I try to use my hardware the longest possible to avoid generating waste. I’ve used my last laptop for roughly 8 years (a refurbished MacBook Pro) before the battery swelled and the hardware got too old to get software updates.
My computers for work (which my job pays and which I send back after each job) are newer and last 3 years on average, but part of me likes using crappier hardware to get a good feel for terrible performance early. Sometimes it’s just impossible though.
Could you keep an older machine just for this kind of testing?
I used my MB Air before this machine for 8 years, tho I always intended to upgrade it at around year 5 or 6 but none of the MBPs at the time felt worth the upgrade (it’s when they had that horrible bulky design). When I got my current Mac (2019 16" MBP) I wanted to upgrade after year 1 because it was one of the last Intel Macs and Apple just kept introducing obsolescence through OS updates - with small quality of life annoyances that make you want to upgrade. Such as it taking a whole second to open or close tabs in Safari (so annoying when you have to close a bunch of them or spend a lot of time browsing webpages/researching) or that it started taking forever to open apps like the Affinity suite.
It’s the small quality of life issues that make most people want to upgrade because they’re just so annoying - it used to drive me up the wall! Did you not experience the same in your older machines? You must have the patience of a saint Fred!
Could you keep an older machine just for this kind of testing?
well I have a raspberry pi that acts as an S3 proxy for my file sync server and a small 2-core VPS with 4GB of ram (running Alma linux), but in general I just try to consume less in terms of computing devices, so I try to stretch out the functional life of my laptop as much as possible.
This clearly won’t do for work where most of my recent employers just use absolutely beefy machines (often more powerful than some of the instances we run the software on in the cloud), so my work computer is fully distinct from my personal stuff.
I had a windows desktop, but it’s essentially the same case I’ve been reusing for the last 18 years except whenever my brother is tired of his desktop, he sends me the old parts and I piece whatever I can together. I’m being EOL’d for windows updates because it doesn’t have a TPM but anyway the thing is now so old that it seems to break after 15-30 mins usage where the fan will spin up fast and it will lose all display (I imagine something is *** up with the graphics card). So I more or less no longer use it until I’ll get motivated to find hardware to migrate *** once more. The practical death of that computer is partly why I no longer have the ability to test my software on Windows anymore.
It’s the small quality of life issues that make most people want to upgrade because they’re just so annoying - it used to drive me up the wall! Did you not experience the same in your older machines? You must have the patience of a saint Fred!
I’m constantly angry at computers. We, as an industry, are wasteful as hell and fully deserve the scorn we get from people angry at planned obsolescence and the short life span of devices. I’m however noticeably less mad at my computer since I have gotten an M1 macbook air a few years ago (which I hope to use until I’m again very frustrated by the experience). It’s clear that if you don’t have an SSD and at least 16GB of RAM in this day and age (and even then 16GB of RAM is laughably low for many), software in the wild is no longer made for you to use unless you stick to the command line.
Overall I’ve gotten good at using minimalist software (eg. command line stuff like mutt for email), but my biggest move over the last few years has been to go “I don’t really need this” and just step away from the computer more and more until the need to do things on it passes. I’m otherwise mostly in browsers, editors, and the endless supply of electron apps (which I can now run all at once because my laptop isn’t a dinosaur any longer).
For what it’s worth, I was thinking about buying a 2nd-hand SFF desktop unit with 500GB HDD, 8GB RAM, and Windows 11. For NZD80 + shipping. That’s about USD48. That’s just the box, no monitor, keyboard, or mouse. If anyone was paying me these days it would be worth it to check that my stuff built on Windows.
