from Hacker News

How and Why I Stopped Buying New Laptops (2020)

by mgd on 1/1/25, 6:38 PM with 141 comments

  • by morningsam on 1/1/25, 7:23 PM

    >I grumpily ordered a replacement key for 15 euros.

    A single key for 15€?! I remember ordering one from an online shop specialized in replacement laptop keys at some point in the 2010s and it was like 2€ total. Browsing through similar shops now, it seems like the minimum is 5€ per key nowadays, but still a far cry from 15€.

    >After spending more than 100 euros on plastic keys, which would soon break again, I calculated that my keyboard had 90 keys and that replacing them all just once would cost me 1,350 euros.

    Someone who breaks keys this often could just buy the whole keyboard assembly FRU for ~30-50€ and take spare keys out of that, assuming it's not always the same ones that break.

  • by jll29 on 1/1/25, 7:56 PM

    Great article.

    I have had a similarly positive experience with older laptops, in particular ThinkPads (x230) and Latitudes (e7460). The older machines often also have much better keyboards than more recent laptops, IMHO.

    As the OP writes, swapping out HDD for SSD (1 usually prefer at least 1 TB) and maxing out RAM are affordable things that you won't regret.

  • by nottorp on 1/1/25, 7:26 PM

    That's all fine when you use the laptop as a typewriter. I keep around a 2010 laptop that only has some text editing software on it for that exact reason.

    Unfortunately, with the advent of soldered ram and storage, this isn't feasible any more for more taxing uses. Most of the used devices will have the default ram and storage and you'll have to buy new so you can order the thing with enough resources.

  • by parasti on 1/1/25, 7:50 PM

    Off-topic, but I was far more intrigued by the fact that their server runs on solar power and may go offline. https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/power/

  • by Joeboy on 1/1/25, 7:26 PM

    I presume, with Windows 10 support ending this year, there's going to be a glut of used laptops.

  • by johnea on 1/1/25, 7:12 PM

    > On the contrary, the only thing a consumer can do to improve their laptop’s ecological and economic sustainability is to use it for as long as possible.

    This is true for everything, not just laptops.

    Any purchasing that occurrs on a fashion cycle is largly a rip off...

  • by LittleTimothy on 1/2/25, 5:12 PM

    I was surprised at how little the author mentioned their actual experience using the laptop. Some things haven't changed and that's fine. I'm sure you can do word processing on that machine, but there are areas where you can't control the fact the rest of the world has moved on. How does the average website appear? Can you browse youtube? Can you actually log on to internet banking? Do you have to disable scripting on websites in general? How bad is the screen? What's the wifi speed like?

    Also, given that this is the author's work laptop, what's the economic justification for not investing in the primary tool you use for work?

  • by josephcsible on 1/1/25, 8:43 PM

    I'd have four concerns with such an old laptop:

    1. Lack of USB-C ports means I wouldn't be able to safely use any USB-C only peripherals (since the USB spec explicitly bans adapters in that direction)

    2. Lack of security updates for firmware, microcode, etc.

    3. Hard to find replacement batteries from reputable sources

    4. The CPU and memory requirements of software are steadily increasing

  • by vouaobrasil on 1/1/25, 8:36 PM

    I gladly buy lots of used things but laptops aren't one of them. The reason is that, at least from my experience, laptops only last between 5-8 years before they become more trouble than they are worth (either they become too slow as was the case with my previous Macbook or they stop working for some unknown reason, or the battery life sucks). I've also noticed laptops get beat up easily -- the vast majority of used Macbooks have dings.

    What I do instead is buy a moderately powerful new one and just use it until it dies -- I don't upgrade before the laptop is truly dead.

  • by rustcleaner on 1/1/25, 7:12 PM

    Maybe for OpenBSD. These days I am parano... savvy and prudent enough to not trust security swiss-cheese software bare metal, and so I box it all up into qubes with Qubes OS. For Qubes, it's always best to max out RAM, core count, and GPU count (AI). Libreboot laptops don't cut it if you want to run seven isolated chat/social profiles on seven separate VPN/Tor connections while also running LM Studio in an offline GPU-passed qube, to obfuscate cross-profile lexical correlations.

  • by jmclnx on 1/1/25, 7:39 PM

    My newest laptop is a Thinkpad W541 with Linux purchased used a few of years ago. That is just as good as any new laptop made today.

    The Old T430 I got from a relative who went to a MAC is also quite adequate for daily use. I have NetBSD on it and just finished upgrading to 10.1, so this was typed on that T430.

    So unless you are a heavy duty gamer or work on complex 3d graphics professionally, any recently used laptop will work just as well.

  • by CT4u8798 on 1/1/25, 8:27 PM

    I never buy new laptops, and I always put linux on the ones I do buy. My only issues have been running the more resource intensive applications I needed to run as a student, and the fact that the university expects you to be running windows. But as an everyday machine a used/refurbished laptop is the way to go.

  • by geek_at on 1/1/25, 7:13 PM

    Use refurbed when possible. But obviously the "don't buy new" incentive only scales to a hard limit

  • by jancsika on 1/1/25, 7:46 PM

    If it's someone local or friend-of-a-friend, fine.

    But for rando ebay/web: is there some part of the supply chain where thousands or tens of thousands of machines hit a single point where it's scalable for, say, a software rootkit to efficiently be put on them?

    E.g., I know universities typically buy a shit-ton of the same model. Where do they eventually unload them if they don't end up selling through their official used channel? Same for police/govt/etc.

    I don't think the economics of, say, rooting a bunch of machines in the hopes of hacking a big Bitcoin wallet need to even make sense. There just needs to be an easy point of access to many machines, so that a confidence man can sell some poor schmuck on the idea that if they buy a rootkit and install it on all of them they'll make millions in Bitcoins (or whatever).

  • by qingcharles on 1/1/25, 7:49 PM

    You can get some really great laptop bargains on eBay if you dig around.

    In 2023 I managed to get a barely used 2017 17" HP for $80 that runs Windows 11 fantastically and even happily runs some smaller LLMs.

    A crappy laptop can be totally transformed by swapping out their spinning HDD for a super cheap SSD and adding another 8GB of cheap RAM.

  • by IYasha on 1/7/25, 11:20 AM

    > New laptops may be more energy-efficient per computational power, but these gains are offset by more computational power.

    Should I rephrase: computers are getting ridiculously powerful, but JavaScript cancels out everything? Or just low-quality software in general.

    PS: I'm using 2014 laptop and only wish WWW wasn't such heavy garbage.

  • by cleverpatrick on 1/5/25, 10:09 AM

    Maybe it's just me, but I find that older hardware will sometimes get "sticky" after just sitting around for awhile. I've had it happen to mice, and to the palm rests on my old Dell laptop.

    The best explanation I've had for this is that the rubber components degrade over time. But it makes me leery of buying older hardware because of that.

  • by begueradj on 1/1/25, 8:11 PM

  • by mystified5016 on 1/1/25, 9:28 PM

    Every new laptop I've touched in the last few years just makes me more sure of my decision to ride out this thinkpad from 2013 until the poor quad core can't keep up with the web.

    It's had no failures at all in its life apart from the battery. My two year old work laptop went in the trash after its USB ports all died.

    This thing has been around the planet twice and it just keeps going.

  • by econ on 1/1/25, 8:23 PM

    My imagination produced a product with the worse possible build quality but with various tiers of replacement parts.

    Say you buy the laptop with a crude 3d printed case and when new money comes in you buy the titanium case. Spending the weekend swapping the parts over is a bonus.

    It should be modular but extra crappy. 2 GB memory is a lot.

    Ideally go full ship of theseus.

  • by Havoc on 1/3/25, 12:34 AM

    Does kinda feel like laptops and desktops are experiencing the same effect as the phones.

    The specs are improving, but the experience is not improving in lockstep with it. Browsing & similar normal usage cases just doesn't need it.

  • by robin_reala on 1/1/25, 7:05 PM

    (2020)

  • by sourraspberry on 1/1/25, 8:17 PM

    Spent like $2000 NZD on a new XPS 13 to replace my old XPS 13 from ~2017 - a device I loved. The new one was a piece of hot garbage. Overheat and throttled playing League of Legends - a game that has ran adequately on every other piece of hardware I've owned since 2011?

    I couldn't understand how a 2022 device would run so much worse than 2017 device and assumed it was faulty. Returned, given a replacement, same issue. It is quite literally not built to hand the heat from the Intel chip doing very minimal stuff. I refuse to use a laptop that sounds like a jet engine when Microsoft is doing basic background stuff.

    Returned and ended up buying a used 15 inch T-type Thinkpad with an AMD chip recommended by Reddit for $500 NZD. Runs great, cool, and quiet. It's much bigger and bulkier that the Dell but I don't mind.

    Note: Not a Thinkpad fanboy, work has given me an X1 Carbon that I dislike for the same reasons I didn't like the new XPS 13 - it's useable, but it's still much hotter and louder than I would like.

  • by jjkaczor on 1/1/25, 8:14 PM

    ... well... this is all good except... if you use Windows and want to upgrade to Windows 11... am currently fighting with a Lenovo W530 from 2013 - and nothing is working "well", even the recent 2024 Win 11 IoT Enterprise release build that can make TPM/etc optional via a Rufus-created USB stick.

    And then testing newer Linux distros is also not working with the nVidia K2000M discrete graphics system.

    Am thinking it may be time to give-up, harvest the RAM, the SSD's and the screen and recycle the rest of this one...

  • by devops99 on 1/1/25, 7:55 PM

    Flipping the HAP bit on the Intel ME/AMT on older laptops is less difficult, generally (not always). However, with more recent UEFI releases containing newer Intel ME/AMT payloads, the HAP bit is benign on these newer releases of Intel ME for all we know.

    There is a very dire need to have those with hardware hacking skills assist the larger freedom software community in "liberating" newer machines.

    Someone recently got Libreboot running on a ThinkPad T480

      https://ezntek.com/posts/librebooting-the-thinkpad-t480-20241207t0933/

  • by Uw5ssYPc on 1/2/25, 12:01 AM

    This idiot first buys several laptops for 5000 Euro, then he switches to garbage 15-years old 50 Euro ones. From one extreme to another. And his website promotes anti-humanism propaganda, like turning off running water in people's homes for "sustainability". What a joke.

  • by bhouston on 1/1/25, 7:41 PM

    Hmm... okay...

    Why the SD Card thing when you can just use the built-in OS cloud syncing capabilities in Windows or MacOS?

    Also you can take my M3 MacBook Air 15" from my cold dead hands. That laptop is ultra-lite, perfectly quiet, and ultra-fast. Wouldn't trade it for a 10 year old laptop.