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Comment by m0llusk | Hacker News Reader

I thought this would be about laptops. The laptops I use for work and personal stuff cost around $100 and are effectively disposable. They are not great for intense use, but the vast majority of tasks go just fine. And when developing any serious slowdown shows up right away so my work ends up being usable on low end hardware with janky connections. When one of these laptops got stolen recently I just got another one, provisioned it using some scripts, restored my personal data, and that was that. Total loss was a little over a hundred dollars and a half day of work.

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>And when developing any serious slowdown shows up right away so my work ends up being usable on low end hardware with janky connections.

A lot of modern software problems stem from developers having a powerfully detached understanding of reality.

This is why I like "resource constrained programming" and demoscene.

If I can make this work (fast) on a Raspberry Pi 3 or on older hardware, will work nicely on production systems.

> A lot of modern software problems stem from developers having a powerfully detached understanding of reality.

The best thing we could do for the internet is have developers at Google, Meta, etc, use a Raspberry Pi 4 or similar "gutless wonder ARM box" for one day a week. So often, I run into things they've written that, for no coherent reason, just run horribly on low end hardware. It was obviously written and toyed with on a Xeon workstation with multiple large 4k monitors, and, who would possibly use less?

The Blogger rewrite rather irritates me, because it went from an old, usable, performant interface that ran totally fine on ancient netbooks to this weird, "mobile first" interface (for a blogging platform) that choked out even on high end hardware when you had a lot of photos in a post. Clearly, nobody who worked on it ever actually loaded it up, or used it on old hardware, and never actually talked to anyone who used it to blog, because it was filled with tons of "modern" UI crap that was objectively worse than the old interface for every conceivable task one might do when writing and editing blog posts.

Kicked me off Blogger and onto my personally hosted Jekyll stuff, though, so I guess working as intended.

My main laptop used to be a Thinkpad T530 from 2012 that I bought used off of eBay. I ran Linux.

I never worried about it at all. There's holes in the keyboard and through the laptop to deal with liquid spills. The case was a nice hard plastic with enough flex to prevent breaking.

Honestly, if I dropped it on the floor - I'd check the floor first for any damage.

Taking it apart was straightforward, albeit a bit frustrating. I found the MBP mid-2012 unibodys much, much easier to take apart and clean.

I recently decided to upgrade and bought a M1 MBP Pro off of a college kid wanting to get a gaming laptop. It's a huge upgrade and I actually find myself loving MacOS. Everything feels so nice and looks so nice.

But now I am just terrified for this laptop. It has a hard case. I'm meticulous about a clean keyboard and screen (fingerprint magnet). I keep any and all liquids very, very far away. I never place it anywhere where there may be dust.

I sometimes wonder if the stress is worth it. I'm tempted to buy myself an X220 or something else in the X series since the T530 was heavy to lug around.

i've been using an x230 for _years_ for light work and side projects. you can mod an x220 keyboard in it if that's your thing. pretty sure it uses the same dock as the t530

haven't really found a need or desire to upgrade beyond maxing the ram and shoving an ssd in it.

I've had Thinkpads for the last 20 years of my life. I presently have an M1 Air for music production and a used T480 - great combo. I've found the MacBook to be fairly durable in spite of all the horror stories that I've heard over the years about cracked screens and so forth, so my plan is to buy an M3 Pro when they come out and throw Asahi on my M1. Unfortunately new Thinkpads just aren't what they used to be given the compelling value prop of Apple silicon but I'll happily continue buying used ones for $150 a pop.

I have similar feelings whenever I get something that's 'nice, new, shiny'. I feel an urge to protect/preserve it as best as possible, and worry more than I should.

One time, I bought a fancy wallet made of stainless steel (threads, woven into thin sheets, backed by plastic). For MONTHS, I was paranoid about leaving any scratches or blemishes on such a pristine, shiny thing.

Years later, it's still my wallet, and has enough blemishes and scratches for me to not care as much. One new scratch or blemish would be unnoticeable among the others. It still holds itself together just fine, and it still has the 'slippery' in-pocket texture that I like.

Point being, as long as you take decent care of Your Precious, it'll be fine with the exterior wear and tear.

I've also got a $4k-ish ring made with white gold, and it came with a fucking mirror-like polish. Tiny scratches or dings were 'End of the world", until I was able to identify "inside" and "outside" orientation via a small blemish on one side.

> One time, I bought a fancy wallet

I've been using the same briefcase for probably 30 years (bought to hold a laptop yet still fit under an airline seat). It's pretty beat up — but for lawyers a beat-up briefcase is something of a status symbol, kind of like Willie Nelson's guitar "Trigger."

https://guitar.com/features/interviews/story-of-willie-nelso...

>I never place it anywhere where there may be dust.

If it's any consolation, the Apple M laptops' keyboards aren't the infamous butterfly ones.

More generally, I don't worry too much about pristine keyboards. I wipe them down every week or two with 91% isopropyl alcohol and tissue paper and they're good as new. They're going to get grimy because you need to touch them, so it's not worth the worry.

As for the screen, I just take a swiffer duster to them anytime I notice dust buildup. If I notice any liquid stains, like the keyboards I just take 91% isopropyl alcohol and tissue paper to them. Good as new.

I’ve recently been trying a bit of an odd setup. I use an iPad on a stand with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and use blink shell to mosh to vultr openbsd hosts. It’s kind of nice in the sense that you have an iPad for when you need really mainstream support for something, and I’m thinking about switching to one with 5G for mobile work. I like the focus of having a terminal style device for hobby stuff.

I came here expecting the same :) Though I prefer used Thinkpads. There's a plentiful supply of leased machines. Instead of disposable, they are excellent quality & nicely repairable and upgradeable in nearly all aspects. (Screen resolution compared to macs has been annoying me, ....) And I get to be smug about using the more sustainability focused option :)

What laptops are you using that are only $100?

If I had to guess, various used laptops from a decade or so ago.

For most practical applications, computing performance plateaued around 2011. Just look at how many people can't/won't use Windows 11 just because their ancient relic otherwise still works perfectly fine.

And if you want a source, anecdata is I'm posting this from an i7 2700K (aka Sandy Bridge) machine.

Thanks, time to look into older machines.

Look into business laptops by HP/Dell/Lenovo. You can still easily get parts for them (keyboards/batteries/chargers) they are well built, have easy to find driverpacks from the OEM and were more the most part lightly used and only retired because the lease is up or the latest version of windows doesn't officially support it. You can get very good condition 4th/5th gen intel core laptops for around $150.

If you want a source, Steam Hardware Survey[0] somewhat agrees with what you're saying, especially when taking in to account that gamers would have better specs than average.

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

Chromebooks that are a couple years old seem to run pretty cheap, especially refurbished. Installing Linux is simple enough, although some (all?) have non-standard key layouts which can require some additional setup to get working comfortably.

I've had a few of these over the years that I take to coffee shops/bars to work. It's nice not to feel nervous about a $1000+ investment just because the server is coming around to refresh my water.

My mother often breaks computers, due to how and where she usually uses them (in the kitchen while cooking etc.)

I bought her a t420, which cost less than $100. All I did was swap in an SSD. But here’s the thing, I bought two t420s, and when one breaks I cannibalize the other for parts, or just swap the SSD into the old machine. I make sure to always have a spare machine, which is not hard because after you cannibalize one machine, and get a replacement, the parts on the cannibalized machine will often suffice for a while until you need to replace the same part again.

For her use cases, and to be honest 90% of people’s use cases, a t420 from 2011 has an excess of power. And the peace of mind knowing that spilling water on the keyboard will be a repair that takes 10 minutes (I could probably repair a t420 blindfolded at this point) and effectively only cost you $10-$20, is wonderful. I’ve been able to walk her through repairs over the phone.

I tend to use old various X220/X230 thinkpad as beaters. Used to be big on the X201, but somehow the X201 has been creeping up in price. Yeah, I use and like my big M1 MacBook for work. It’s nice for what I do at my job. But in my personal life I’m 100% happy with Arch Linux and i3wm on a stack of thinkpads. Having swappable batteries might be my favorite part, other than how well Linux runs.

I've noticed a U shaped price curve for some kinds of recycled computer. Here in the UK, Thinkpad X220/230 are currently in the minimum. As you have noted earlier Thinkpads are beginning to climb I imagine as they get recycled and there are less around.

(Way off topic for this thread so apologies)

Roughly, ten plus year old asus is what I go after.

I like having a couple "junk" Thinkpads around, but I'm spoiled my "junk" Macbook's screen (older Retina model).

I'm using an M2 macbook pro and our typescript project is slow to start, slow to restart after a code change. It routinely leaves orphaned node processes running at 100% CPU. I shudder to think what it would do to a $100 notebook. It would probably explode hahaha

But for Elixir yes, I could definitely use a cheap laptop.

I like Drew's take on this https://drewdevault.com/2019/01/23/Why-I-use-old-hardware.ht...

Why is it assumed that software developer can identify and solve problems only by artificially forced to experience it firsthand and be personally frustrated - why modern software stacks keep getting buried into layers of convenience wrappers and no one cares? What would be the steps to solve it?

I don't think Moore's law is solely to the blame. Incentives are lacking, spoken languages and software development methodologies are still too primitive to describe and define temporal behaviors, and, I suspect there are also disincentives to solve it - slower software seems to be preferred for the mass, and so each times significant speedups are achieved, a correctional force could be emerging and applying over it.

Same reason why I would never go for anything beyond the base model Macs. Losing/damaging the base model (~$1k) is something I can live with, less so to the fully-specced out $4k+ one. Not to mention that those aren't super reliable to begin with and given their anti-repair stance there is no cost-effective way to repair any eventual failures the way you can do on a PC.

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