"A lot older than I thought", my daily driver until recently was a 2011 MBP and it kinda worked for most tasks, while of course, it needed to be plugged. But it worked fine
Computers can last a long long time. I built a pair of dev computers in 2012 for about $2500 each, using one of the fastest CPU’s on CPU Benchmark that was also quite cheap (about $350 per CPU). I still use one of them as my main dev computer. Nothing has ever broken inside it, not even a fan. The original SSD raid setup is still in place. It works as well as it ever did. I don’t notice any issues when all of the different IDE’s and tools I need are open.
My first personal desktop computer was old enough to start high school before I upgraded, though in its final years it was little more than a minecraft, youtube, and web browsing machine (a typical 14 year old). It was an old machine from our church in 2004, it had a Core2Quad and a 512MB Radeon graphics card, with 4GB of DDR2.
> My first personal desktop computer was old enough to start high school before I upgraded, though in its final years it was little more than a minecraft...
I hosted a minecraft server on a last gen P4 because the single threaded performance was that good (headless ubuntu). Intel hits these high spots were some hot chip keeps up with the next 7 years of CPUs.
They said they purchased it in 2004, and it was given to me as a graduation present in 2011, so someone at our church must have upgraded it somewhere along the line. Doing a little searching, the Quad came out even later, in 2008 so it must have been around then. Presumably for the upgrade to Windows 7.
Now that I think about it, pastor's son was a gamer that spent all his time at the church, and I always thought it weird that a church had a discrete graphics card with DVI output in a back office machine...
Same here, see my comment below. I should add that I do plenty of compiling programs from C# for a specific application and it's still almost instantaneous.
Same here, not into upgrading continuously for no good reason.
My primary home server (ZFS pools and hosting many VMs) is one I built in 2010, still nothing wrong with it. I keep wanting to upgrade to a new one but there's nothing wrong with it so can't really justify change.
My desktop mac mini is from 2014, works just fine. My windows laptop (toshiba) is from about 2009-2010 (I bought it used in 2011) and still works just fine (I don't use windows generally but have a bunch of niche astrophotography programs which are windows only).
Meanwhile... A Mac work laptop from 2021 lasted a year before the right side usbc ports both died. A Mac laptop from 2021 lasted a year before the screen died completely. The new machines have terrible quality problems.
You bought that computer at the exact right time when the bulk of the industry talent went into trying to make mobile processors more power efficient rather than making desktop processors more powerful.
I still have one of those small form factor Dell Optiplex 9020 (with i7 4790) and with the RAM upgraded to 16G and SSD this things feels super nice and snappy for what I use it for. I paid around $100 for it last year. I’m really starting to wonder if newer hardware has any real advantages for me.
Still use one cheap HP Compaq XP business machine from 2006, Pentium D which is really just two 32-bit Pentiums on one die to equal an early 64-bit AMD64. Runs W11 just fine once you coax it into existence on a BIOS PC. Linux too.
A slightly older XP Dell only has a single-core 32-bit CPU so no W11 for you, but W10 32-bit is still current and there's only 4GB of memory anyway. Debian on 32-bit looks like it may be supported for somewhat longer. Uses parallel PATA and/or serial SATA drives.
Both have floppies, parallel printer ports, serial COM ports, dual DVD readers/burners and telephone modems.
I had one of those `63 Darts with a straight 6 in it back in the 80s. It was a blue four door. I put snow tires in the back and drove that car all over the dirt roads in the Tehachapi Mountains north of Los Angeles.
One day I drove to the very end of a dirt road way up near the top of a mountain there and was just sitting there soaking in the view when I heard two big 4Wheeler Pickups rumbling up the road and when they came around the bend in the road where it ended and saw me in that old Dart sitting there it just crushed their egos.
Stunning. My high school roommate (1996-7ish) had a Sparcbook. He let me use it a few times, and even at the time it just felt good.
I still have the dot matrix printout of everything I ran / wrote on a TI-99/4a in the early nineties. I wish my parents hadn't s#!tcanned that machine when I went to college, I bet I could write markdown with a modem and some kind of VCS on it to publish content even on the modern web with that old dog.
Anyway, that's not to hijack your comment - even at the time, probably almost 15 years after the TI-99/4a came out I felt like there were restrictions on what you could do with a machine that kept you focused on the task at hand in really productive ways. So I totally understand.
How are the keys in such good shape? My keyboards wear out within a few years on the meta keys, and sometimes particular letters. They typically lose some of the lettering and the plastic is shiny or worn down.
Note: I keep my fingernails quite short. I do type a lot, though.
It's one of those original indestructible Lexmark-designed IBM keyboards - I'm not sure what coating they used, but they rarely wear. That's why there are so many pristine mid-90's Thinkpads out there.
Wonder how long Windows 7 will last for him. I have Windows 8.1 at home (not my daily driver, for that I use Linux), and Google Chrome is no longer updated. Nor is much else. But it works for my tasks, which is Lightroom (the last one that was not subscription I guess).
That keyboard (and trackpoint) is begging to be touched. I'll guess it's a thinkpad k/b.
I do love vintage gear, but as a daily diriver, the rest of the machine looks, um, very vintage. Check those bezels! Though the LCD is barely visible anyway.
I'm still using the macbook pro i bought new in april 2015. Nearly 9 years of use! You never got that in the 90s. And to think some say progress has stopped!
In 1990 you’d still have quite a few 1980s era machines, and even into 1995 there would be old 8086 machines doing their thing.
But then everything changed when Windows 95 attacked, suddenly the upgrade treadmill was on and those older machines stopped being used not because they were to slow or broken, but because upgraders were dumping used hardware, and you might as well.
Somewhere after the proliferation of SSDs I feel it slowed down again.
I believe it's related to PC standardization really kicking in during the 90's. Before that point, cross-platform abstraction existed but was relatively bespoken to the application, and you couldn't rely on coordination of developers with users that could run out and upgrade to this year's latest, because the pre-32bit desktop hardware kept changing architectures in radically incompatible ways - segmented memory, cooperative multitasking, etc. As such your data export was usually not to another computer, but to paper.
After 1995 you had convergence on Wintel: they won the desktop architecture wars, the address space was large and flat so applications could grow, and Linux, Unicode and the Web were still nascent but all existed in a "right place, right time" sense to drive adoption.
The SSD era slowed things down because right around that time, the focus shifted towards mobile computing, which saw the same treadmill from the start of the iPhone era. The older generation phones of this era are largely uninteresting curios, perhaps valued only if they happen to store an old game that got removed from the stores.
IoT seems to be the next wave, still working towards the big shake-out and standards convergence: "computer as a feature" is increasingly possible to a degree that was unreasonable before.
You can somewhat work around this using Karabiner Elements. I map caps lock to esc (when tapped) and ctrl (when held) with a 'complex modification' rule that looks like:
I am still using a PC I built in 2012, that is over twelve years of daily use. Honestly for 90% of task I do I see no reason to really upgrade it, though I did put a newish GPU in it last year because the old one was failing. I feel like personal computing power somewhat plateaued in the last decade or so which is fine with me really, less upgrades is less waste. I think phones will hopefully reach this point soon though sadly I don't see most of them lasting over a decade.
> I feel like personal computing power somewhat plateaued in the last decade
It did in the WinTel world, after the 4th gen i7. Performance stayed flat from 5th gen until 10th or so. It's better after that. Between these later CPUs and and NVMe drives, it feels like computing has picked up a lot.
At least until Windows 11 ad/crapware bloats it all away.
I use a 2010 MacBook Air with Debian and i3 for writing and coding practice using vim and cmdline tools. No web browser installed. For those tasks I'm much more productive on it than on any modern machine I own. I just wish the battery life were better.
I did follow iFixit and replaced the battery and SSD. Battery life is still terrible compared to a modern laptop. It's just a limitation of 14 year old tech.
i'm typing on that very same computer. it was a free replacement for my 2015 MBP, which had a battery problem that became a warranty/recall of some sort and they didn't have the parts to repair it.
my 'F' key is broken but still mostly works, the touch bar randomly doesn't work right (i think that's software though), and the battery is mostly shot. other than that, and the fact that i can no longer upgrade to the latest OS, this thing is quite adequate.
I made peace with the touch bar after I found out it could be customized, and I removed most of the default functions and put in a couple that I like having handy, including the ability to lock the screen at a touch.
I agree, I love my MBP 2017 touchbar layout and frankly forgot I had customized it to “how it should have come” so long ago. Borrowed someone’s stock MBP and was like oh this is all wrong. I understand all the brouhaha over the esc key, but you’ll have to pry the wonderful volume and brightness sliders from my fingers. Repeatedly spamming volume up seems so archaic.
PSA to anyone who doesn’t know yet: you can lock the screen by clicking the Touch ID button (at least, in the newest no-touch bar Macs). It can be used to both lock and unlock.
I’m guessing your Touch Bar system can do this too but I have no way to try it. Sometimes Apple makes random little shortcut modifications when they change button layouts.
Control Command Q also locks the screen. I used to have that combo as a fast habit.
I jumped off the Touch Bar as soon as I could. I sorta miss the smooth volume and brightness adjustment but it’s not as good as having the keys be physical and always in the same place. No more looking down.
If they could make a row of physical keys with little OLED screens and maybe a couple of customizable knobs and/or sliders that could be assigned to anything that might be a really useful concept. But the need to look down at the Touch Bar really killed its magic for me.
The other thing you get on a modern Mac that’s arguably under-hyped is just the fact that the function keys are full size. It’s so much nicer.
I am using a desktop pc I built in 2012 for around 350 USD. It's running 24/7. I had to replace the mainboard, psu and ram over time due to failure (with similarly old components). The CPU AMD A10-5800K is still going strong though.
Eh, honestly, depending on where you live your yearly electricity bill might justify an upgrade considering you’re running it 24/7. You might want to check your idle wattage with a kill-a-watt and look at your price per kw hour on your electric bill.
Basically you can outperform that rig with an Intel Atom N100 with 1/10th the TDP of the A10-5800K. You could jump on Amazon and grab a Beelink mini PC or similar for about $200 and have an entire system that maxes out at 35W, idles at about 12-13W.
If you save 20W of power on your idle and your power costs 20 cents per KW/h the new system would pay for itself in less
than 6 years. If you’re in a country like the UK or Germany your payoff is 3 years or less.
Ha, just a minutes before this post I thought again why I recently decided not to bother with upgrading my T440:
despite the upgrade (replacing the ugly 1366 panel to a proper FullHD, IPS one) wouldn't cost me much (around $50 for the panel and probably another $50 for the work and maybe cleaning) it would be still a decade old laptop with an anemic i3-4010U (2c/4t 1700MHz), the awful Intel(R) Wireless-N 7260 and a fucking pedal instead of the touchpad. Sure, I can replace the wireless card too (if Lenovo would allow me and I would find the proper one if it doesn't) but at this point... It's easier to add another $50-100 and just buy something a more modern.
But hey, if my main notebook would fail, just as JGC, I would be fine with it because it's a glorified terminal:
> a lot of my computing needs being offloaded to the cloud
You make a point about something that keeps me away from older laptops: WiFi speed.
Sure, I could get a USB WiFi card but…ick.
I’m paying for symmetrical fiber, I want to use those speeds. When I’m uploading stuff to servers it really can slow me down to have slow WiFi. I could actually really use WiFi 7 to finally un-bottleneck my connection and I’m just waiting here semi-patiently for new client devices and cheaper access points to launch.
The author says that most time is spent either in a web browser, or in a terminal in ssh sessions. Talk about the year of desktop Linux; I bet most web sites and most hosts to ssh to are Linux-powered.
Last year, I upgraded to a new daily driver: ThinkPad T520, manufactured in April of 2012.
Linux (Debian Stable) runs great on it, and it has TrackPoint with a non-chiclet keyboard. And if you drop it on something, the something will probably get hurt more.
It doesn't seem "vintage". My previous one, made in 2009, also still runs Debian Stable well, including when running 3 different Web browsers and a couple other bloated programs at once.
I’m still on my 2012 W520 as daily driver. Runs Ubuntu 22.04. It’s a tank - it just won’t die. And if something does wear it, it’s easy to repair or replace.
I’m actually thinking of purchasing a X220 or X220T as a smaller, more portable model of the same era. To me, this era of thinkpad is the pinnacle of laptop design. Unsurpassed. Robust and practical.
Yes. I used an x200 which was unfortunately damaged. I tried to repair it but it didn't recover. I bought an x230 off ebay. It was a factory demo piece which was refurbished. I did that in 2014 and did so because Ineeded one urgently. I replaced it about a month ago with an X1 carbon. The battery is shot and it overheats when I run too much on it. However, for day to day stuff, it's superb. Runs Debian and chugs away without many problems.
I've stockpiled a few W520 units, in case I ever need that upgrade step. The huge 170W power brick is the reason not to just move to it now, since I have a fleet of 90W AC adapters I've been using for everything since the T60.
I've also wanted to get X220, for more portable, but still matching keyboard. (I currently have some X200 units, with better displays than X220 usually has, but different keyboard layouts. They'll be a bit of work to sell, for the upgrade, since I'll have to replace the custom Coreboot that's on them.)
> The huge 170W power brick is the reason not to just move to it now, since I have a fleet of 90W AC adapters I've been using for everything since the T60.
Can't you get a barrel connector on top of a modern GaN adapter? It should be much smaller!
Good question. The W520 wants 20V (at up to 170W). Looks like the newish USB PD standard can supply 20V in addition to 5V. So maybe it could be done with a current/forthcoming consumer USB PD wallwart, without needing to add additional power circuitry?
> So maybe it could be done with a current/forthcoming consumer USB PD wallwart, without needing to add additional power circuitry?
You may need a circuit to negotiate the USB-PD, then to ouput 20V from that, but it should be possible.
It could even be a very interesting project: expose an artificial resistance on the barrel plug to simulate the Lenovo AC wattage resistor by matching what the USB-PD can deliver.
And a 7-year old machine isn’t necessarily obsolete either.
Apple uses those two words to mean specific things (vintage: >= 5y, < 7y; obsolete: >= 7y) as it relates to their support policies. Full support up to at least 5 years, some support up to 7, no support from then on.
Honestly, it’s pretty refreshing to be able to summarise 99% of a company’s product support lifecycle in such a small paragraph.
I'm still on a x230 I've bought 12 years ago (which was also manufactured in around 2012) as my personal daily driver. I replaced the keyboard once as I preferred the x220 one, replaced the battery every 4 years, and wouldn't even consider "upgrading" to something else. I mostly write C, Guile and Perl code in Emacs on this machine and spend another large chunk of my time in a terminal emulator, so I'd even argue that my hardware requirements haven't really changed during the last decade and probably won't for yet another.
The X230 is absolutely a classic, a local optimum of computer hardware. I have several of them at this point. It's just too bad that it doesn't have the X220's keyboard.
My parents are still using my old 2012 MacBook Pro. Installing an SSD and 16GB of memory a few years ago revitalised it. The last time I used it when visiting them I could see no reason to retire it, but I assume it might lose out on security updates soon.
I've been daily driving a 2013 MBP. After occasional memory upgrades, hard drive upgrades, and battery swaps this decade-young computer of Theseus runs great.
But the real reason I'm not upgrading is because of software compatibility:
1. This is about as new a machine I can get that runs Adobe CS6 & Lightroom with perpetual licenses. (F your subscription)
2. The new M machines do not appear to run the Intel-driven CAD software I currently run in Bootcamp, not even in emulation. (I'm not keen on owning 2 machines for my dayjob, nor wholly converting to Windows.)
Meanwhile my less mission critical software has gotten cheeky lately and started telling me my machine is too old. Spotify and Signal both refuse to update further and launch with big nastygram windows saying so. Wheeee.
For #1, I can’t imagine either switching over to open source or an Adobe competitor isn’t going to easily surpass CS6 with how old it is. I have to think GIMP has caught up with and surpassed CS6 by now.
For #2, I think if it was me and I really wanted to stick with the Mac and upgrad I’d just run Parallels. Sure, it’s yet another license, but it runs a lot of stuff pretty well, including some 3D games, so I think it might be worth trying.
Another part of me wonders if Crossover/Wine could run that CAD software.
Of course, you want to be able to run these on a trial before you buy any hardware.
If you’re not aware of OpenCore Legacy I might as well mention that in case you need a newer version of macOS on that hardware.
my current dd laptop is also an early 2013 MBP, which I had installed Linux on a few years ago. however recently I picked up music again and preferred to use Mac for certain software. oh man was the reinstallation process a nightmare. the recovery install didn't have a browser that would render the Firefox download page. the Mac app store didn't have downloads for the highest version of macOS I could install on Intel architecture. it was problem after problem but now in finally running the last version I'll be able to run: 11.17. funny how much can change or become obsolete in only a decade :D
We have a rack with two servers (internet-facing) from around 2000/2001. They haven’t been rebooted since a facility move about a decade ago. They are still in continuous use.
I discovered this the hard way with my home server. The boot drive whilst still working wouldn’t come up on boot. It apparently worked in Linux still but it was no longer bootable.
Having to scramble after a power outage to get a bootable Linux image to fix it wasn’t ideal.
No way to have discovered this without a hard power cycle, a soft reset didn’t repro it.
That's awesome. I build my own desktop for $1700 in parts in 2012. Not unsubstantial, but definitely not breaking the bank either. I had really come to take it for granted over the course of the last few years, as it's just one of multiple boxes I work on these days.
I started working on it pretty intensively again in the past few months and... man, for being 11+ years old it keeps up. Turns out I got lucky with the longevity of the i7-3820, GTX 770, and (what at the time was a ridiculous for a home machine) 32gb of ram in it.
Benchmarked (anecdotally) against a more modern (2021 build, 3x the cost) desktop, raytraced renderings still take 8x as long. But if I'm designing / modeling in 3d or BIM there is LITERALLY no dropoff.
I'm still going to make a new build soon because I'm getting back into not having time for that 8x hit on renderings. But I had no idea when I put this thing together 11 years ago that it would serve me so well for so long.
I also have a 7 year old laptop I bought for $140 new that I've put #!++ on and which keeps up just fine for most things the average punter would need in a machine.
146 comments
[ 5.6 ms ] story [ 220 ms ] threadMy current laptop is a Lenovo P53 from 2020. I still think of it as being 'new' but it's coming up for about four years old.
11 years of daily driving.
I hosted a minecraft server on a last gen P4 because the single threaded performance was that good (headless ubuntu). Intel hits these high spots were some hot chip keeps up with the next 7 years of CPUs.
Impressive lifespan nevertheless.
Now that I think about it, pastor's son was a gamer that spent all his time at the church, and I always thought it weird that a church had a discrete graphics card with DVI output in a back office machine...
My primary home server (ZFS pools and hosting many VMs) is one I built in 2010, still nothing wrong with it. I keep wanting to upgrade to a new one but there's nothing wrong with it so can't really justify change.
My desktop mac mini is from 2014, works just fine. My windows laptop (toshiba) is from about 2009-2010 (I bought it used in 2011) and still works just fine (I don't use windows generally but have a bunch of niche astrophotography programs which are windows only).
Meanwhile... A Mac work laptop from 2021 lasted a year before the right side usbc ports both died. A Mac laptop from 2021 lasted a year before the screen died completely. The new machines have terrible quality problems.
It has no moving parts and I hoped this could lead to it lasting well beyond what I would normally expect.
Regardless of part wear, or the apparent lack thereof, it feels to me as performant as the day it was born.
A slightly older XP Dell only has a single-core 32-bit CPU so no W11 for you, but W10 32-bit is still current and there's only 4GB of memory anyway. Debian on 32-bit looks like it may be supported for somewhat longer. Uses parallel PATA and/or serial SATA drives.
Both have floppies, parallel printer ports, serial COM ports, dual DVD readers/burners and telephone modems.
I had one of those `63 Darts with a straight 6 in it back in the 80s. It was a blue four door. I put snow tires in the back and drove that car all over the dirt roads in the Tehachapi Mountains north of Los Angeles.
One day I drove to the very end of a dirt road way up near the top of a mountain there and was just sitting there soaking in the view when I heard two big 4Wheeler Pickups rumbling up the road and when they came around the bend in the road where it ended and saw me in that old Dart sitting there it just crushed their egos.
That is truly a great car!
[0] https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/sparcbook3000st-the-coo...
[1] https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/sparcbook-teardown/
I still have the dot matrix printout of everything I ran / wrote on a TI-99/4a in the early nineties. I wish my parents hadn't s#!tcanned that machine when I went to college, I bet I could write markdown with a modem and some kind of VCS on it to publish content even on the modern web with that old dog.
Anyway, that's not to hijack your comment - even at the time, probably almost 15 years after the TI-99/4a came out I felt like there were restrictions on what you could do with a machine that kept you focused on the task at hand in really productive ways. So I totally understand.
Note: I keep my fingernails quite short. I do type a lot, though.
But “My belief is that computer security is highly overrated” is just ignorant.
I do love vintage gear, but as a daily diriver, the rest of the machine looks, um, very vintage. Check those bezels! Though the LCD is barely visible anyway.
I facepalm'd when I realized the image itself was in the same article.
In 1990 you’d still have quite a few 1980s era machines, and even into 1995 there would be old 8086 machines doing their thing.
But then everything changed when Windows 95 attacked, suddenly the upgrade treadmill was on and those older machines stopped being used not because they were to slow or broken, but because upgraders were dumping used hardware, and you might as well.
Somewhere after the proliferation of SSDs I feel it slowed down again.
After 1995 you had convergence on Wintel: they won the desktop architecture wars, the address space was large and flat so applications could grow, and Linux, Unicode and the Web were still nascent but all existed in a "right place, right time" sense to drive adoption.
The SSD era slowed things down because right around that time, the focus shifted towards mobile computing, which saw the same treadmill from the start of the iPhone era. The older generation phones of this era are largely uninteresting curios, perhaps valued only if they happen to store an old game that got removed from the stores.
IoT seems to be the next wave, still working towards the big shake-out and standards convergence: "computer as a feature" is increasingly possible to a degree that was unreasonable before.
That was quite an upgrade.
15 years of daily driving.
Remap the useless Caps Lock key to Esc in system settings (no third party tools needed) and problem solved?
That being said, it's probably using a 7th gen intel core cpu, which was one generation before the move from 4 to 6 cores for many desktops cpus.
It did in the WinTel world, after the 4th gen i7. Performance stayed flat from 5th gen until 10th or so. It's better after that. Between these later CPUs and and NVMe drives, it feels like computing has picked up a lot.
At least until Windows 11 ad/crapware bloats it all away.
My work notebook is an upgraded 2012 T430.
I have a 2011 Air that I resolved with an M1. I expect to put Linux on the 2011. Devuan and i3.
my 'F' key is broken but still mostly works, the touch bar randomly doesn't work right (i think that's software though), and the battery is mostly shot. other than that, and the fact that i can no longer upgrade to the latest OS, this thing is quite adequate.
I’m guessing your Touch Bar system can do this too but I have no way to try it. Sometimes Apple makes random little shortcut modifications when they change button layouts.
Control Command Q also locks the screen. I used to have that combo as a fast habit.
I jumped off the Touch Bar as soon as I could. I sorta miss the smooth volume and brightness adjustment but it’s not as good as having the keys be physical and always in the same place. No more looking down.
If they could make a row of physical keys with little OLED screens and maybe a couple of customizable knobs and/or sliders that could be assigned to anything that might be a really useful concept. But the need to look down at the Touch Bar really killed its magic for me.
The other thing you get on a modern Mac that’s arguably under-hyped is just the fact that the function keys are full size. It’s so much nicer.
(technically it’s from 2021 and it’s now 2024 but it’s closer to 2 and a half years old)
Basically you can outperform that rig with an Intel Atom N100 with 1/10th the TDP of the A10-5800K. You could jump on Amazon and grab a Beelink mini PC or similar for about $200 and have an entire system that maxes out at 35W, idles at about 12-13W.
If you save 20W of power on your idle and your power costs 20 cents per KW/h the new system would pay for itself in less than 6 years. If you’re in a country like the UK or Germany your payoff is 3 years or less.
despite the upgrade (replacing the ugly 1366 panel to a proper FullHD, IPS one) wouldn't cost me much (around $50 for the panel and probably another $50 for the work and maybe cleaning) it would be still a decade old laptop with an anemic i3-4010U (2c/4t 1700MHz), the awful Intel(R) Wireless-N 7260 and a fucking pedal instead of the touchpad. Sure, I can replace the wireless card too (if Lenovo would allow me and I would find the proper one if it doesn't) but at this point... It's easier to add another $50-100 and just buy something a more modern.
But hey, if my main notebook would fail, just as JGC, I would be fine with it because it's a glorified terminal:
> a lot of my computing needs being offloaded to the cloud
https://www.techpowerup.com/cpu-specs/core-i3-4010u.c1607
Sure, I could get a USB WiFi card but…ick.
I’m paying for symmetrical fiber, I want to use those speeds. When I’m uploading stuff to servers it really can slow me down to have slow WiFi. I could actually really use WiFi 7 to finally un-bottleneck my connection and I’m just waiting here semi-patiently for new client devices and cheaper access points to launch.
Linux (Debian Stable) runs great on it, and it has TrackPoint with a non-chiclet keyboard. And if you drop it on something, the something will probably get hurt more.
It doesn't seem "vintage". My previous one, made in 2009, also still runs Debian Stable well, including when running 3 different Web browsers and a couple other bloated programs at once.
I’m actually thinking of purchasing a X220 or X220T as a smaller, more portable model of the same era. To me, this era of thinkpad is the pinnacle of laptop design. Unsurpassed. Robust and practical.
I've also wanted to get X220, for more portable, but still matching keyboard. (I currently have some X200 units, with better displays than X220 usually has, but different keyboard layouts. They'll be a bit of work to sell, for the upgrade, since I'll have to replace the custom Coreboot that's on them.)
Can't you get a barrel connector on top of a modern GaN adapter? It should be much smaller!
You may need a circuit to negotiate the USB-PD, then to ouput 20V from that, but it should be possible.
It could even be a very interesting project: expose an artificial resistance on the barrel plug to simulate the Lenovo AC wattage resistor by matching what the USB-PD can deliver.
Make sure that you don't have another T520 lying around!
And a 7-year old machine isn’t necessarily obsolete either.
Apple uses those two words to mean specific things (vintage: >= 5y, < 7y; obsolete: >= 7y) as it relates to their support policies. Full support up to at least 5 years, some support up to 7, no support from then on.
Honestly, it’s pretty refreshing to be able to summarise 99% of a company’s product support lifecycle in such a small paragraph.
But the real reason I'm not upgrading is because of software compatibility:
1. This is about as new a machine I can get that runs Adobe CS6 & Lightroom with perpetual licenses. (F your subscription)
2. The new M machines do not appear to run the Intel-driven CAD software I currently run in Bootcamp, not even in emulation. (I'm not keen on owning 2 machines for my dayjob, nor wholly converting to Windows.)
Meanwhile my less mission critical software has gotten cheeky lately and started telling me my machine is too old. Spotify and Signal both refuse to update further and launch with big nastygram windows saying so. Wheeee.
For #2, I think if it was me and I really wanted to stick with the Mac and upgrad I’d just run Parallels. Sure, it’s yet another license, but it runs a lot of stuff pretty well, including some 3D games, so I think it might be worth trying.
Another part of me wonders if Crossover/Wine could run that CAD software.
Of course, you want to be able to run these on a trial before you buy any hardware.
If you’re not aware of OpenCore Legacy I might as well mention that in case you need a newer version of macOS on that hardware.
Feature-wise, maybe, but UX is totally different.
If you are using the latest Adobe products at work, for example, you would want the same UI when you are doing something at home.
Daily Final Cut Pro 1080 video editing, lightroom editing in a catalogue with 5000+ images from a Sony a7iii, web stuff, lots of document writing.
If it could edit 4k video, I would have no reason to upgrade, but I've been eyeing used M1 prices lately...
It is very irksome to have to reboot due to a hardware issue and then discover that some software change possibly months or years ago broke startup.
Having to scramble after a power outage to get a bootable Linux image to fix it wasn’t ideal.
No way to have discovered this without a hard power cycle, a soft reset didn’t repro it.
I started working on it pretty intensively again in the past few months and... man, for being 11+ years old it keeps up. Turns out I got lucky with the longevity of the i7-3820, GTX 770, and (what at the time was a ridiculous for a home machine) 32gb of ram in it.
Benchmarked (anecdotally) against a more modern (2021 build, 3x the cost) desktop, raytraced renderings still take 8x as long. But if I'm designing / modeling in 3d or BIM there is LITERALLY no dropoff.
I'm still going to make a new build soon because I'm getting back into not having time for that 8x hit on renderings. But I had no idea when I put this thing together 11 years ago that it would serve me so well for so long.