 2011 MBP. The trend of offloading everything to the GPU on a system that has the weakest of GPUs killed that computer as useable.

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