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Comment by dotnet00 | Hacker News Reader

Worth thinking about efficiency/battery life. Might be fine performance wise, but if you tend to need it to last a while unplugged, a more recent laptop will be much better at the same performance level. I had kind of sworn off laptops because last time I had one, the battery life just wasn't useful. But nowadays they're actually good enough to treat as proper portable devices.

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This is the real advantage. Any crapbox with 16GB of ram is good enough for most things (unless you work on JVM microservices), the main benefit of the new laptops is the unreal battery life.

That, and USB-C charging is handy if you spend a lot of time on the road.

It's worth it to note: When doing interviews for a new role, the camera quality really does matter.

To whom does it really matter? How do you know?

Thanks for asking. I should have mentioned this is based on anecdotal personal experience. I used to have an ancient laptop with a bad mic and a low res webcam.

I noticed much higher callback rate after upgrading. This is admittedly a small sample size.

I agree with you that if you're doing a lot of remote interviews having a decent camera is worth the investment. I have no doubt that people will subconsciously judge people who have meet through a potato.

In my experience audio is an order of magnitude more important than video.

In my experience working in a remote team, what matters is the audio. Ideally a headset (so that your voice does not get cut while someone is talking) with a decent mic. Not understanding what the remote person says is very frustrating.

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 also get a USB webcam for like 15 bucks. Coming from the integrated 720p cam my laptop had, a 15 buck webcam was wonderful.

If you get a laptop with removable batteries, it doesn't really matter. Just carry a backup battery if you need it and you outdo modern laptops with non-removable batteries.

That's adding more weight to carry around, and anyway, if needed, modern laptops can also use battery banks, which once again puts them ahead. Bonus that since laptops tend to use USB-C nowadays, you get the versatility of being able to use that bank for both phone and laptop.

USB-C is amazing, but my 2019 laptop has it.

Oh man, it really has been 5 years since 2019...

LLOL:D Yeah, the other thing that really helps get nice tech into the hands of cheapskates like me is the truly relentless march of time:P

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.

The laptop I got last year also "replaced" one that was 11 years old, from the awful interval where they had internal batteries and limited ports but custom chargers and almost useless batteries.

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.

You don’t need to do that anymore!

You can just buy batteries that will do USB-C PD.

Then you get a versatile external battery solution for charging multiple devices!

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