Ask HN: How long do you use your personal laptop before replacing it?
0. What's your profession?
1. Which laptop do you use as your personal laptop?
2. How long do you use yours before getting a new laptop?
1. 14” MacBook Pro - M1 Pro
2. My current laptop is about 4 years old. Historical, I’ve updated more frequently, but every time I think of doing it I don’t see a point.
The M1 has held up amazingly well, a new one would give a minor speed update for some stuff. I don’t use my personal laptop a ton these days, and don’t push it very hard.
My work laptop is the same chip, just a large screen. It’s off lease at this point, so I’m due for a new one, but I’m not feeling it as an issue where I’m reaching out about it.
My past justification was that Macs held their value well, so I could sell my old one, get a new one, and always be pretty up to date, for a more modest price. With the M1 Pro, I think I may have skipped an entire upgrade cycle already, and will likely skip another one. It is also possible that it feels more like that because Apple is finally shipping regular updates again. For many years during the Intel period, the update cycle seemed random, which I did not like and it made the upgrades less predictable.
In personal life, currently 17 years. Lenovo T400 still rocking on. Beyond SOME web browsing there just isn't anything yet that heavy that demands anything more than this thing.
As that distro is built to be 100% free/libre software it sort of unofficially targets the T400 as the upper limit of the hardware. As such it is all kept fairly lean.
Yes, other than my phone, I did go 'The Full Stallman'.
1. I don't. I have a Mac Mini. I don't quite understand why people have laptops at home if they always use it in the same place. I spent years getting my office setup to be great so I don't need a computer I can move around.
2. Mostly dependent on what shiny new Mini is available. I had an 8GB M1 for 5 years, then moved to an 24GB M4 Pro last year because local AI looked fun. I'll probably upgrade to an M5 later this year because there are tangible improvements in the hardware.
If it's not for work I won't be using a computer, so my phone is enough.
> I don't quite understand why people have laptops at home if they always use it in the same place.
A lot of people wil be using it from the sofa or generally in a shared space where it's not convenient to have a permanent computer setup.
Those who usually use it in one place may want the flexibility of occasionally using it from the coffee shop or while on vacation.
Update: On consideration, the reason I kept buying laptops for so long was that I thought having the option to be mobile was valuable. It turns out, based on my actual usage history, it's not valuable to me at all.
As the question was 'personal laptop'. Your work Mac mini may stay in your office, but electronic device do you use for non-work? Just your phone?
0. Software developer
1. Current laptop is HP EliteBook 835 G7 (16 GB/256 GB SSD).
2. I bought the current laptop secondhand for few hundred a year ago. I expect to get 5+ years out of this one.
Previous laptop was MacBook Pro (15", mid 2015) that I would probably still be using, but I need to change it's keyboard and haven't bothered to do that yet. That lasted for 8 years on my use.
However, I decided to switch away from laptops entirely when my last one broke. Towers fit my situation much better.
1. m1 max 32gb
2. i bought it used for $900, i'll use it until it no longer works for my needs (build speeds, running docker stuff locally) and then i'll get whatever future renewed macbook i can get on amazon for 900-1000 bucks
1. MacBookPro M4 base model.
2. roughly 10 years ( my last one was a MCP retina 2015, and before that linux notebooks lasting about the same time ).
I’ve bought my last MacBook Pro in 2015 and replaced it with a framework 12 this year.
But that’s what i wanted, I was looking for a native device to test my apps and libs on to see how they perform on a constrained device.
I got a Ryzen 9 in a desktop when I need speed.
1 - Thinkpad
2 - Minimum 3 years. anything above that is bonus. (My 2015 MBP is still running fine)
1. macbook pro, generally maxed out spec at time of purchase
2. 5-6 years
1. Dell Latitude 7490
2. As long as I can.
I think I've been on the Latutude for about 4 years now, but it's a second-hand device coming up on seven or eight years old. I generally don't need much oomph for the stuff I like to do at home (I don't game for example).
I had a series of XPS laptops, but the battery life in use was poor and they tended to need the battery replacing quite quickly (puffy batteries - possibly because they run quite hot).
Prior to that I'd been on second hand Thinkpads, with the X220s still kicking around somewhere in case the main device dies.
I reckon the current Dell has at least a couple more years in it for my purposes. It has 64Gb ram so until website bloat gets out of control I'm good I think.
I have a fairly fast mini-pc with oodles of ram on the network that I use as a sacrificial yolo machine for Claude, and an elderly desktop machine with a decent GPU for local running of LLMs. The latter is noisy and in practice it hasn't been turned on for months.
I hate Macs, but envy you the battery life and spiffy Arm CPU (yes, I know about Asahi, but until one can safely entirely wipe MacOS from the Mac I'm not interested).
I generally haven't had much trouble with second hand Dell and Thinkpad machines; perhaps buying second hand means that the real lemons are already ewaste? Though the XPS machines bought new were fine aside from the annoyingly brief battery life.
Currently using a Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 13 under Linux for work stuff and I like that (much lighter) so if I can get one second hand with enough memory I might choose that when/if the Dell eventually feels too slow.