The data shows that the average laptop CPU in 2024 has 56% better thread performance, and 123% better total performance, compared to the average laptop in 2019.
Laptop thread 2019: 1689 avg. score
Laptop total 2019: 6396 avg. score
Laptop thread 2024: 2643 avg. score
Laptop total 2024: 14288 avg. score
For the specific case, just look up the benchmarks for the CPUs you are comparing.
Once a company stops being cool it dies.
Macs are fast, cool, and quiet; are there other ARM machines that are fast and not super expensive servers?
(Edit: To be clear, I'm skeptical but also if you know of one I'd be very interested)
https://system76.com/desktops/thelio-astra
It's an arm64 Linux workstation.
When on the road, I meet with clients, partners and vendors. I don't sit in coffee shops debugging complex apps. That is what my office with desktop computers and servers are for. Whilst traveling I try to address my sleep deficit.
The GPU and other I/O makes a noticeable difference to quality of life IMHO.
That, and USB-C charging is handy if you spend a lot of time on the road.
I noticed much higher callback rate after upgrading. This is admittedly a small sample size.
Any webcam does the job as long as you can recognize the person. Anyway most people use this blurry background thingy, I really don't believe that the video quality matters.
You can just buy batteries that will do USB-C PD.
Then you get a versatile external battery solution for charging multiple devices!
If it makes you feel any better, this machine replaced my previous daily driver because I realized that the machine I'd been thinking was "surely just like 5 years old right?" was 11 years old.
Replaced in quotes because for the covid years I used a desktop and didn't have to be able to function outside often enough to bother with a laptop.
Considering that 5 years ago is 2019, I figure that efficiency gains are probably also not as dramatic as I'm imagining.
What you should keep in mind is the following:
- degrading battery: replacing can get expensive to impossible depending in the model.
- Temperature: old thermal paste may need replacement, Core i7 are getting pretty hot and throttled, maybe an i5 is the better choice
- Display: dead Pixels, degrading colors, lower contrast
- touchpad: smaller, less accurate, no glass
- Connectivity: no Bluetooth 5.0, no wifi ax
I would buy a used one but only because i'm willing to do replacements and repairs. If your time is valuable and you are not an expert, it's probably not worth.
This has been a problem for me pretty much every time I've recycled an old laptop. The CPU/mobi/ram still works fine but the cooling screen battery and case are often going after a few years in and out of the backpack.
I'd love to recycle them myself, suppose I could ask the folks at Re:PC next time I do a drop off
I personally don't like external Docks at all, i prefer displays with integrated usb-c pd docks.
It's a bit like buying a used car - if you are not an expert, it's risky, but avoiding obvious red flags 70% of the time you're not getting ripped of and you save a lot of money.
I regularly sell refurbished i3/i5/i7 machines with first/second/third generation processors to customers for very low prices (think $60 for a laptop that used to cost $800). They work fine. You can check your email, do spreadsheets, use Discord, watch Netflix.
This is an extreme example, of course, but the truth is the idea you don't need something new to do the same things you were doing ten years ago. If your expectations are to do reasonable normal people stuff, you'll have no problem at all.
Minus the caveats others have mentioned about battery life, charging speed, and portability, you'll be fine.
It depends on WHAT you are using them for. Generally the public has reached a point where we don't need more processing power. Unless you're into gaming, streaming, editing, or a specific CPU intense use case we have enough computing power. The only thing left to do is make them more energy effecient.
I buy and sell used laptops and computers parts as my side hustle. There afew points that you should keep in mind, while buying used laptop. 1.Don't buy U variants or any other low power variants of the i7 processor. 2.Don't buy dual core i7 variants. 3.Try to buy 8th gen or above. Better battery life and performance ratio. 4.If you are not everyday carrying or portablity is a must , stay away from slim and designer ones, that do not have adequate cooling. 5.Check if the display is TN or an IPS panel. TN is a straight no no. 6.Do not buy the models that are targeted towards students and home users, buy something that for professional users. They are more durable and tend to last long. Example lenovo T-series, W-series, HP also has some, Dell M-series, Precision-series. 7.Check the number of output ports. 8.Physical condition of the laptop, if it is kept clean or not. The fans might be clogged, hinghes are loose, some keys might not be working. Some usb ports might not be working or loose, etc etc 9.Reapply thermal paste , even if it's running fine. Factory ones dry out quickly, so you will get the chance to clean up the fans as well
The more pressing matter is the amount of RAM the laptop has, especially given that many laptops have soldered RAM. I have a Surface 7 Pro (released in late 2019) with a Core i5 processor and 8GB of RAM that performs quite fine for Web browsing, Microsoft Office, and some programming. I don't do anything heavy-duty on my Surface Pro, though; I have more powerful machines with much more RAM for that.
And even if the numbers are great on a sunny day (or rather a cool day, to fix this I would have to sit with it in an open window), this is a real performance sink.
What you described sounds fine also.
I've been using a third-hand T480 for many (5? 7? Can't even remember anymore) years now, and it's probably the best Linux experience anyone can hope for. Performance vs. efficiency is crazy - easily hitting 20 hours, screen-on battery life after all this time and many full discharges.
It's true that performance was already good enough in many apps, so better than good enough might not be noticeable.
I suggest >9000 passmark score like the 10th gen i7-10710U [2] or newer, or earlier if it is a higher power chip.
[0]https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-2630U...
[1]https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-14700...
[2]https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i...
As an axis of comparison, I work on a really snappy and fast 5800X3D desktop with a couple of 180Hz monitors. My laptop is a 15" Macbook Pro i7 from 2018. Comparatively, the most sluggish-feeling part of the laptop is the 60Hz display. Everything else feels fine. Comparable. Laptop-y.
The differences between laptops now and 5 years ago are subtle – finer photolithography processes mean lower power draw which means longer battery life and/or faster charging. Screens are sharper, more responsive, have better color. Little things that make a difference to some and not to others.
Generally speaking, as long as it has a NVMe SSD, it’s modern? maybe?
Posed as a question of workability, the Intel macs are still on the table imo / ime.
I think if you want to run Windows it might be more painful as the upgrade treadmill might force you to a place where drivers are no longer available.
Battery life is poor compared to a Mac but about average for a PC (I've replaced the battery once so far though).
Also, you'll have USB-C ports, the newer hard drive standards, memory, latest wifi protocols (I don't know if there is one, to be honest), etc etc.
Performance of my new laptop (amd 7840hs) is better, yes, but it is much, much less significant than you would think. If not for hardware issues, I would not feel any pressure to "upgrade".
The 16GB of RAM and the SSD I put in here are what're keeping it usable. That, and I'm not trying to use it for heavy gaming or any giant programming projects.
So it works fine for everything I need to do. I sometimes look at new laptop models, but there is nothing much they have that would make any difference to me.
Otherwise agree, my main work computer remains a i7-6700k, plenty of power for anything I don't run on a server, plus low idle usage. Never needed more than 64GB RAM. I have no use for PCIe 4 or 5 speed (any nvme speed over 2GB/s is kind of wasted on me).
[edit] and watch the battery. I had batteries starting to swell after 4-5y on many laptops. You might even want to replace it preventively and while you can still find the model.
Heck, no. Moore's law applies to the doubling of transistors. But efficiency gains are still being had every year.
An i7 mobile chip released 5 years ago would likely be the i7-8750H (high performance). An intel chip released recently would be the 'Raptor Lake' generation - let's say i7-13650HX (also high performance).
The i7-13650HX is at least 50-80% faster (single-core) and over 100% faster in multi-core.
While it is true that an i7 from 5 years ago is probably sufficient for basic tasks, RAM+SSD is perhaps more important than raw CPU performance than anything else these days. If you have at least 8 cores, you'll probably have a good time.
Claims of its death have been greatly exaggerated.
>mostly give me the same speed as the latest model. Am I right? Is it worth saving the money? I mostly use spreadsheets and web apps.
Any CPU from the last 10 years can handle Excel perfectly and JavaShit mostly fine. However, RAM could become the chief issue because there's only so much bloated Chrome and JavaShit you can fit in there.
If you can find a laptop with at least 16GB of RAM you will likely be fine.
The biggest issues I have with my system is that even with a brand new battery, battery life on 45W Skylake portables isn't ideal (this system is nearly 10 years old now), yielding about 2.5 hours with light browsing or terminal work. The 4k IPS screen is also dim-ish, but I remember it being pretty nice for the era in late 2015/2016. Compared to an M3 macbook pro is like the moon compared to the sun. This isn't inherently an issue with the CPU though.
If you leave the laptop plugged in, it's fine compared to a modern machine. Connected to an external display to avoid the dim screen and I'm able to do my programming/administration work just fine. I don't need a ton of cores to run GNOME powering Chrome and Kitty + tmux + ssh.
The only real upgrades I did was bump it to a 16GB stick of RAM and add bump the WiFi to an Intel 6E 210. I'm contemplating getting a new or secondary NVMe for it. The only real complaint I have is it doesn't charge by USB-C.
Thank you for the new word :). TIL JavaShit
However, given most mobile platforms will heavily throttle the CPU on battery, than the answer may be more complicated.
CPU choices became good enough for most use-cases years ago, and only the GPU and installed RAM bumps the capability these days.
For example: A slower 24 core i7 CPU with 64GB ddr4 and rtx4070 on laptops will perform a little better than an older platform. =)
Not sure Windows 11 would run fine on either device, but NixOS sure does.
Lenovo ThinkCentre's and Dell Optiplex types.
I'll probably upgrade to 9- or 10-series in a year or two, depending on what's available for low low prices.
I'm currently on a Quad Core Q9650 desktop from only God knows how many years ago, and it works perfectly fine after upgrading to 16Gb RAM and an NVME SSD, with the latter being what a 5 year old i7 may be equipped with.
On a laptop battery life is your main concern and it is something you have to look into.
Some newer peripherals may be a bit of a problem, but if you are mostly on the go you'll be fine.
I think lately we have been seen a surge of efficiency cores because of this, turning on all that silicon to do just a little bit of computation and sitting idle is wasteful.
My impression is that this applies to a lot of server infra as well.
And then Moore Law might be close to dead but the performance increase of newer cpus isn't, the new Ryzen are pure magic and a big leap forward.
Get a ~1yo off lease Dell.
But it suffers a bit with extremely heavy simulations in Excel.