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This looks really cool, but the author... is... replacing their laptop every year? Like, I'm writing this on an 8 year old MBP that has survived as my round-the

• flatiron 5y ago
  2013 MacBook Air daily driver here. MagSafe? Usb A? Sd card reader? User replaceable battery? Runs Linux? All checks. It’s light on RAM (which for just chrome and light app use honestly it’s fine).
  • tucosan 5y ago
    It just haa a horrible screen resolution.
    • flatiron 5y ago
      yeah 1440x900 does kinda stink, but the screen is so small it doesn't really bother me too much. plasma does a good job shrinking itself down enough and virtual desktops help. 99% its a full screen chromium window so who cares.
      • lotsofpulp 5y ago
        I would guess that MacBook Airs, especially the current ones, are sufficient for the needs of 80%, maybe even 90%, of the entire laptop market, who I presume just need to be able to use a browser and spreadsheets. And they last for years and years, and I doubt the cost:performance:longevity ratios can be beat.
• lapetitejort 5y ago
  Further down the article: > The environmental consequences of that system weren't lost on me, even given my very good track-record of re-homing my old computers with people who needed them.
• qolop 5y ago
  The author does address that > The environmental consequences of that system weren't lost on me, even given my very good track-record of re-homing my old computers with people who needed them.
  • czechdeveloper 5y ago
    That's not really addressing it. It's just acknowledging it.
    • dathinab 5y ago
      If it causes other people not to by new laptops, it kinda is addressing it. (As long as we assume the people getting the old laptop would have bought a new laptop, which might or might not be the case.)
• deleted 5y ago
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• gattilorenz 5y ago
  And apparently it made sense for him to pay 150$/year to get his laptop fixed in 24h if needed, and buy two powerbooks at once... I guess what he really should have bought is a Toughbook instead of a ThinkPad?
  • ndiddy 5y ago
    Buying a new thinkpad every year is especially confusing to me given that Lenovo’s switch from mobile to ultrabook processors in the x40 series meant that for around 5 years, buying a newer thinkpad than the x30 series meant getting a speed downgrade.
• bluedino 5y ago
  >> replacing their laptop every year? Not really that uncommon especially with a MacBook Pro where a new one is released...every year. How much sense it makes, that's another story.
  • JohnBooty 5y ago
    Ignoring the (potentially substantial) environmental costs, if you do it "correctly" the total cost of ownership is about the same. If you buy a $2000 Mac and use it for as long as reasonably, it's going to depreciate by several hundred dollars (let's say, roughly $300) a year. At a certain point it's worth nearly zero, and you must buy a new laptop. After 6-7 years your total outlay is $2000. Alternatively, every year or two you can sell the old one for a few hundred dollars less than the new model, and buy the new model. You always have a new laptop. And your total outlay is still only about $2000. Plus you are covered by free AppleCare every time you buy the new one. Plenty of people do this with mobile phones and automobiles and other things as well. Please note that I am not advocating it. I was still using my 2015 laptop until very recently. But economically it is not necessarily insane. (Assuming you are selling the old laptops, that is. It's not clear to me that the author is doing that. He says he's donating/rehoming them. Not sure if that includes selling)
    • bluedino 5y ago
      The downtime of setting up a new laptop, migrating data, etc is going to be worth several hundred dollars to many people
      • JohnBooty 5y ago
        Agreed. Though, with Macs, it's trivial - their migration tool is peerless. (As one would certainly expect and demand: since they control the whole software/hardware stack)
  • TwiztidK 5y ago
    Many products are released on a yearly basis, but very few people are upgrading every year.
• deleted 5y ago
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• riffic 5y ago
  "the author" here is well known writer Cory Doctorow. No one here seems to be making this connection, but pluralistic.net is his blog.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • teekert 5y ago
    Ah, hehe, I got confused opening the tweet. I wonder why I had in my head that this was a woman writing the story, must be the monica-byrne in the url :)
• tombert 5y ago
  Back when I was making crap wages, I would get the cheapest laptops I could afford that would more or less give me decent performance (on the order of ~$500-600). It's not too hard to find a new laptop that performs well at a reasonable price, but you always run the risk of them reclaiming those costs by cheaping out on all the mechanics of it, and it's not like I was able to afford paying ~$2000 for a high-quality machine. Usually within 2 years, the laptop would just start falling apart, I would get sad, and then I would repeat the pattern. After the fourth or so time of doing this, and after getting higher-paying jobs, I ended up biting the bullet for a more expensive computer, and it lasted me five years, and I only replaced it because I wanted more RAM. Point is, if you're lower-income, it's fairly easy to get stuck in the "one laptop a year" trend, because, while probably a better deal in the long term, it's really hard for lower-income to justify a multi-thousand dollar expense. I'm a proper tech bro now so buying a good computer isn't the worst thing in the world for me, but that wasn't always the case.
  • danielmg 5y ago
    That's the Vimes' boots theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
  • toast0 5y ago
    Looking at your trend, you've got $500 laptop / 2 year, or $2000 laptop / 5 year, which reduces to $250 laptop / year vs $400 laptop / year. Getting low cost laptops isn't necessarily a worse financial outcome, although it depends on how fast the processor updates are moving; when a 2020 intel cpu is about the same as a 2015 intel cpu, it would probably have been better to pay a little more in 2015 for a faster one; when a 2015 intel cpu smokes a 2010 intel cpu, incremental updates every year or two mean a low cost 2015 cpu is probably better than a high cost 2010 cpu. Plus, you get a battery refresh (even if it's small). I think there's more junk at the low end to avoid, but it's not as if the high end doesn't have a lot of junk to avoid. Either way, you have to do careful shopping. It's like just my opinion, but a lot of higher end laptop spending seems to be on increasing the screen's DPI, which is then run with scaling, at the cost of more CPU, more RAM, more GPU, and more software BS. Buying a cheaper laptop with fewer pixels that just runs 1:1 saves all that extra computation and BS, and maybe looks a bit less nice. Sometimes glossy screens are reserved for the high cost laptops, which is like wait, I want a matte screen, so I have to save money to get one, great!
• dickfickling 5y ago
  As the other comments have noted, Cory addresses this further down in the linked post. He further expanded on this in the post he wrote when he quit smoking[0]: > That was my homework: go away and think of an immediate reason not to smoke. When I came back, I had my answer ready: “I spend two laptops per year on smokes. That money goes directly to the dirtiest companies on Earth, the literal inventors of the science-denial playbook that is responsible for our inaction on climate change. Those companies’ sole mission is to murder me and all my friends. I’m going to quit smoking and I’m going to buy a laptop this year and every year hereafter, and I’ll still be up one laptop per year.” [0]: https://doctorow.medium.com/i-quit-9ae7b6010c99 https://doctorow.medium.com/i-quit-9ae7b6010c99
  • afterburner 5y ago
    Or he could just save the money. But I guess he has to constantly reward himself for quitting? Man addiction sure is a pain.
    • avgDev 5y ago
      Sounds like giving up one addiction for another. But I guess buying laptops yearly is better for your health than smoking.
      • 0des 5y ago
        While acutely better for the individual, surely the e-waste and resource sequestration outweigh that over time
      • aseipp 5y ago
        The labor and physical footprint needed to produce modern electronics is completely insane. You're comparing little league basketball to major league baseball, and it's not like a player like Framework is going to change this at all. There is a severe ecological impact to the wider environment that comes from electronics, let's not kid ourselves. That doesn't mean buying electronics makes you like, a terrible person, but if you're sitting around prostheyzing on blogs like Doctorow about how these companies are killing you, it's a bit funny to essentially go from a thing that kills people you know in the first world to one that only kills people in the third world you never cared for. Modern comforts like cutting edge electronics have extreme externalities. Like, okay, let me just throw the "murders people I care about" problem over the fence, where it will surely not be an issue for all those people halfway across the planet from me (that I coincidentally do not care or think about.) In general I'm not trying to be too hard. It's not like anyone else deals with this level of cognitive dissonance much better, and I say that as someone who mostly quit cold turkey over a year ago...
• JZL003 5y ago
  Also just bc the link is buried, see https://doctorow.medium.com/i-quit-9ae7b6010c99 https://doctorow.medium.com/i-quit-9ae7b6010c99 He traded smoking for buying a new laptop every year. Now that it's been years, I guess he could quit and not buy a new laptop. But also people do more wasteful things. I do understand though, I drive laptops into the ground over many years but still 4-5 years per laptop
• bitwize 5y ago
  What you're supposed to do, apparently, is buy a brand-new laptop, use it for a few months, then flip it on eBay before it gets too old so you can recover most of what you spent on it and buy the next new laptop. I worked with a guy who practiced this with all his personal hardware.
• sneak 5y ago
  It's very, very normal for wealthy people to replace their daily-use tools every year, or even more often. I replace my phone and laptop and iPad every year. I know people who replace their car and wardrobe and luggage every year, too. In laptops and mobile devices in general, annual updates make a lot of sense as power efficiency is still regularly increasing. The M1 Air, is, for example, a fucking marvel. It's been out for way less than a year. I have an M1 Air, and will upgrade it again in less than a year when the Mx (where x > 1) Macbook Pro comes out.
• mkka 5y ago
  The author, Cory, links to a previous explanation of when he quit smoking he converted the cost into getting a new laptop annually. As he mentioned in the article he typically finds a new home for the used device. Laptop appears to be his primary device and critical to his work so updates annually makes sense, though a new device is partially due to the construction framework elimates(i.e. riveted or glued components).
• zumu 5y ago
  >Forget the cost, but the waste! They can just sell the laptop and someone else will use it. For example, I almost never buy new laptops, as perfect Linux support generally lags behind.