Comment by bartread | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bartread | Hacker News Reader

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> It was amazing, and infuriating, to have your decently high-end system basically obsoleted in two generations. And, the DOS to Windows transition didn't help matters. It seems really odd in a time where you could still be using a 10 year old i7 and be just fine.

Indeed, and this went on for a good 10 years - possibly more - I think. I remember being annoyed that my decently high end system, purchased at the beginning of 2000, could no longer run many of the latest games (in some cases not even coming close to minimum specs) by early- to mid-2002.

I really stretched myself to buy that system in the first place and couldn't afford to replace it for years. I bought a new system in 2004 and then didn't buy another until 2011 when I moved to laptops and bought a 17" Macbook Pro (by which time it too felt very obsolete, whereas that 2011 MBP would still be fine if its GPU hadn't desoldered itself in 2017).

Nowadays I run a 7 year old MBP that's still more than capable of handling everything I need. Biggest issue is the battery life is really starting to suffer.

> Indeed, and this went on for a good 10 years - possibly more - I think. I remember being annoyed that my decently high end system, purchased at the beginning of 2000, could no longer run many of the latest games

I remember this period of very rapid advancement, too. It was such a trope in the computer market at the time, Weird Al even made fun of it in his lyrics:

My new computer's got the clocks, it rocks

But it was obsolete before I opened the box

You say you've had your desktop for over a week?

Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique!

Your laptop is a month old? Well, that's great

If you could use a nice, heavy paperweight

(It's All About the Pentiums, 1999, "Running with Scissors")

I just gifted a 2013 MBP to my father after replacing the battery. It's a pain in the neck to replace, but fairly doable if you're even slightly inclined to hardware repair and can read instructions. Worst part was dissolving all the glue. Not sure why Apple felt the need to use seemingly aviation grade VHB tape to keep the batteries in, but it's a lot of acetone and a lot of scraping to get it all off. All it took was $90 for the kit and a couple hours.

> Indeed, and this went on for a good 10 years - possibly more - I think.

Many more. An Apple II+ from 1979 was approaching obsolete in 1984. An IBM PC from 1985 was obsolete by 1990. A 386 machine from 1990 was obsolete by 1995. A Pentium machine from 1995 was obsolete in 2000. A Pentium III from 2000 was nearly obsolete in 2005. This cycle started in the late 70s, and I guess continued until computers were "fast enough" for all the typical software they might run. Video was the last big one. Even very cheap computers are now fast enough to render complex documents and display video, more or less instantly (at least with the right software). So, for most users they subjectively seem "fast enough".

Things do seem more stable these days, in terms of general compatibility. A Pentium III machine can still boot a current Linux distro, if rather slowly. And 20+ year old USB peripherals will still work on a modern machine. That's quite a change from the era when a new, incompatible architecture or peripheral bus came out every five years.

I feel your pain. By 2005, my AMD Athlon XP with 256MB of RAM and GF2 was junk.

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