You feel sorry for ze little old computer. Zis is because you crazy. It is just a machine; it has no feelings.
It is working just as well as it was 10 years ago and capable of all the same things now as it was back then. Nothing has changed except your expectations of it. That's right, there's nothing wrong with it -- in reality, you're the problem.
Not really. As it’s been updated over the years with new features the OS has heavier usage on the hardware. Also if it’s still got a hard drive in there chances are it’s dying after 10 years
Running an OS significantly newer than original on a computer gets filed under "expectations." Nobody bitches their Amiga can't run Windows 98, either. If it is 10 years old, its original OS was Windows 8, updates for which ended in 2016 (or last year, for Windows 8.1). No new bloat after that!
But even so, unless the computer in question is a netbook or something it'll be fine. For reference, I have a ThinkPad laptop that was manufactured in 2012 and I still use it daily. It runs Windows 10 just fine. Updates and all. The latest Corel suite, modern browsers, video editing, no problem. PC performance reached a bit of plateau coincidentally... about 10 years ago.
The MTBF of even a middling consumer hard drive is, if we are being extremely uncharitable, 300,000 hours. That's 32 and a quarter years of continuous usage and there are vintage hard drives in circulation in perfect working order that are much, much older than that. The main thing this laptop is going to need help with is its battery, which probably is degraded a bit by now.
But even so, unless the computer in question is a netbook or something it’ll be fine. For reference, I have a ThinkPad laptop that was manufactured in 2012 and I still use it daily. It runs Windows 10 just fine. Updates and all. The latest Corel suite, modern browsers, video editing, no problem. PC performance reached a bit of plateau coincidentally… about 10 years ago.
even then you could just install something like linux on it, and it would probably be lighter than win7 which is what likely shipped with that machine, though i think some sported windows 8 later in the cycle.
Well actually, electronics age just like the rest of us, every electron that passes through wears down the component just a little more creating just a little more resistance with each passing use. So in effect the 10 year old laptop does have something resembling getting harder and harder to wake up
have there been like studies on this? Or anything that shows any sort of relevant data about it? I've been curious what effect it has on manufactured stuff like this for a while now.
Assuming that the software updates haven't slowed it down and that it's been kept clean of dust (which also causes it to throttle itself to avoid overheating).
Silicon doesn't age friend. Heat might degrade circuits and harms processors by thermal deformation. But most electronics are designed to stay well under the temperatures that will harm them with throttling and heat management. So, unless you're incredibly negligent with maintenance or intentionally overclocking, most electronics have a way longer potential life span than people use them for. My 15 year old desktop computer was so beefy when I build it that today it still outperforms this year's off the shelf office units in raw speed and processing power, despite being physically about 12 times larger. It's only recently that new games started to tax it beyond performance goals (60fps at 1080p), but get a lower modest expectation (800p at 30 fps) and suddenly she is back in the game. Only thing I'm missing now is lack of on-board bluetooth connectivity and usb-c ports. Even if I were to build a new one, I bet the old beast could go on as a server for decades more.
That's lovely. When is the last time you bought an electronic device made entirely of silicon including no capacitors, thermal past, electric motors for fans, etc, etc? Electronics may seem permanent, and yes they have an amazing shelf life, but chips do in fact degrade (see solid state ssds), and you're held back by your weakest link.
Absolutely, a ten year old computer today is still capable of doing pretty much everything that most people use computers for. It's not like the old days when every few years a new tier of computer would come out that made older devices no longer capable of doing what people wanted.
I was still running a Q6600 (a 2.4 gHz quad core from 2007) until a few years ago. It ran most things acceptably for its entire life - it wasn't until around the time of PS4 Pro/Xbox Whatever ports that it could no longer keep up, and even that was largely due to the other components I was restricted to on such an old motherboard.
That thing was also a tank. The CPU cooler was stock and the thermal paste had degraded and separated to the point it idled at 65c, but I never had a single hardware fault in nearly fifteen years of running it. I kind of miss it.
It depends on how good it was to start with. I have a machine from 2006 that is usable for daily tasks. I also have a netbook from 2009 that can barely do anything.
My notebook is 8 years old. It was a gaming beast when I got it, now it's not great on most modern releases(1060). It still works really good to be honest, I just stopped using once I got a good desktop computer.
Heyo yee old laptop gang. I have a 2011 MacBook Pro that I slapped more ram and a SSD into and it works amazingly. I don’t use it for games anymore (I bought it to install Windows and play games) but it handles like 60k photos wonderfully.
I did that with a 2010 17” MacBook Pro. It had Windows for games and Mac OSX when I wanted a reliable computer. Finally died on me in ~2022 but otherwise was doing fine. I switched to a tower for games in 2018 and now my friend and I(mostly my far more savvy friend) and working out how to make Linux work reliably because Windows is…ya know.
I read about this from people like you, but I did NOT have the same experience.
I recently upgraded a 2011 Pro Macbook with new RAM, and a new battery. I am furious at myself for even wasting the money to do that in the first place.
The battery, even when brand new from iFixit, barely lasted an hour or two on Youtube while I am at work. Two videos around 15-20 minutes, medium brightness, 720p, and the damn thing barely lasted those two videos. God forbid I want to use it for anything after those!
I'm assuming it was because the CPU is way way power hungry, which is okay, but DEFINITELY not usable in real situations. My main point is that my side of this situation was not at all good, and to not waste your money!
I actually am on my original battery, it only has like 25 or 30 cycles because I only used it to play games so it was always plugged in. Before I installed the SSD, I tested the battery and got through 1.75 playthroughs* of Beetlejuice on full brightness!
The model I have is the early 2011, so it’s got an ancient i7 and a dedicated GPU. On the most recent OSX version it’ll take, the GPU doesn’t appear to be working though… which is fine, because I just use it to browse stuff and store a million pictures.
I've realized, thanks to tal, that I was under the wrong impression and had thought the CPU was just too power hungry. Maybe it is, but it has always had not so good battery life unfortunately.
I have bitten the bullet, and upgraded to a newer laptop. The battery actually lasts multiple days of youtube, plex, and anything else like games I throw at it. I just wanted a laptop I didn't have to worry about charging unless I got a few uses out of it first! I will always miss the glowing apple on the back of the lid though. That was some good times. :')
Replacing the spinning disk hard drive with an ssd will give you a significant increase in battery life. And it'll also make the machine wildly faster on all tasks that aren't cpu intensive
The battery, even when brand new from iFixit, barely lasted an hour or two on Youtube while I am at work. Two videos around 15-20 minutes, medium brightness, 720p, and the damn thing barely lasted those two videos.
googles
This is a discussion from back when they came out, and it sounds like two hours is maybe about right.
Wow. Thank you so much for this post! I always thought I was flipping crazy, but it actually makes sense now!
As an aside, I just went ahead and bit the bullet and got a new laptop as I was under the impression the CPU was very power hungry, and that no matter what upgrades I gave it, it would never be "efficient" enough for me to use for what I need a laptop for, which is battery life.
Thank you for helping me understand the issue was always there, and that I should've definitely researched more before I bought these upgrades!
Hey just chiming in that I did exactly this on my 2011 i7 MBP (p
Probably circa 2018) and had the same experience, terrible battery life on the new battery, MacOS would stutter, etc. Not worth it. Interesting to read that that's all we should've expected!
I also went and installed Debian on it because I knew it was no longer supported by MacOS. I know I could've tried the OpenCore and I did at one point, but it wasn't very stable and still ate through the battery. :/
At least for me, both my laptop (daily driver) and desktop would be considered old by this comic (2014 and 2017 respectively). Neither of them are struggling with the tasks I mostly use them for (writing notes, programming, light gaming on my desktop).
The only things they are struggling at, are modern video codecs and the ABSOLUTELY BLOATED shitshow that is today's Internet experience.
to be fair, everything struggles with software decoding on modern HEVC codecs (yes i realize HEVC is technically H265 but that's a stupid fucking name, and i refuse to use HEVC and AVC as anything other than generics for the class of codec they're in because that's the only thing that makes sense)
i do live in brazil so its hard to get good hardware because os shipping and everythings supposed to be around 5x more expensive than stuff in the us (though in practice, its way worse than that)
my brother got lucky and got an rtx 2060 super at the end of the pandemic. the best gpu ive ever had was a gtx750 ti that simply stopped working, meaning im now stuck with no gpu, an i5 6500 and 16GB of ram (my brother got himself more ram and sold a 16GB stick to me that he was using)
So, a number of countries, including Brazil, have VAT, which is considerably higher than US sales tax. Looking online, it looks like Brazil has 17%-19% VAT, and sales tax in the US, aside from a few states that don't have it, is usually in the 6%-9% range.
And I can believe that for some products, maybe localization for Portuguese costs something, and economy of scale is less.
But how can it possibly be 5x? That seems far higher than anything that I could imagine producing. Some countries have protective tariffs to subsidize local industry, but I'm pretty sure that Brazil isn't big in the PC hardware business.
googles
Okay, this is a decade old. They cite other taxes as some of that:
Taxation is a recurring theme when you ask Brazilians about the cost of many imported goods. To take an example, the Brazilian website iG published an infographic on Apple products’ tax burden, and noted that the different taxes hitting the iPad add up to almost 55%.
So, that's pretty hefty. Still not 400%, though.
This is where ‘Lucro Brasil’ (“Profit Brazil”) comes into play. Coined in reference to ‘Custo Brasil,’ it denounces the fact that structural problems often hide abusive margins at all levels, which most Brazilian consumers aren’t aware of.
While it is always difficult to find out about distributors’ and manufacturers’ margins, several details seem to confirm this suspicion. For instance, 60% taxes don’t fully explain why items can be twice as expensive in Brazil, and why tax breaks take so long to be reflected, Gizmodo Brasil highlighted in a recent article.
Okay, but why higher margins?
According to many analysts, the Brazilian elite may have its share of responsibility here. In practical terms, a high price tag has become a selling point for some, the anthropologist Roberto da Matta explained in an interview:
“When I was living in the US, I was running once when I saw then president George W. Bush, running as well, with security guards. He was using the same Nike shoes as I was. Here in Brazil, it’s hard to picture such a scene. Because objects still very much reflect the social segment of their owners. The sneakers, the car, the restaurant aren’t valued only for what they are, but also as status symbols. This is why it is more expensive to have dinner in Rio or São Paulo than in New York.”
I could maybe buy that for luxury goods -- that's a thing, Veblen goods, but I don't think that most computer hardware probably qualifies.
Martin’s comment is a reference to reports that Foxconn is now manufacturing Apple products in its Brazilian plants – a piece of news that didn’t have any major impact on their price tags.
Hmm. That might be an argument that protectionist policy is involved.
Brazil is among the world's most expensive countries to buy Apple products, according to a new report looking at 20 countries worldwide, published by bank BTG Pactual.
The prices of imported electronics in Brazil are among the highest of the countries listed in the report and are justified the argument that the Latin country is a "tough environment for foreign players", who have to deal with "challenging and structural issues."
Such problems include high import taxes, complexities and bureaucracy for imports and bottlenecks around logistics. According to the report, that means players with local manufacturing operations will get the upper hand in the years to come.
I have a ThinkPad X220 that recently turned 13, with SSD and RAM upgrades, basic maintenance, and Linux it’s still running great for plenty of tasks.
Plus it’s so well built I could probably stick it in a plate carrier and use it as body armour. Doesn’t seem to matter how much it gets dropped or dropped onto, ol’ Thinky keeps on chugging.
I had an x201 that I sold on to pay for my now "current" (ha) OG Thinkpad Yoga. Sometimes I do miss that old brick.
Sure, it only had two point touch instead of 10... But it got 11 hours of battery life with the extended (swappable!) pack, a daylight readable display, built in GPS, a fingerprint reader that actually worked, and if anyone tried to steal your laptop you could just hit them with it.
I mean, I don't know if the 100Wh limitation is specifically reasonable, but I've seen lithium battery fires before, and they're pretty exciting. Fires on airplanes are pretty bad news. They probably had to have some kind of cap.
You can carry an additional 100Wh battery or power bank, which I do, so if laptop vendors would actually make laptops with 100Wh batteries, that's 200Wh that can be at least with you, albeit not all internal. And you can carry larger powerstations if you aren't actually flying.
In theory, laptop vendors could do that old Thinkpad route of having batteries that extended outside the case and make them as large as they wanted...you'd just have to fly with a smaller one.
The only computer I have is a 12 year old laptop, it sounds like a jet engine if I try to play a 1080p youtube video, though local 1080p files mostly work fine. I use Shadow for gaming, creative work and anything else that just doesn't work locally and it's crazy how good it is, it never spins the fans much more than its idle speeds when streaming and the input delay is crazy low, unnoticeable 99.99% of the time. Even though I've used this for thousands of hours it still feels like some sci-fi fantasy.
It was running Vista when I bought it, then upgraded to Win 7, and now runs whatever flavor of Linux I feel like installing.
Battery is shot. Screen connection is iffy, but works if you wiggle it. Several keys stopped working after I accidentally threw up on it, but I can use an onscreen keyboard for those.
I was pulling an all-nighter reading fan fiction serials while drinking Kraken mixed with Orange Juice and had also eaten a whole frozen pizza around midnight. I was not ok. The incident happened around 3am.
First time I'd ever vomited while drunk. I know my limits better now.
Resale value is great on them too. I sold my 10 year old MBP (after I paid for an Apple cert battery replacement) for close to 50% of what I paid when it was brand new.
Good for you but who pays that much for that old hardware? While many computers run well beyond 10 years, it's hardly surprising if components break down after that time.
My early 2015 MBP is still my daily driver for programming, I will never regret spending so much on an MBP when they last this long. I went through two windows laptops in four years before this one. It is starting to show its age with only 8 GB of RAM, but I’m going to use it until it melts haha
Ten year old laptop is 2013 (this post seems to be from 2023). That's really not old at all. I use a 17 year old machine and it works great for basic tasks.
17? As in 2007? What are the specs on that thing? You running a lightweight linux distro on it? Surely you have an SSD in there and have upgraded the ram.
It's interesting how light KDE has gotten. It used to be the big, bloated desktop environment that you wouldn't even try using on old hardware. It seems to have traded places with GNOME.
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