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Comment by throwaway328 | Hacker News Reader

> Four years later, this MacBook Pro is still a delight. It’s the longest I’ve ever owned a laptop

Is this normal? Changing laptops every 2 or 3 years seems absolutely bonkers to me

I used to keep laptops 5+ years, but recently I've realised that as a software engineer, this may be a bit of a false economy. It's my primary tool - if I can buy a ~20% performance bump sooner than that, it's absolutely worth it (and a deductible business expense into the bargain)

On one hand – absolutely.

On the other hand, I suspect this is the main reason we have those Electron abominations and bloated web apps nowadays.

Yeah. Unfortunately as a software engineer I'm constantly on the losing side of that battle - many of the tools I'm obligated to use have long-since become enshitified :/

I keep macbooks longer, but PC laptops I've had would often start breaking in ways that were too expensive to be worth repairing around that time. I had a Dell XPS whose screen had issues and replacing it (some custom touch screen that didn't have many options aside from dell's official replacements) was something like €600 (conveniently this happened shortly after the extended warranty expired), which at that point in the laptop's life was not worth the expense.

If you hire Wayne Gretzky, don't skimp on skates.

A software engineer costs more than a laptop per month, and it's insane that companies have devs waiting on builds a single second longer than necessary. The faster the edit-compile-test cycle, the more value you get for the massive investment of engineer salary.

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