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Comment by asdff | Hacker News Reader

The type of person shelling out 3k for a computer is not running it until the wheels come off.

I don't think you can say that -- I paid about that for my 2021 M1 Max with 64GB and I'm still using it four years later as my main machine. There's an argument to be made to buy an expensive computer every 5 years or so rather than a cheaper one that you need to replace every 2 years because it's become unbearably slow.

My laptop is still a 2012 MBP. Granted I don’t use a laptop as my main computer, I use a hackintosh desktop. I might finally buy a new laptop in 2026, 14 years is not bad. If my new laptop can last that long I see no problem maxing out the specs at time of purchase.

Same here: I paid about twice as much for my 2013 Mac Pro that I’ll probably keep using until I replace it with an M5 Mac Studio at some point next year, which I’ll then plan to use for at least 5 years.

As for camera lenses, I expect my collection of manual focus F-mount Zeiss primes to have a longer useful life than their owner.

same here; I bought a M2 Max with 96GB of RAM almost 3 years ago, for €4K, but a client paid half of it for a 1 year retainer. This machine is still the best thing i've worked with, and I have zero intentions of switching this machine anytime soon (i'll probably need to replace it's battery in the future). Rather keep the same machine for 5 or 6 years than to buy a crappier one every 2 years

Even if you are buying at the low end, hardware simply doesn't age that quickly nowadays. Comparing against of the M series chips, I'd be surprised if anyone found an M1 Air unbearably slow in a blind test. In contrast, there was a huge leap in going from say the Pentium 4 to a Core 2 Duo.

I actually find M1 Air class performance still more acceptable for all my usual dev tasks. I might only need a beefier machine for the extra RAM if I'm spinning up a lot of VMs. Otherwise though, the raw CPU performance is still quite fine.

That's so far from my personal idea of "running it till the wheels fall off" that your comment genuinely reads like a parody of an out of touch wealthy person trying to justify their wild spending habits.

I've been using the same PC that I built in 2013 continuously since then. Every four or five years or so I'll buy one part in the $500 range to keep it updated. It's currently got a Ryzen 7800X3D, 32GB DDR5, and a Radeon RX 6700XT, so it's easily outperforming a brand new $3000 Macbook Pro in most workloads that I actually care about.

My initial investment in it was $1200. My total investment over the last 12 years has been about $3000.

Buying disposable computers simply does not make any financial sense to me.

What does the purchase price have to do with it? Seems like it would entirely depend on circumstances and constraints, rather than cost, how long someone would run something

Tells me they are price insensitive and probably get a new computer every couple of years.

That reasoning does not make any sense. I spend $3-4k on a MBP and run it till it fall apart, usually 5-7 years later.

I reckon it makes some sense for Apple users. You have to be willing (and financially able) to upgrade when Apple says. Apple forcefully obsoletes their products way too quickly to be a viable option if you care about longevity[0]. I have five excellent-condition still-perfectly-working Apple products next to me, none of which have current operating system support from Apple.

[0] EDIT: for reference, my previous ThinkPad lasted me 14 years.

14 years as your main driver ? Because that what we’re talking about.

14 is a indeed very long. Let’s instead assume 12, it’s 2013 and you got a top specced T440 with 4th gen i7. That’s actually not bad and the build quality is like a tank as all Thinkpads. Nothing I would use as daily driver myself but having used many other thinkpads of that generation I can see why others are still getting by with it today.

Since we are talking about OS support. 4th gen Intel isn’t supported by Windows 11, so you’d have to upgrade to Linux.

Out of curiosity, how much of that thinkpad were you able to upgrade? Could that be the difference between 5 and 14 years here?

It makes sense for some people, and doesn't for others. Not particularly surprising or insightful.

>I have five excellent-condition still-perfectly-working Apple products next to me, none of which have current operating system support from Apple.

If they're working perfectly, why does it matter if they have current operating support? It doesn't seem like you're dependent on Apple.

Software drops support for certain OS versions even if the device still can run it.

The first iPad Pro can’t run adobe products for example.

The Mac is a bit more resilient to this, but it’s still worrying as yearly improvements become subtler.

Yea, this is the bigger problem: 3rd party software developers drop support for "too old" operating systems WAY too early. Especially on mobile. Some developers only support one major previous version, which is insane.

So, Apple leaves old hardware high and dry by not supporting them with operating systems, and 3P software leaves users high and dry by dropping support for operating systems. It's like they are working together to create e-waste.

> The first iPad Pro can’t run adobe products for example.

That’s more on Adobe than Apple though right?

I'd argue it's a bit of both. In my case, I have an iPad 3, which runs iOS 9 compatible apps, but iOS itself doesn't backup the app files, so when various developers pulled their files off the app store for those old iOS versions, I lost access to the old software that did work, which really doesn't make want to buy another iOS device. Less of a problem on mac though.

I guess if it was a paid app I can see the irritation that would cause. Free apps not so much.

In terms of what I'd hypothetically feel entitled to, absolutely, but it only matters because that basic level of control isn't there

I use Macs to develop Mac OS software. I need a recent OS to run the latest XCode and I need to test on the latest OS that my customers are using.

Out of about a dozen Apple devices in our household, none of them can be updated to the latest operating system. It's a huge problem with the Apple ecosystem, I'd say one of the biggest problems. Their hardware vastly outlasts their software, comically so.

Meh, I've been a mac user for 15 years professionally, usually alongside some desktop pc for gaming, and I upgrade when I damn well please, which is typically when they have a notable leap in performance, my laptop gets stolen, or my needs change, which should hardly be surprising in terms of progression through a career.

Their recent hardware is proving much more capable as tools than the budget i5 I had before, so I upgraded. In terms of machinery expenses, it's more than I'd like to spend on RAM and ssd than I'd prefer (their pricing ladder is comical) but the product is amazing. I'm going to wait as long as possible before I upgrade to Tahoe though, seems almost DoA

Describe “forcefully obsoletes”?

I ran a 2008 MBP until 2019. Then…gave it to my wife who used it until 2022. Finally retired it after the battery swelled. I suspect I could have replaced the battery and she could have got another couple of years out of it if I really needed.

Not once did that device ever feel obsolete.

I think we have different definitions of obsolescence. Mine is basically "the ability to continue to use the device for the original purpose that I purchased it for." In my case, developing Mac OS software (that's the only reason I own Macs, I do all of my day to day computing on Windows and Linux.) I completely agree with you that the hardware is in no sense obsolete, the software is a different matter. For example my original Retina iPad started feeling obsolete as soon as Safari stopped rendering modern websites, even though the device hardware does not feel obsolete. Another example is that every Mac Mini that I have bought was useless to me as soon as I could not upgrade the OS and run the latest XCode on it.

In my view the forcefull obsolescence mechanism comprises the following strongly interacting practices:

1. Not supplying operating system updates for "older" hardware (actually not that old). Depending on your security posture this point alone may be sufficient.

2. Aggressively deprecating APIs and nudging developers to use the new APIs (i.e. nudging applications to not support the operating systems that run on the older OS that you have to run on the old hardware -- see point 1)

3. Ratcheting operating system upgrades with new hardware. There is no way to control the OS version that you use independent of hardware: replacing a machine always forces an OS upgrade.

4. Requiring the latest OS to run the latest development tools.

In combination, these practices create a treadmill that keeps everything "new" and anything older than 3 years not compatible. There's probably more to it than this but that's what I could write down quickly.

I have the M1 Max. It’s still going hard. Not planning to replace it anytime soon.

Bullshit. I shelled $3k for my MBP M1 back in 2021 and I intend to use it until I can’t anymore.

It depends on the person and the use case. Different personalities etc

That's not particularly rational given how quickly computers progress in both performance and cost, a current-gen $1k Macbook Air will run circles around your M1. You'd probably be much better off spending the same amount of money on cheaper machines with a more frequent upgrade cadence. And you can always sell your old ones on eBay or something.

i like using computers until they break on me, i've never really felt (for the usage i give my macbook) that it is lacking in power. Even after, what, 5 years?

i think i'll be upgrading in the next 2 or maybe 3 years if apple puts OLED screens on their new machines as it is rumored.

Respectfully, this is also bullshit for my use case. For me, the M1 purchase was a step up compared to Intel; the rest is diminishing returns for now.

It’s also not true if you care about certain workloads like LLM performance. My biggest concern for example is memory size and bandwidth, and older chips compare quite favorably to new chips where “GPU VRAM size” now differentiates the premium market and becomes a further upsell, making it less cost-effective. :( I can justify $3k for “run a small LLM on my laptop for my job as ML researcher,” but I still can’t justify $10k for “run a larger model on my Mac Studio”

See https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/discussions/4167#discu...

There are other factors to consider such as screen size, storage and RAM, connectivity and ports, active versus passive cooling (thermal throttling), and speaker quality. Additionally, the M1 Pro GPU benchmarks still outperform the latest M4 Air.

For example if I spec out a 13" M4 MBA to match my current 14" M1 Pro MBP, which with tax came to ~$3k in 2021 (32GB RAM, 1TB storage), that $1k MBA ends up being ~$1900. Now that more frequent upgrade cadence doesn't make as much sense financially. After one purchase and one upgrade, you've exceeded the cost of the M1 Pro MBP purchase.

Overall I don't disagree with your sentiment, especially for more casual use cases, but progress will never stop. There will always be a newer laptop with better specs coming out. I personally would rather beef up a machine and then drive it until it dies or can no longer perform the tasks I need it to.

I have an M2 Ultra. I don't see myself getting rid of it for another 5 years at least.

M2 here also, still flies for cross platform mobile development. The 250GB storage space is a bit tight without external storage but my dev environment is lean and purges caches every day so I manage easily.

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