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Comment by coffeebeqn | Hacker News Reader

Exactly it’s the same with laptops. If you know anything about decent specs and don’t buy something with a ridiculous bottleneck and do a fresh install you can find a 5+ year old laptop that is amazing for anything other than extreme workloads. I mean like rendering scenes - not VSCode and Slack or something

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I use an Apple Silicon MacBook Pro for multimedia and some other things. But most of what I do on a 7+ year old MacBook and iMac does just fine.

I suspect you also have something of a generational thing with many younger students not even using PCs.

Apple going to have a hard time getting people with M1 macs to upgrade any time soon.

Yeah I used a 2012 MacBook Pro 15" Retina until 2017 when the overheating and throttling of it in summer became just unbearable, upgraded again in quick succession due to the crappy keyboard, thermals and battery of the successors, and then finally settled on the 16" M1 Pro.

If the 2012 lasted me 5 years back then, this M1 Pro should last at least as long since the things that drove me to upgrade from the 2012 (mainly thermals) are not a problem with this machine.

I had a 2015 MBP that was falling apart and waited for the M2 refresh. I expect that I won’t get another laptop until 2030.

I have an iPhone 11 (fall 2019) and I see no reason to upgrade.

It does feel like we’ve hit a plateau. The only step up I can see would be on-device ML/“AI” models. Removing the latency and improving offline capabilities of something like Siri would open some doors.

Yeah. On-device ML. Cameras are also still improving YoY as more people abandon standalones. But while I'm usually on a 3 year cycle, I'd have to be convinced with this year's model.

And I may slide in a Mac Mini/Studio in place of my iMac at some point, I'm not really in a hurry in spite of being out of OS update support. It's basically a browser machine given I have a newish laptop.

Two Electron apps are extreme workload for me :)

Indeed. I'm currently stuck with 8GB RAM on my laptop and it feels like the OOM killer [1] is playing whack-a-mole with Firefox and any Electron apps. Start Firefox, then VS Code gets killed by the OOM killer. Start VS Code, then Slack gets killed by the OOM killer. Start Discord, then Firefox gets killed by the OOM killer. It doesn't help that I'm firmly in the way-too-many-open-tabs camp. Even zswap doesn't really help.

[1] Actually systemd-oomd to be precise, but let's not start the userspace OOM killer debate again in here

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