Mastodawn

I am indecisive about this post: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/12/how-and-why-i-stopped-buying-new-laptops/

On the one hand, it does make sense to buy used high-quality repairable machines instead of new replaceable glued garbage.

But, on the other hand, does it really make sense buying an extremely old laptop AND two more for spare parts because getting these parts is hard? This feels like an unnecessary multiplication of e-waste to me.

My approach is: I’m using my extremely underpowered 2020 Lenovo Thinkpad for the longest possible time and then I get an X220 from 2011, because that’s the last model with a good keyboard that’s still relatively powerful enough to handle my type of computing, and roughly the same specs as the current one, in fact. But it’s a hard sell even to me, because computing is heavyweight in a general case. Might be quite inconvenient with such a laptop, especially in two or three years from now.

Time for a SIMD-powered application stack anyone?

How and Why I Stopped Buying New Laptops

As a freelance journalist – or an office worker if you wish – I have always believed that I should regularly buy a new laptop. But older machines offer more quality for much less money.

LOW←TECH MAGAZINE

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gustav 4d ago

@aartaka I recently bought a new Macbook after having my last one for 6 years. The one before I had for 10 years. 10 years should be the minimum for any new device imo, unfortunately the 6 years one (the last of the Intel Macs) was abandoned by Apple from the start and was very cumbersome to work with.

I feel pretty bad about buying a new one. I finally caved in because of the extremely bad performance and stuttering when running ”modern” software required for my contract work. I currently need to run MS Teams and the rest of the MS suite of online tools and Unity, and it’s frustratingly slow on everything except the latest. For my own work and when I can decide, I’ll make sure everything works on 25 year old hardware, but for running ”modern” software that may or may not be forced upon you, you pretty much have to choose between suffering and paying the environmental/monetary software tax in my experience :/

That this tax is present for office/communication level software is mind-boggling to me and something I desperately want to change in the future.

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Artyom Bologov

@gustav yes, I had to request a work laptop for the heavyweight software the company used. So yeah, many modern and collaborative workflows are super resource-hungry. A shame.