My daily driver is older than I thought; it's positively vintage
blog.jgc.org
blog.jgc.org
I had one of those `63 Darts with a straight 6 in it back in the 80s. It was a blue four door. I put snow tires in the back and drove that car all over the dirt roads in the Tehachapi Mountains north of Los Angeles.
One day I drove to the very end of a dirt road way up near the top of a mountain there and was just sitting there soaking in the view when I heard two big 4Wheeler Pickups rumbling up the road and when they came around the bend in the road where it ended and saw me in that old Dart sitting there it just crushed their egos.
That is truly a great car!
[0] https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/sparcbook3000st-the-coo...
[1] https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/sparcbook-teardown/
I still have the dot matrix printout of everything I ran / wrote on a TI-99/4a in the early nineties. I wish my parents hadn't s#!tcanned that machine when I went to college, I bet I could write markdown with a modem and some kind of VCS on it to publish content even on the modern web with that old dog.
Anyway, that's not to hijack your comment - even at the time, probably almost 15 years after the TI-99/4a came out I felt like there were restrictions on what you could do with a machine that kept you focused on the task at hand in really productive ways. So I totally understand.
Note: I keep my fingernails quite short. I do type a lot, though.
But “My belief is that computer security is highly overrated” is just ignorant.
I do love vintage gear, but as a daily diriver, the rest of the machine looks, um, very vintage. Check those bezels! Though the LCD is barely visible anyway.
I facepalm'd when I realized the image itself was in the same article.
11 years of daily driving.
I hosted a minecraft server on a last gen P4 because the single threaded performance was that good (headless ubuntu). Intel hits these high spots were some hot chip keeps up with the next 7 years of CPUs.
Impressive lifespan nevertheless.
Now that I think about it, pastor's son was a gamer that spent all his time at the church, and I always thought it weird that a church had a discrete graphics card with DVI output in a back office machine...
My primary home server (ZFS pools and hosting many VMs) is one I built in 2010, still nothing wrong with it. I keep wanting to upgrade to a new one but there's nothing wrong with it so can't really justify change.
My desktop mac mini is from 2014, works just fine. My windows laptop (toshiba) is from about 2009-2010 (I bought it used in 2011) and still works just fine (I don't use windows generally but have a bunch of niche astrophotography programs which are windows only).
Meanwhile... A Mac work laptop from 2021 lasted a year before the right side usbc ports both died. A Mac laptop from 2021 lasted a year before the screen died completely. The new machines have terrible quality problems.
It has no moving parts and I hoped this could lead to it lasting well beyond what I would normally expect.
Regardless of part wear, or the apparent lack thereof, it feels to me as performant as the day it was born.
A slightly older XP Dell only has a single-core 32-bit CPU so no W11 for you, but W10 32-bit is still current and there's only 4GB of memory anyway. Debian on 32-bit looks like it may be supported for somewhat longer. Uses parallel PATA and/or serial SATA drives.
Both have floppies, parallel printer ports, serial COM ports, dual DVD readers/burners and telephone modems.
But the real reason I'm not upgrading is because of software compatibility:
1. This is about as new a machine I can get that runs Adobe CS6 & Lightroom with perpetual licenses. (F your subscription)
2. The new M machines do not appear to run the Intel-driven CAD software I currently run in Bootcamp, not even in emulation. (I'm not keen on owning 2 machines for my dayjob, nor wholly converting to Windows.)
Meanwhile my less mission critical software has gotten cheeky lately and started telling me my machine is too old. Spotify and Signal both refuse to update further and launch with big nastygram windows saying so. Wheeee.
For #2, I think if it was me and I really wanted to stick with the Mac and upgrad I’d just run Parallels. Sure, it’s yet another license, but it runs a lot of stuff pretty well, including some 3D games, so I think it might be worth trying.
Another part of me wonders if Crossover/Wine could run that CAD software.
Of course, you want to be able to run these on a trial before you buy any hardware.
If you’re not aware of OpenCore Legacy I might as well mention that in case you need a newer version of macOS on that hardware.
Feature-wise, maybe, but UX is totally different.
If you are using the latest Adobe products at work, for example, you would want the same UI when you are doing something at home.
How has software qualitatively improved since 2017? Even since 2010? We are still slinging the same sht around together with an ever increasing amount of 'node modules' on our disks.
The cause of climate change is not the use of fossil fuel, but the extreme extraction and processing of raw material for releasing the next new thing that will increase quarterly revenue targets leaving in its wake extreme waste that no one knows what to do with except force third world countries absorb it.
I myself still run a decade old macbook air - with most hardware parts replaced for a second or third time, except the mainboard: On the Ventura with all security fixes instead of Big Sur. Its awesome.
Luckly I went for 8gb and i7 back then. And swapped the NVME with an adapter + vanilla drive, so no pricey upgrades. The computer has 4tb diskspace now ...
Linux (Debian Stable) runs great on it, and it has TrackPoint with a non-chiclet keyboard. And if you drop it on something, the something will probably get hurt more.
It doesn't seem "vintage". My previous one, made in 2009, also still runs Debian Stable well, including when running 3 different Web browsers and a couple other bloated programs at once.
I’m actually thinking of purchasing a X220 or X220T as a smaller, more portable model of the same era. To me, this era of thinkpad is the pinnacle of laptop design. Unsurpassed. Robust and practical.
I've also wanted to get X220, for more portable, but still matching keyboard. (I currently have some X200 units, with better displays than X220 usually has, but different keyboard layouts. They'll be a bit of work to sell, for the upgrade, since I'll have to replace the custom Coreboot that's on them.)
Can't you get a barrel connector on top of a modern GaN adapter? It should be much smaller!
You may need a circuit to negotiate the USB-PD, then to ouput 20V from that, but it should be possible.
It could even be a very interesting project: expose an artificial resistance on the barrel plug to simulate the Lenovo AC wattage resistor by matching what the USB-PD can deliver.
Make sure that you don't have another T520 lying around!
And a 7-year old machine isn’t necessarily obsolete either.
Apple uses those two words to mean specific things (vintage: >= 5y, < 7y; obsolete: >= 7y) as it relates to their support policies. Full support up to at least 5 years, some support up to 7, no support from then on.
Honestly, it’s pretty refreshing to be able to summarise 99% of a company’s product support lifecycle in such a small paragraph.
In 1990 you’d still have quite a few 1980s era machines, and even into 1995 there would be old 8086 machines doing their thing.
But then everything changed when Windows 95 attacked, suddenly the upgrade treadmill was on and those older machines stopped being used not because they were to slow or broken, but because upgraders were dumping used hardware, and you might as well.
Somewhere after the proliferation of SSDs I feel it slowed down again.
After 1995 you had convergence on Wintel: they won the desktop architecture wars, the address space was large and flat so applications could grow, and Linux, Unicode and the Web were still nascent but all existed in a "right place, right time" sense to drive adoption.
The SSD era slowed things down because right around that time, the focus shifted towards mobile computing, which saw the same treadmill from the start of the iPhone era. The older generation phones of this era are largely uninteresting curios, perhaps valued only if they happen to store an old game that got removed from the stores.
IoT seems to be the next wave, still working towards the big shake-out and standards convergence: "computer as a feature" is increasingly possible to a degree that was unreasonable before.
That was quite an upgrade.
A classic tower workstation, beautifully engineered.
And that is for a machine that is likely slower / less performant than a modern one with much lower draw. Your power bills may thank you.
It is very irksome to have to reboot due to a hardware issue and then discover that some software change possibly months or years ago broke startup.
Having to scramble after a power outage to get a bootable Linux image to fix it wasn’t ideal.
No way to have discovered this without a hard power cycle, a soft reset didn’t repro it.
That said, the M series laptops are such a huge step forward it's a little mind blowing!
Interesting observation: my remote junior colleague has a M2 Pro MBP with more memory than me. We're running the same OSX and node versions. Spinning up a development environment in a project using vite and a Java DB process running inside docker is about 3x faster on my old Intel than on their M2 Pro. The problem isn't anything trivial, and I'm struggling to help them figure it out over Zoom.
Not saying it isn't fixable, but I suspect there are still ARM potholes you trip on.
It's always using a VM so I am guessing Rosetta is involved and a x86 emulation ist happening. (Again, this is a guess!)
If docker is a priority, Asahi Linux might be a great option, but this will of course create new problems, as it's far from done, and switching to Linux is a project on its own.
I for myself use a Debian ARM64 VM in UTM to have the most control over the VM and then just use docker in there. Works much better than I anticipated.
Why would it use Rosetta and x86 emulation? Docker can work on arm as well.
A customer of mine was running the full test suite of a Rails web app in 50 seconds on his M1 Mac, in a docker container. I ran it in 75 seconds on Linux on a 2014 laptop. 50 vs 75 could be a large improvement but not as much as one would expect from the difference of hardware: CPU, RAM, bus, everything is much faster on the M1 Mac and yet it's wasting too many resources running an x86 docker on ARM.
Remap the useless Caps Lock key to Esc in system settings (no third party tools needed) and problem solved?
{
"description": "caps_lock to left_control or escape",
"manipulators": [
{
"from": {
"key_code": "caps_lock",
"modifiers": {
"optional": ["any"]
}
},
"to": [
{
"key_code": "left_control"
}
],
"to_if_alone": [
{
"key_code": "escape"
}
],
"type": "basic"
}
]
}What's causing the issue? Perhaps the coin cell battery is drained (and I didn't know the right way to test CR2032s at the time, so I thought it was good)? Or is the EC fried or corrupted, perhaps because I did a botched BIOS reflash which corrupted the EC, and had to reprogram the EC in flashrom over multiple passes while skipping "hung" flash blocks (the pin to hold the EC in reset didn't make flash properly writable)? Afterwards the laptop would boot, but dumping the EC flash again revealed the image was changed again. Or did the EC die due to flash corruption that occurred afterwards (either from flaky chips or because I damaged it earlier)?
it wasn't an obscure hardware issue related to corrupted firmware, but just the laptop (Windows 7) dies when it tries to go from sleep to hibernate after 6 hours
The more I use it, the more I love it: Everything I need is readily available through the package manager. There are no interruptions and no nag screens. There is an unobtrusive icon at the top telling me that an update is available, but I get to install it on my schedule.
I've resisted the urge to sign into Google for Gmail and YouTube and my other social media accounts and I'm actually amazed at how little I miss it (though I still use those services from my phone, but I've been using them less)
Also, it being a home-built computer it comes with a couple of quirks: Its fan is extremely noisy, when you scroll the mouse wheel you hear a crackling noise on the speakers and the keyboard is very uncomfortable, but all of these gives it a "personality" that only endears it to me.
I started working on it pretty intensively again in the past few months and... man, for being 11+ years old it keeps up. Turns out I got lucky with the longevity of the i7-3820, GTX 770, and (what at the time was a ridiculous for a home machine) 32gb of ram in it.
Benchmarked (anecdotally) against a more modern (2021 build, 3x the cost) desktop, raytraced renderings still take 8x as long. But if I'm designing / modeling in 3d or BIM there is LITERALLY no dropoff.
I'm still going to make a new build soon because I'm getting back into not having time for that 8x hit on renderings. But I had no idea when I put this thing together 11 years ago that it would serve me so well for so long.
Basically you can outperform that rig with an Intel Atom N100 with 1/10th the TDP of the A10-5800K. You could jump on Amazon and grab a Beelink mini PC or similar for about $200 and have an entire system that maxes out at 35W, idles at about 12-13W.
If you save 20W of power on your idle and your power costs 20 cents per KW/h the new system would pay for itself in less than 6 years. If you’re in a country like the UK or Germany your payoff is 3 years or less.
My work notebook is an upgraded 2012 T430.
No no no. The sound is irreplaceable. I ended up with FUJITSU MPB3043AT. Tried Quantum Fireball 2GB but it was too noisy.
EDIT: I do have an 80MB MFM drive but that would be weird.
I’m guessing your Touch Bar system can do this too but I have no way to try it. Sometimes Apple makes random little shortcut modifications when they change button layouts.
Control Command Q also locks the screen. I used to have that combo as a fast habit.
I jumped off the Touch Bar as soon as I could. I sorta miss the smooth volume and brightness adjustment but it’s not as good as having the keys be physical and always in the same place. No more looking down.
If they could make a row of physical keys with little OLED screens and maybe a couple of customizable knobs and/or sliders that could be assigned to anything that might be a really useful concept. But the need to look down at the Touch Bar really killed its magic for me.
The other thing you get on a modern Mac that’s arguably under-hyped is just the fact that the function keys are full size. It’s so much nicer.
My oldest computer still in 24/7 use is my 2014 FreeNAS, but it's using a monitor that's so old I don't even know.
Old hardware is great, but I do appreciate just how much better LCD panels have gotten over time.
It did in the WinTel world, after the 4th gen i7. Performance stayed flat from 5th gen until 10th or so. It's better after that. Between these later CPUs and and NVMe drives, it feels like computing has picked up a lot.
At least until Windows 11 ad/crapware bloats it all away.
I can’t spend £3,000 on a device that does that, no matter how great the rest of the machine is, as I don’t do graphics work. Guess I’m not their target customer.
So, my “obsolete” MacBook Pro 2015 continues to be my web surfing machine and my AMD desktop for real work. Thanks Apple!
They draw more power than I'd like, but they perform very well on the workloads I throw at them.
I'd save a good amount of money by purchasing newer energy-efficient hardware, but even when presented with the numbers I can't rationalize away the sticker-shock.
15 years of daily driving.
Especially if you take care of the battery and/or replace it some time.
Daily Final Cut Pro 1080 video editing, lightroom editing in a catalogue with 5000+ images from a Sony a7iii, web stuff, lots of document writing.
If it could edit 4k video, I would have no reason to upgrade, but I've been eyeing used M1 prices lately...
My current laptop is a Lenovo P53 from 2020. I still think of it as being 'new' but it's coming up for about four years old.
I have a 2011 Air that I resolved with an M1. I expect to put Linux on the 2011. Devuan and i3.
I expected something from the 2000s being old, something from the 1980s being vintage
> Products are considered vintage when Apple stopped distributing them for sale more than 5 and less than 7 years ago.
~ https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201624
Products older than that are considered "obsolete".
I've got a range of software which I know exactly how to use. I can focus on creativity and productivity, not learning how to use a new tool before I can produce anything of value.
Command+.
Works on iPad with keyboard case (on which I use vim in iSH) too!
I still want one though.
my 'F' key is broken but still mostly works, the touch bar randomly doesn't work right (i think that's software though), and the battery is mostly shot. other than that, and the fact that i can no longer upgrade to the latest OS, this thing is quite adequate.
That being said, it's probably using a 7th gen intel core cpu, which was one generation before the move from 4 to 6 cores for many desktops cpus.
(technically it’s from 2021 and it’s now 2024 but it’s closer to 2 and a half years old)
i bought it primarily for photography. it has a 5k wide-gamut screen, and when i bought it used, an equivalent LG monitor actually cost more.
there has just never been a reason to upgrade. the 2022 studio display has the same resolution and color depth.
despite the upgrade (replacing the ugly 1366 panel to a proper FullHD, IPS one) wouldn't cost me much (around $50 for the panel and probably another $50 for the work and maybe cleaning) it would be still a decade old laptop with an anemic i3-4010U (2c/4t 1700MHz), the awful Intel(R) Wireless-N 7260 and a fucking pedal instead of the touchpad. Sure, I can replace the wireless card too (if Lenovo would allow me and I would find the proper one if it doesn't) but at this point... It's easier to add another $50-100 and just buy something a more modern.
But hey, if my main notebook would fail, just as JGC, I would be fine with it because it's a glorified terminal:
> a lot of my computing needs being offloaded to the cloud
Sure, I could get a USB WiFi card but…ick.
I’m paying for symmetrical fiber, I want to use those speeds. When I’m uploading stuff to servers it really can slow me down to have slow WiFi. I could actually really use WiFi 7 to finally un-bottleneck my connection and I’m just waiting here semi-patiently for new client devices and cheaper access points to launch.