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Comment by yodsanklai | Hacker News Reader

> Not excusing the price, but people these days spend multiple hours a day on their phones

That's my reasoning when I buy a new computer. I can buy a MBP for $2000, use it for 3 years and sell it used for $1000. $30 a month is a bargain considering I use it between 5-10 hours a day. I may pay a mac a little more (20%?) than the competition but it's worth it considering it's subjectively better (and objectively different, Mac OS / design / size -- arguably less and less so).

However, I'd never buy an iphone (or an expensive smartphone). Iphone users may disagree, but for what I've seen they provide almost the same experience as much cheaper phones (typically two times cheaper). Another issue I have with the price is that I don't feel confortable walking around with such a small expensive item. So easy to lose it or forget it.

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Much of this logic is why I stopped buying new computers or phones. I'd rather use a $70 T440 that I've upgraded and know how to repair most everything on than haul a MBP that I'll need to get a pro to service, that also happens to have terrible ventilation. I mean, my last MBP literally cooked itself, comparatively this T440 has a giant grill that it rapidly removes heat through (though its 15w i5 doesn't make much).

You make it sound like the MBP is a weighty piece of burden compared to a dainty T440 (use a T440 vs. haul a MBP.)

And the part about cooking itself sounds like a manufacturing defect for which you should have gotten a replacement - in normal conditions it should just shut down, if temperatures get high enough that ventilation and throttling don't help.

My old MBP is heavier than my T440 by half a pound. I also never said that it shut itself down, just that it was consistently uncomfortably hot to be using, and I couldn't imagine attempting to use it to run a bunch of VMs like I use my T440 for.

I'm happy to have sold that MBP and put Apple far behind me, with the inflatable battery and high temps, it was on par with the $20 x100e I picked up last year (though that x100e was much lighter/smaller).

> You make it sound like the MBP is a weighty piece of burden compared to a dainty T440 (use a T440 vs. haul a MBP.)

I made the mistake of buying a MBP to see what all the fuss was about and fantasize regularly about destroying it Office-Space style, "weighty piece of burden" is just about the nicest way you could put it

I do exactly the same but with X220s. With an SSD and Debian they make a great coding laptop. I buy stacks of them and just move the SSD across when the break.

Also means I can leave one in the office and have one at home then just move the SSDs between them.

That sounds so much easier than what I am doing with my laptop (macbook): I have to put it in my bag somewhere and take it out somewhere else and continue exactly where I left off every time. It is such a burden...

A friend of mine takes that approach, but the T440 has a whole unibody panel that takes a minute or so to remove. The T430 and T410s comparatively have nice little hatches where a single screw will let you pull the drive.

How do you like the X220s? I nabbed one for a friend a while back, seemed like a nice smaller form factor laptop, she rather liked it iirc. Good price too, think I paid $65 for it.

What sort of battery life do you get with these? My 4 year old MBA now gets around 6 hours while coding vs 10 when new.

I'm just passing the 6 hour 30 min mark, though my battery is a few years old. Its reporting as 75.8% capacity with 4% left, so another 20 minutes perhaps, gonna throw it on the dock here though.

I've got Atom open, Signal Desktop, Tor Browser Bundle (Youtube), Firefox with a few dozen tabs (Soundcloud, HN, etc). Couple spreadsheets too in LibreOffice, and Thunderbird & Transmission too. With a few of those closed, should be able to get some more battery life, but I don't feel in need of it.

The X220 is a great laptop, especially if you find one with the IPS screen (and no bright/dark spot defects).

I kind of wanted to do that, for the hipster geek cred, but after retina screens, actually usable touchpads and operating system that just works and also is unix at the same time ... I just can't go back.

I have also looked at switching to Linux over OS X and the retina/hidpi alone stops any attempt. I actually had someone on here argue that no one needs retina, and that it didn’t make any difference visually!

GNOME works just fine on hidpi screens. I use it on my (2013) mbp and (2015) chromebook pixel and it looks great.

You do have to use wayland to get scaling across a low dpi external monitor to work, but that has been fairly painless these days (if your GPU is supported by the open source drivers).

This is exactly the reason I switched to Linux laptops on cases that I can open up and easily switch out any parts of need be.

iPhone provides software update much longer (typically two times longer) than any Android phones in the market, so it actually has longer life. If you plan to use it for a long time, it makes sense.

I agree if you plan to use iPhone for less than 2 years it's probably expensive.

Not necessarily true - if you have the know how or know someone who does, you can run a custom rom on your Android device, Lineage is updated weekly for many devices and will easily provide many more years of life. Once it's set up it's pretty hands off too, so just knowing one person who can do it for you once is pretty much enough.

The official situation is slated to improve now with Android 8 separating the HAL and the rest of the OS more clearly it likely means that in a generation or two this won't even be a concern.

> Lineage is updated weekly for many devices

You see, right there you described why most people, myself included, aren't interested in that. I can't be bothered to care about weekly OS updates, I tolerate the 1-2 yearly updates to my android because as someone in the security industry I understand the need for updates but that's it. A phone isn't something I care about tinkering with, it's a tool and I want it to work well with as minimal maintenance getting in the way as possible. I couldn't even be bothered to root my current phone, much less install a different OS.

I find it ironic that you're in the security industry, yet have no interest in getting security updates as quickly as possible.

We're not talking about major updates here, we're talking about updates that take about 30 seconds to apply plus a reboot, once a week and you know you're always running the latest and greatest from a security standpoint. Most change nothing from a user perspective.

Of course, you're free to treat these updates as you like, I typically only patch about once a month or when there's a major remote vulnerability.

I'm not in the operations side of it, I'm on the development side: whether admins apply patches or not is not our problem :)

Like I said, doing weekly or monthly updates and reboots would be an extra concern that I'd rather not have. As it stands the only "management" burden my phone (I use an HTC 10 for reference) imposes on me is having to connect it to the charger every night; It's already more than I would like but unfortunately it doesn't have wireless charging.

As far as I'm concerned, for non-hobby stuff, the least management a device asks of me, the better it is because it's a few more things I don't have to bother taking care of.

"I can buy a MBP for $2000, use it for 3 years and sell it used for $1000."

I've used a refurbed Thinkpad T420 for about a year now. It cost me $350 to buy, and I expect it to last at least 2-3 years. Less than $10 a month, and it's more than fast enough to do absolutely everything I need to do. Not too shabby for a 6 year old machine.

The only reason for buying a brand-new computer is if you absolutely need the highest end of computing power, or need the very newest peripheral ports for some reason.

> So easy to lose it or forget it.

Or break it. After I broke my Nexus4's screen three times I gave up and bought some cheap Zenfone (and it cost as much as one screen repair for Nexus).

What might be interesting is if the iPhone X ends up being a device that combines more laptop-like features into a phone.

Better keyboard/mouse/display integration. Support for laptop-like apps. Then it could be worth laptop-like pricing.

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