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Comment by beretguy | Hacker News Reader

The reason i don’t buy Macs is planned obsolescence. Even if i would have mac it would still be running Linux. Might as well not waste money and buy refurbished pc and install Linux on it.

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Thanks for reminding me of the hundreds of dollars of games on Steam I bought to play on Mac and now can't because I didn't realize that giving into to their Apple's incessant update nagging would completely remove support for those games.

Wow, yeah, i didn’t even know about that. That’s another reason to never use macos.

In spite of everything else, you've got to respect MS for their commitment to backward compatibility. I still frequently run Paint Shop Pro 7 (bought way back in 2000) on Windows 10.

Meanwhile, iOS games I developed in the 2012-2014 period were no longer runnable by the end of 2017 (due to the iOS transition to 64bit)

It's not as bad as you think. I'm currently rocking a 2017 MBA and it's eminently usable for all my needs even with 8GB RAM. 7 year's service is fairly good for a laptop, I've only recently changed the battery.

For non-gamers and lighter workloads you could easily make do with earlier models, provided they have a SSD.

> 7 year's service is fairly good for a laptop

No it is not. That is a very low bar.

*7 years so far....

But what's your best anyway?

Currently using dell latitude from 2014, so it’s 10 years old. Bought it refurbished a few years ago for around $130. Upgraded its ram to 16 GB and storage to 2 TB SSD. And it has removable battery. Should last me well beyond 2030s.

Interesting, I was expecting a ThinkPad. Presumably you're on Linux too. But good going, I'll formally challenge you to a race if I can remember to come back this thread.

My own long-term plan is to install Linux when Apple drops support for Monterey on this hardware.

Yes, Linux. Cool! Let’s race :)

> Even if i would have mac it would still be running Linux

This was my plan, any solid distros that support the ARM64 silicon (M3 & M4 specifically) OOTB? I've concerns about support for the touchpad, webcam etc.

As of the last Asahi Linux update at the beginning of this year, they had caught up with M2 series only.

https://asahilinux.org/2024/01/fedora-asahi-new/

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