The Soul of an Old Machine | Hacker News Reader

The Soul of an Old Machine

benjamincongdon.me

54 pointszdw54 comments

> One practice that tends to work for “releasing” sentimental objects is taking a picture of it, and being intentional about what value it brought me, and allowing it to go (in a fairly Kondo-esque fashion)

I wish the Kondo method worked for me. I still have a ton of old Sun computers in my basement I just can't get rid of, because they all SPARC joy.

You are a bad, bad person.

Didn't the gal retire because the Kondo method didn't work for Kondo either (Once having IRL kids and all)

I'm curious why you specified IRL.

To clearly delineate between real live children and fake imaginary children.

I heard the "take a picture of it then get rid of it" from Bruce Sterling, probably over 15 years ago now.

I still have way too much junk, too many projects I hope some day to get to, for my tiny living space & general not-enough-project-time. But there have been a bunch of things this method has helped me out with.

You will regret getting rid of it. It is a small form factor that is easily stored.

If anything you will look back later and marvel at all the freedom we had.

“You could just plug into the internet with this?”, “You say you could just download code and run it? Without government certification? What? You even wrote your own code?? How did you circumvent the Trusted Computing check? Oh.. right, you could do whatever. Wild times. Dangerous times.”

I still have every laptop I've owned & I don't know why (fujtisu p1120 (what a badass machine), some msi core2duo (p951 or something), a msi gx66, a dell venue 11 pro, and my current Samsung book 12. Oh and I bought a Sony Vaio P way way after the fact for like $130, as a potential p1120 refresh- neat ass system. Almost two decades of gear. Some very well stickered, the Dell & GX not so much.

I think you're onto something about size. It's a factor. Still, I feel real shame for having not gotten rid of more machines. I have gotten rid of old desktops at least.

I still miss my 486 sometimes. I rebuilt a 90s gaming machine somewhere in early 2010s. You can guess how often I power it up.

I did get my parents to throw out the Gateway 2000 full tower that had been sitting on the porch. I bought a p166 /w mmx from a paper route. Then eventually put a legendary Abit BP6 in it. Took me at least 18mo to get the second Celeron cpu for it.

Served them for a real long time as an eventual hand me down. Alas I had though I'd left them with more memory so it was still like 32mb of ram for a long long time, just feel so bad about that.

Sat on the porch & served as a coffee table for a long long while. I did ask them to get rid of it & now it's gone. I did take a photo or seven first.

I think $90 is too little value for an old laptop compared to the value you can get out of it.

I use my 2010 macbook pro as a home server and it has served very well - as long as you get rid of the os and install linux on it.

I use it to run a couple of low traffic websites, pihole dns, a photoprism server, a paperless document server, a tailscale subnet router, and a nextcloud server. That's certainly more value than $90 I'd think.

You could probably get more by selling it on Ebay but then you would have to deal with Ebay and it's buyers.

> Unfortunately, a couple months ago I realized my [2014 MacBook Pro] was struggling to manage even a single Chrome tab, and noticed that is just was not pleasant to use this machine anymore.

Eh? I use a 2011 MacBook Pro as a daily driver, and it's fine. I wouldn't try to run IntelliJ or games (especially not since the discrete graphics chip is dead), but it handles an upsetting number of browser tabs, plays video fine, and generally behaves itself.

But then, i am running Linux, not MacOS.

I have both a desktop computer and a laptop. I tend to upgrade each about every 10 years. I stagger the upgrades so that I get a new machine about every 5 years. You think that your old machine is still 'good enough' until you realize just how much faster and more capable the newer model is.

I had an Intel i7-3770K computer that seemed to work just fine. Even builds on a decent-sized project did not seem uncomfortably slow. About a year and a half ago, I ripped out the guts and updated it to a Ryzen 5950x with 64 GB RAM and a PCIe Gen 4 SSD. It only took a few days before I wondered how I could possibly have tolerated the older machine for so long.

Now my laptop (Intel 6700K) which I got in 2016 is getting long in the tooth. When I update it in a few years, it might make my desktop seem slow.

Title came form this book FYI. In case readers didn't know

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7090.The_Soul_of_a_New_M...

Just came to mention the Tracy Kidder reference and you have beaten me to it. The book is one of my all time favourites.

I’ve been using a 2009 MacBook Pro since I bought it. It’s not my primary machine anymore, but use it for basic music production. I upgraded the RAM and fitted an SSD and was able to install a more recent (officially unsupported) version of MacOS on it.

Also, in line with the article. I was sentimental about giving up on it. It’s a strong piece of hardware with features that are no longer present these days, like a CD/DVD writing drive. Which I still use to create digital copies of DVDs I have lying around.

The battery is long dead, but I have a power socket and cable nearby.

So to me, it’s not dead. And I somehow hope it will last for another 10 years. (Fingers crossed)

I was using a 17″ 2009 as a ‘bedtime reader’ until the backlight died last month. Pro(?)tip: Acrobat reader can rotate viewing (unlike Preview, whose rotate operation affects the document), so that you can lie on your side and have a page-sized display.

I also have a cheese grater running Snow Leopard (the last good MacOS, and the last with Rosetta). I'd like to replace it with a VM, but apparently 10.6 still gives UTM (QEMU) trouble.

I love that you titled this 'the soul of' -- I could have done the same with my old leather jacket [https://objet.cc/kev/cuir-serie-m].

and that's why we call one of the section in our Objet journal 'Soul of an Objet'; example here with Gilles: https://objet.substack.com/p/063-nailing-down-your-style

I'd say it's a reference to Tracy Kidder's book "The soul of a new machine".

Put Linux on it to make it useable again.

I was running Linux on my 2011 MacBook Pro until the GPU finally failed, otherwise the machine was perfectly usable for web browsing.

Same, my wife still uses my 2013 Air running Arch.

$90? You got ripped off. 2014 MBP is still perfectly usable

Agreed. You could make at least double AND let sb use it instead of recycling. Reuse should come before recycle.

And that "recycling" probably ought to be put in scare quotes

> replace my 2014 MacBook Pro. It was, and is, a great machine. If not for its woefully aged processor and now-insufficient memory, I’d happily keep using it.

> my MBP was struggling to manage even a single Chrome tab, and noticed that is just was not pleasant to use this machine anymore

I don't share your experience. My Lenovo ThinkPad X220 bought in year 2012 with an Intel i5-2450M CPU and 16 GiB RAM is still usable. In particular, it runs Firefox on Windows 7 just fine, and I get acceptable performance on websites like Reddit and Twitter.

Heck I think my $15 (well now 16.50) Kimsufi server has the same or very similar CPU. It’s been a solid and capable Plex workhorse for years for me, and is still sufficient in that role.

I'm fairly certain "recycling" in this case means extracting the gold plating from the circuit boards and maybe the aluminium from the case. I think they're starting to do the batteries as well, but I'm not sure it's happening yet. Certainly all the epoxy and fibre glass and most of the minerals inside the components are unsalvagable. Most of what was a magical machine is going to be toxic garbage forever, and not on a human, but a geological timescale.

Why isn't it melted down into a giant "distillery" where you can drain certain levels for the materials? The slag would be hardened out then crushed, and maybe a centrifuge can take it from there to separate even further.

The results aren't valuable enough to pay for this kind of processing.

I was actually under the impression that this is more or less what they do, but that not everything can be recovered this way, in particular the various materials that get encased in epoxy for ease of handling, like most of electronic components.

And when you look at the semiconductors, the chips and the display, the input materials to most of it aren't really that special, as I understand, but turning the sand into thinking machines takes clean rooms, factories, transportation and processing that add up to huge amounts of energy - in some cases as much as will be used to power the device in its lifetime, I've heard. And no recycling technique is ever going to bring the embodied energy back.

I wonder if anyone has studied how the average frequency of personal computer buying, i.e., average number of years for a person to buy a new computer, has changed over time since 80s, 90s, and what factors explain the differences. I think I usually can go about 5 years before I start feeling the need to buy a new one. I wonder if that's frequent or not or average.

It's never been perf for me.

I still use my msi gx66 with a hd5870 (2010) for some on the go gaming-ish, every now and then. I was trying to use a Vaio P (shitty atom) in 2016 but even after sinking money in couldn't get it to live on battery (should try again with a USB-c pack & fixed barrel jack output cable!). I just bought another 5 year old Samsung Book 12 detachable.

If you ignore the fact that I buy repeats sometimes, be cause a) they're cheap (under $300) b) I like having one wherever I go rather than toting & re-setting up, I'm around 4 years. But it's because I want something different in form, some capability I have unserved. I went from ultraportable to affordable-value to gaming to detachable to bigger detachable with oled.

With steam play, it's kind of awesome that I never need to consider buying a gaming laptop ever again. With 5g latency really did drop a lot. A while ago I'd done the dance & setup an aws based gaming machine & that was fun, showed me that if I do want to play FPS and am physically far from home, I can set up a cloud box that will again have good latency.

Agree with the author, this series of MBPs was their opus. I have a mid 2015 and an M1 (which I bought to replace the mid-2015), but I won’t be getting rid of it. My daughter will get it to toy with after I’m done using it for car resto work.

Love that laptop. Glad to see the port load out in the new Apple silicon machines is similar to this series at least.

Still using my 2012 MBP

Isn’t a patch on my M1, but it’s still very useable for everyday stuff.

Yeah, I'm still using a 2009 ThinkPad with Debian Linux as my main workstation, and it handles numerous Firefox and Chromium tabs just fine. (I do upgrade the GPU in a server frequently, however.)

> Unfortunately, a couple months ago I realized my MBP was struggling to manage even a single Chrome tab

Probably the author is doing something much more computationally intensive than I am. And also running software from a company that wants to sell frequent hardware upgrades.

I use a Lenovo with a Celeron processor, 4GB of RAM, and Manjaro (Arch) Linux as my main computer for coding and browsing.

Swapping the HDD for an SSD and installing Linux, transformed this machine. Now it's fast enough for normal tasks, even for light photo retouching. And it loads web pages without issues. Faster with each new release of Brave.

Brave's Chromium engine is optimized for Chromebooks, which usually have low power processors, so it runs fine on almost any computer, even with Core 2 Duo processors from 2008.

I also have a Macbook Air from 2014, and it is plenty fast. If you have enough RAM, almost everything loads instantly.

To free up RAM, you can use a tab suspender or enable the battery and memory saver mode in 'chrome://flags'. Each Chromium tab creates a new process and eats a lot of memory.

https://blog.google/products/chrome/new-chrome-features-to-s...

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/tab%20suspender

You can speed up Firefox or any Chromium based browser even more by storing the browser cache in a RAM disk. I use a small 128MB cache in the RAM disk and it works great. There is plenty of information on the web to set this.

There is a quite a lot of power hidden by bloat, in these old laptops.

It seem absolutely bizarre to me that a 2014 Mac wouldn't be usable for web browsing, I wonder how much of it is just a matter of taste, or if Apple are playing down-clocking games like they do/did on their phones?

My daily driver is a Core 2 Duo machine with 8GB RAM that's a full five years older than this. There are some outlier sites it doesn't handle well (Microsoft Teams is the only one I'd call close to unusable), and I do wait more for it than I do my work machine (2020), but honestly it's fine for almost everything I need.

I have a 2015 MacBook Pro and iMac. They’re perfectly fine for at least for browsing. The MacBook Pro has had a battery replaced along with a warranty screen replacement for a manufacturing defect.

I did get a new Apple Silicon MacBook for image/video work and because I wanted a more loaded on the go machine for various. And my older Macs don’t support current OS releases. But the new system was something of a luxury.

But to the article’s basic point I still have various old hardware laying around I should recycle as it’s really mostly taking up space. Maybe I’ll keep a few things but very little is either interesting or likely to be useful.

Still sad about selling my old Samsung netbook. Was hoping to get something similar in size (10"), but with better specs. And then netbooks just disappeared.

12" MacBook is similar size because of reduced bezels (MacBook is 11.04x7.74x<=.52 2.03lbs) a little wider, way thinner and lighter) vs Samsung n150 10.4x7.4x1.4 2.8lbs) and the MacBook is a much better machine (display and computation).

May want to give one a shot...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/12-inch_MacBook

For anyone reading this in the future: it's an okay machine.

I have one. It runs 4-5 docker images, Sublime Text and half a dozen tabs just fine. It's a ridiculously portable machine that's perfect for bicycle travel. However it feels slow when using Gmail and other SPAs. Still, it's good enough to leave my "home laptop" in its case, 6 weeks after returning from my last trip. The little bastard became my main laptop by accident.

somewhat off-topic, but reminded me of an even older machine (on which "soul of a new machine" book was based) - nthe DG Eclipse. i had to deal with one of these at the BBC Addressing Unit (amazing how much stuff the BBC sends out, mostly for free, to its viewers/listeners). anyway, the DG was on its last diodes, and i replaced it with an Altos (look it up) running unix. mostly good for everyone.

I use a 2014 MacBook Pro, running Big Sur, basically daily as a low-power desktop. It is performant, runs everything I throw at it, and does so fairly silently. 16GB RAM, and an NVMe SSD in an adapter.

I don't understand why this person's was stuck on Mojave, or why it wouldn't be perfectly serviceable with an SSD upgrade and an OS reinstall.

I have been through many machines. Some of my oldest would probably actually be worth vintage money, these days.

My first machine was a (just released) Mac Plus, with 4MB of memory, and an external 20MB SCSI disk. Cost about $2500.

[UPDATE] Actually, my first machine was a Commodore VIC-20, with 3KB of RAM, a machine language monitor cartridge, and a cassette drive.

I have a similar Mac, a 2013er. I love that machine so much that I bought another, nearly the exact copy of it, a few years ago. Currently I can not imagine that I will need a better/newer Mac or another modern machine. However I am old/older now and had my share on "I need a new computer/laptop every few years".

I have the same experience OP, my Macbook Air M2 arrived 2 days ago. I came from MBP Pro 2015. I would loved to keep on using my 2015 but latest Xcode will only run on Ventura. And also Electron apps are too much for the old machine to handle. Except for Things 3 which is the only app that runs very fast on 2015.

How do you feel about your purchase so far? I'm considering the same machine, upgrading from a Macbook 12" from 2017.

I still use my 2008 MacBook with GNU/Linux and FreeBSD on it. It does all my web browsing tasks, and most stuff runs fine on it even with it's limited 2.5GB ram. I guess OS X is pretty heavy-weight.. The 2014 MacBook Pro should be fairly usable even now with these OSes instead.

Growing up I was a huge computer nerd and whenever I got a new one I'd give my old one away to someone. It's a practice I deeply regret, and I've derived considerable satisfaction from going on ebay and rebuying my old machines.

> struggling to manage even a single Chrome tab

Is Chrome significantly slower today than it was just a few years ago or is this more of a complaint about how modern web pages are constructed?

I still use an iPhone 6s—typing on it right now in fact—and the web has definitely moved on past these old devices. When I got it, it worked perfectly. Now lots of websites will run out of memory and crash the tab after a bit (e.g. new Reddit, Twitter, most news sites), and just chug in general because the rendering can't keep up. I've gotten familiar with how Safari prioritizes painting because on slow sites I can watch the sections pop in.

I've replaced the battery and the health is fine, people just don't test their stuff with old devices (I've done frontend before, I get why not).

Every developer should run the software they are about to release on 10 year old hardware. If it doesn't run or is so slow as to be absolutely unusable, then something is wrong and needs to be fixed.

Ubuntu is running on my old laptop. Much better than the MacOS.

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