
Why I use old hardware - ddevault
https://drewdevault.com/2019/01/23/Why-I-use-old-hardware.html?
======
tombert
I remember getting in an argument a few years ago during a budgeting meeting
at a job, where the prospect of upgrading our two-year-old Macbook Pros came
up. This company was a startup that wasn't doing particularly well with money,
and I said that you don't need a super-fast laptop to program...especially
since this job was Node.js based and none of the work we were doing was
processing-heavy.

This started somewhat of an argument with my peers who claimed they needed a
top-of-the-line Macbook to do everything because you can't program on anything
slower. Management ended up caving and buying the new laptops.

I stand by my point on this though; as a proof of concept, I "lived" on an
ODroid XU4 for a month awhile ago, doing all my programming and everything on
there. I was happy to get my big laptop back when I was done with this
experiment, but I never felt like weaker hardware impaired my _programming_
ability.

~~~
jacobsenscott
This only makes sense if you pretend developer time is free and low morale has
no effect on productivity.

10 minutes of lost productivity a day due to inadequate hardware means you are
paying at least $4k per year per dev for that shit pile of a laptop. Usually
it costs more than 10 minutes a day too.

The hit to morale when you tell a professional they can't pick their tools is
even worse. Now they are spending at least 1 hour a day looking for a new job
because devs are good enough at math to know if you can't afford a new laptop
you've got six months of runway tops.

If you believe employee happiness has any correlation to productivity you
always buy them whatever hardware makes them happy. It is a small price to
pay.

~~~
scarface74
If you are using Node as the original poster mentioned, what is a slightly
faster computer doing for you? You’re not spending time waiting on a compiler.

~~~
readingnews
Exactly. They can not break out the "my codes compiling" argument. Lost morale
over a 2 year old laptop?? Wow, they should work in education. Try a 10 year
old laptop and no hope of every buying a new "high end" machine. Try a shiny
new $500 dell. I think some new programmers are out of touch a bit on
hardware...

~~~
zulln
> Wow, they should work in education. Try a 10 year old laptop and no hope of
> every buying a new "high end" machine.

That it is worse in another field is not a very good argument?

~~~
scarface74
Yes because developers who are whining about having to use a two year old
laptop because their company is trying to save money seems more like a bunch
of entitled brats.

~~~
eanzenberg
If you're bringing in 3x your cost (as you should as an employee), the cost of
a laptop is very nil for the company. Their nickel and diming you is worse for
morale and retention.

~~~
scarface74
Anyone who will quit a job for something so minute as having a two year old
laptop is someone that is probably so immature that they couldn’t handle the
normal rigors that come from being a professional.

~~~
eanzenberg
You may think so. When you see certain coworkers get new machines every 2
years but you don't, for example, it builds a power structure when one wasn't
before. If you feel less valued as a result, I don't think it means you can't
handle the "normal rigors" of being a professional. It means, if you can find
somewhere else where you feel more valued, then more power to you.

~~~
scarface74
Again if you can’t handle the “power structure” of not getting a laptop every
two years, you will never be able to handle navigating life in corporate
America.

------
shaftway
My mine take-away from this article is something that I've always thought was
key: When you're developing for other people, use the same hardware as them.

I was at a fairly large financial firm in ~2004 that was rolling out a system
to a large number of users. These users had impulse control issues, and were
not allowed to use mice or keyboards (they would be torn off and thrown across
the room). So the screens they used were touch screens. Inventory was shocked
when I asked for one of the touchscreens to use as my second monitor.

When launch time came around my parts of the UI were the only ones usable.
Everyone else had built tiny tap targets that were easy to hit with a mouse,
but impossible to fat-finger.

~~~
zozbot123
> ... rolling out a system to a large number of users. These users had impulse
> control issues, and were not allowed to use mice or keyboards (they would be
> torn off and thrown across the room).

Trading desk, I assume?

~~~
shaftway
On the floor at an open-outcry exchange.

------
unwabuisi
There is a similar line of thinking for audio engineers who do a final
mix/master of music before it is sent off to radio, streaming platforms, etc.

After spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on expensive sound systems and
professional speakers, engineers realized the average users listen to their
music through inexpensive mediums. A cheap pair of headphones, a small
bluetooth speaker, or even laptop speakers. They rarely listen to their music
through mediums where the full audio spectrum is present, so in order for an
engineer to get a mix that translates well across all mediums, they do their
final mixes and tweaks on devices like a pair of apple earpods, or a more
famous example, the Yamaha NS-10 [0].

The line of reasoning being: if you can get it to sound good on a basic
speaker, it will sound great on high end systems, which is a win-win!

[0] - [https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/yamaha-
ns10-story](https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/yamaha-ns10-story)

~~~
spindle
Just to clarify, they do the final mix and mastering of each piece on a
_variety_ of speakers. But right - the closer they get to the finished product
the less they care how it sounds through expensive equipment.

------
fb03
We need to fight software bloat.

Old computers and hardware are awesome for several reasons, specially if you
_really enjoy_ tinkering with computers!

\- Linux/Un*x compatibility is usually pretty good. and those OSes are good
for tinkering and producing new stuff. You can reuse your old boxes for
staging servers and test beds.

\- Old hardware forces you to learn more about how the hardware works and how
to optimize your toolset. No, you don't need that insane number of daemons
that run automatically if you install a vanilla distribution like Ubuntu. It
is a nice stance against this ongoing trend of consumerism and disposable
hardware.

We are wasting and rebuilding and tearing apart all our hardware each 2-3
years just for the sake of having that new instruction corrected in microcode
or for having a conversational piece. it's bollocks.

We now have some insanely fast consumer processors which gives us the power to
run and simulate real time graphics, audio synthesis, AR, etc.... but
following the same trend, software is becoming more and more inefficient.

Some software solutions now require several hundred megs of binaries and local
web servers and dlls and whatnot to solve the simplest of use cases. We have
text editors and music players that now need a full Node.js server instance
and a separate build of Chromium running just for doing shit that we used to
get by with a tenth of ram and processing power. Thank god we still have some
survivors like foobar2000, notepad++ and etc.

The effect of that inefficiency on us is that we get to do the same things we
did 10 or 20 years ago (study, read, code, listen to music?), only using way
more cycles for nothing.

Besides very few people running insanely complex simulations (which when
scaled, are gonna be run on clusters or AWS anyway), most power users don't
need that multicpu rig with 128 gigs of ram.

I have 2 old laptops now and one of those is a pretty usable 2010 Macbook with
3gigs of ram. It ran Mac OS X dog slow but now with Xubuntu, it's still pretty
usable. And when XFCE starts becoming too bloaty, this box is gonna allow me
to study tiling window managers and more lightweight customizable distros like
Arch. The net effect is me studying more, which is always a win.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
It's really shocking how much Linux Desktop has let itself go over the years.
I remember when you could recommend someone install Linux on an old laptop to
get it responsive again, but nowadays that advice isn't true anymore.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kvT40umKL8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kvT40umKL8)

~~~
badsectoracula
I recommend people to grab Caldera OpenLinux 2.3 from Archive[0] and try it in
86box[1] on an emulated Pentium 166MHz with 32MB of RAM and 2GB (or so) HDD.
Do an installation that includes everything. Note that you only need the first
CD (the one named "OpenLinux 2.3 CD.iso"), the rest are source code packages
and some commercial stuff (that most people probably never saw, but the first
CD was distributed via magazines).

This single 650MB CD IMO it is one of the most complete distributions in terms
of what it includes and you can do with it. It includes a complete desktop
environment (KDE 1), development tools (with an IDE), graphics editors,
productivity tools, typesetting tools (TeX, LaTeX, Groff), databases, clients
for mail, irc, web, etc, media players, a bunch of games and - most
importantly - documentation for pretty much everything accessible right away
from the panel at the bottom (...although ironically while there is also a
"getting started with linux" document that describes the basics, for some
reason it is not linked and not even compiled... you need to already know the
console and docbook tools to compile it and read it :-P).

And on that machine is still very fast and usable. I tried it at some point a
while ago and after playing with it for a while i started reading some of the
included stuff and after a while i forgot i was in an emulated environment
since everything was responsive. And this is, btw, exactly how i remembered it
- this distribution was the first Linux distribution i ever used on my PC in
1999 (which was a 200MHz Pentium MMX with 32MB of RAM).

(as a sidenote, yes this is the same Caldera that renamed themselves to SCO
and made the infamous lawsuites, but this distro was made before that time)

[0]
[https://archive.org/details/OpenLinux2.3CD](https://archive.org/details/OpenLinux2.3CD)
[1] [https://github.com/86Box/86Box](https://github.com/86Box/86Box)

~~~
keithpeter
A default install of Slackware from a 2.4Gb .iso will give you a similar
environment that is reasonably functional on an X200 similar to the OAs. I
actually use an X220 which is slightly more powerful but same ballpark.

x4 inflation over 20 years?

~~~
badsectoracula
Slackware is the closest i know of, but only because there isn't anything
better. Beyond that it isn't really comparable since Slackware is just a
collection of software thrown in together and it has a ton of redundant
software, a large part of which is "bloated". The reason i mentioned to try
out COL was that it provided an integrated system (it is probably the only
time i used a Linux system where things felt like they were meant to work with
each other - and kinda sad that this was on the first distro i ever used) with
little redundant functionality (beyond practical matters - it has both KDE's
web browser - not called Konqueror yet at the time - and Netscape since in
1999 the latter was pretty much needed for browsing the web on Linux) yet with
a lot of functionality provided in a small footprint. The full install is a
little above 900MB - in comparison Slackware's full (and only supported)
install is a bit above 9GB (so it is more of a 10x inflation :-P) with a
couple different desktop environments, a ton of window managers and a bunch of
duplicated things.

But as i wrote, Slackware is the closest which is why i have an ISO of the
latest DVD available on my external HDD to throw in a VM whenever i want to
try something on Linux. Also (and this is only tangentially related) i like
that it still provides "full" distribution media (in comparison Debian has
become so overloaded with packages that to download installation media for
archival/offline use you need to build them manually yourself and even then it
is several blu-ray disks).

FWIW i do not think it is impossible to make something similar, but it would
require a lot of work, especially on the desktop environment front.

------
koolba
Many years back I had a peer who insisted on sub par hardware for all his non-
prod environments. He’d also insist that his team meet any production
performance goals on said sub-par hardware. End result was things would fly
when they finally got to production.

~~~
gcb0
I call this the Demostenes' performance hack.

------
johnklos
Imagine how much better off the whole planet would be if we recycled computers
for use by other people, kept and repaired computers, and didn't accept the
idea that rendering a web page should take half a gigabyte.

~~~
zanny
I have a shelf of old parts including a Pentium 4 ATX board with working CPU
and some DDR2 I found. I have a dozen or so hard drives that still pass all
their SMART readings (even if most have old age and wear level warnings). I
have a few 10+ year old monitors that look like spoiled eggs with how
inaccurate their colors are but aren't broken.

I keep it all around as a "if someones board etc dies, at least it works" kind
of thing. I have some old GPUs too that still work including some 8800s, an
X1800, and a GT 520.

If they broke, it wouldn't be worth my time to fix them, but they are still
working hardware, even if they aren't the latest tech.

~~~
cr0sh
I once saved my bacon with an "old" (I don't really consider it old) 8 MB S3
PCI video card I had lying around.

I had bought an AMD chipset motherboard that assumed (in the BIOS) that you
were going to use a CPU with onboard video (ie - an AMD "APU"). I was setting
things up, and my CPU was an AMD without onboard video, because I figured the
motherboard, like all the others I'd ever set up, would switch automagically
to the PCIe video slot, which had my old NVidia GPU in it.

Nope. POST beeped that I didn't have any video output. So - I could either buy
another CPU - or another mobo. Neither was an option. But I thought - maybe I
could plug in a PCI video card and it would recognize that...?

Dug through my various boxes-o-junk and found one. Dropped it in, and it
worked - long enough for me to switch the BIOS video option over, after which
I could use my GPU.

I was kinda shocked at the BIOS, though - it was my first time using something
"modern" \- and it was a pretty GUI with a mouse and everything (then I
started learning about UEFI which the mobo supported - a lot of things had
changed since my last system, which was a Core2Duo board).

------
paride5745
While I love those old Thinkpads (and I have one), my main issue with these
posts is that nobody talks about battery life.

If I work on a laptop, I don't want to have to look for a power socket around,
I need something to work on battery for at least half day.

~~~
tpadtway
x220 with ips screen, 9 cell battery. Lasts 9 hours if you just ssh. You can
get it for $300-$400.

~~~
radomir_cernoch
I do have a similar experience. However, when I start compiling, the battery
goes down in 2-3 hours. Simply because the compilation takes so much time...

~~~
setquk
I do that stuff on AWS. I try and treat my laptop as a terminal.

~~~
digsmahler
Oooh, I like that idea! I'm gonna try to figure that out today.

~~~
jagger27
Or if you have some spare basement space, pick up an old Dell PowerEdge or
some HP equivalent from eBay and slap ESXi on it. Works well for me, and I use
my PowerEdge T410 for some other home services. 12 cores, 24 threads and 64GB
DDR3 ECC RAM goes a pretty long way.

~~~
setquk
Plus keeps your house warm in the winter :)

------
nkingsy
My former boss (front end web) had a similar rationale for forcing the team to
use old MacBook airs.

I think it’s reasonable if you have cloud everything. We did not. We had to
deploy directly from our machines, which basically made the laptop unusable
for 12 minutes on every deploy. Also, sketch + slack + chrome + dev env
basically meant swap was the normal state of affairs (random 10 second hangs
all day every day). But at least I could talk to other people and decrease
their productivity while I was waiting to be able to work.

On the plus side I was very motivated to optimize our build system.

------
zachruss92
This is a _really_ good point the author makes. I definitely am guilty of
getting into the trap of wanting to get new hardware when, realistically, I
could do all of my work on a 10-year-old machine.

This concepts also applies to website performance. I test my projects on
physical iOS and Android devices, but they're both relatively new. I should
start taking into account lower-end devices, especially on the Android side as
JS is notoriously much slower.

------
leni536
> _In reality, this high-end hardware isn’t really necessary for most
> applications outside of video encoding, machine learning, and a few other
> domains._

Like browsing the modern web.

~~~
syntheticnature
Yes, this is what drove me to abandon the netbook I'd been using for years --
everything was fast enough except any sort of web browsing.

~~~
ddevault
It's better if you disable JavaScript by default and gradually change your
habits to avoid websites which work poorly.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
You end up cutting out a huge part of the internet then.

~~~
ddevault
Yep, and nothing of value is lost.

------
ilovecaching
I'm fine with slower hardware, and agree in principle with what the article is
saying, but not poor displays. The reason I pick a MacBook over a Thinkpad is
because the screen quality is cash money compared to the 1080p on the stock T
series. I just can't do 1080p anymore.

Also, you could solve this problem by just using a VM. If it really bothers
you to have so much RAM and CPU, just spin up a 1401 in VirtualBox and use
that for all your dev needs.

~~~
rpeden
I agree with you on display quality. I picked up a ThinkPad x220 for not much
money, but I swapped an IPS panel into it because the TN panel it came with
was really, really awful. I don't even hate all TN panels - the one one my old
MacBook Air was quite decent.

When you start getting up toward MBP prices, you can find ThinkPads with
decent displays. Even some of the older W series came equipped with a 3k matte
IPS, which I found quite nice. I prefer the W series keyboards over the new
MBP keyboards as well, but I found the trackpad on my W540 to be ridiculously
awful. It's not exactly cheap to buy one of these machines on eBay, but they
aren't crazily expensive either.

------
docker_up
My current desktop I bought with my own money is from 2012. I selected my
components based on low wattage, not based on highest specs, because the
computer previous to that, a Xeon server, used 200 watts idle and it cost me
at least $50/month in electricity.

I've been using this computer since then, with absolutely no reason to
upgrade. The only thing I would need more horsepower for these days is
ripping/transcoding video faster or editing video faster. I ran into issues
playing 4K video and thought I was processor-limited, but it turns out it was
my codec was also from 2012 and when I upgraded that, everything was fine.

Even at work, I'm still on a 2015 Macbook Pro because I refuse to upgrade
based on those fucking Touchbars.

------
earthnail
I co-founded Sonalytic and served as CTO until we got acquired. We developed
AI for music information retrieval. Clearly an area where every developer
needs the newest hardware. Or do they?

The entire time I worked from a 2010 Macbook Pro. For really resource hungry
stuff, we had a few dedicated servers with 64 cores, 512Gb of RAM and Nvidia
GPUs. I.e., nothing you’d ever get in a laptop.

Because my Macbook wasn’t particularly fast, we ended up avoiding all kinds of
bloat. We kept things simple, which actually helped us move really fast, and
used the resources on the big machines for scientific computing.

Worked out well for us :-).

------
bhauer
While my hardware isn't that old or that low-powered, I strongly agree with
the sentiment that software developers are notorious for under-appreciating
the importance of performance. One of our luminaries once opined about
optimization in such a way that some of us incorrectly think performance
optimization is something we should de-prioritize. Knuth's commentary has
value, but he is not a deity and his advice left us with an ambiguous notion
that you must know _when_ to optimize and, for many pieces of software,
optimization ends up never happening or happening far too late, yielding a bad
user experience. His advice should be framed not as _when_ to optimize, but
_how_ : profile, focus on low-hanging fruit that yields the maximum
performance benefits first, and only as needed dig into the lesser
bottlenecks.

Despite this confusion about when and how to focus on performance, many of us
instinctively know software is, in the large, too slow. Microsoft Office, a
slew of web sites and web apps, music players, most Electron apps, etc. As
developers, we sometimes get clever and use animation to hide slowness (or,
pathologically to mistakenly add slowness). As the OP mentions, some of these
apps end up with "good enough" performance on high-end hardware, but that
"good enough" isn't in fact good enough.

------
bytebuster
My opinion:

The article implies the hardware is fine, it's your workflow that's too heavy.
I want a machine that fits my workflow, not the inverse.

Even though the article implies that there isn't much difference, the
difference in productivity can be HUGE. Specially for workflows that depend on
crappy^H^H^H^H^H^Hdemanding applications.

From the perspective of a company:

The cost of laptops relative to salaries is minimal - Salaries are usually
close to six figures/y, a very good laptop is $2~3k, and can last multiple
years. The productivity increase will most probably cover the investment (not
only in terms of direct return, but business value: could be time to market,
fulfilling a tight deadline, etc).

From the perspective of a freelancer:

You are selling your time. A laptop that costs $2~3k will free some time (time
saved) and be used for years. Time saved = FREE MONEY.

The only reason I see to don't upgrade a laptop/desktop used to work is if
it's performance it's already close enough of a new one. BONUS REASON: newer
versions have keyboards that self-destruct.

------
bscphil
Likewise, I use a now 8 year old Dell XPS laptop. With any reasonably high
quality hardware, maintenance is not hard to do. I upgraded the screen and RAM
a few years ago, and that has precluded me from needing anything newer. I've
changed the thermal paste and blew the dust out of it. The only things I have
consistently had to replace are the charger and batteries. Both are <= $30 on
Ebay.

I think replacing a laptop that's 4 years or less old is pretty wasteful,
especially with how little the performance demands have changed in that time.
We should treat computers more like we treat cars: knowing they can't last
forever, but still a long term investment that requires some maintenance. Just
like with a car, if you can't perform the maintenance yourself, take it to
someone who can.

------
eloy
Nice to see I'm not the only one still using an X200, it's still a pretty
decent machine with an SSD, 4GiB RAM and coreboot. I fully agree with Drew.

------
Tade0
I have a "consumer grade" personal laptop from 2013, I use a company issued
MacBook Pro and just recently was still using a HP EliteBook 840 G2 issued by
my former workplace.

Checked the first two over the same TypeScript project and the MBP takes 10s,
while my laptop twice as much.

It does indeed _feel_ kinda slower overall, but it never occurred to me that
it was by that much. I mean - it's still fine for my after-hours stuff.

Meanwhile the HP, even though in the middle in terms of age here was a pain to
work with, because the fans on its i5-5200U would spin furiously on any hint
of actual work being required from it. Performance was equally bad.

I guess the takeout here is that while hardware doesn't matter that much, it
has to be _good hardware_ to begin with.

~~~
ericabiz
Do both of your non-MacBook laptops have old spindle hard drives? I find that
is much of the difference between “slower” and “faster” computers. SSDs have
come down in price significantly, so it’s worth the upgrade if you use the
computers on a regular basis.

~~~
Tade0
All of those mentioned have had SSDs from the get go, but with the exception
of the MBP connected via SATA III, so they never reached their full potential
in this regard.

My first ever laptop(2010) is still running and has a magnetic hard drive. I
can't believe I went through half of college on this thing.

------
chaoticmass
My trusty T400 died about three years ago, and I occasionally need a laptop to
work remotely doing web development and server maintenance. I also had a X41
tablet which wasn't really being used outside of being another old ThinkPad in
my collection. I started using the 1.6Ghz single core X41, running Linux and
Windows 7 dual boot, to work remotely and really had no issues doing what I
needed to do. I did need to have a bit of patience at times, but it worked.

This September I did finally get a new laptop, a Lenovo X1 Tablet, but I still
like to fire up the 13 year old thing and use it to test my own websites, just
to make sure they are still usable on slow systems.

------
jdblair
TLDR: Old Thinkpads are powerful and rugged, but the screens are terrible.

A wistful story:

I used a Thinkpad X201 (2010 model) as my primary laptop for 6 years. I called
it "lappy" (yes, a homestar runner reference). That thing took at serious
beating. I worked on solar power system monitoring and control, and this
involved a lot of field-work to debug problems. Lappy was exposed to a lot of
dirt, dust, moisture, heat, cold, grease, and spilled coffee. Yet, after I
upgraded the HD to a SSD it was the fastest build machine on our little
software team.

It did require repairs, but Thinkpads are designed for repairability. The most
fragile part is the power connector, which will break if the laptop falls and
lands on the connector while attached to the power cord. This repair requires
taking EVERY part out, but I followed the instructions and was able to replace
the connector.

After taking a break from Lappy for a few years and working on a Macbook with
a retina screen, I have to say the biggest deficiency of the Thinkpad was the
screen. When I read about using an 11 year old Thinkpad as a primary machine,
this is the first thing I think of. After using a modern laptop display I
can't go back to that washed out, fuzzy display on the X201.

2 years ago I took it on a "last mission" when I was building an installation
at Burning Man, which is probably the most hostile field environment I've
worked in. It had started to shut down randomly, but it kept running reliably
enough for my week-long dusty hack-a-thon.

[edited to fix some typos]

------
amiga-workbench
I don't plan on giving up my ThinkPad X201t any time soon, its probably slower
than an X200 as the ULV CPU throttles a bit but I've got 8gig of RAM, a solid
state disk, a real keyboard, a 16:10 VA display and no trackpad.

If I fancy more graphics performance I've always got the option of an express
card PCIe dock.

I find that this setup gives me a good yardstick for the kind of hardware an
average end user might have and it pushes me to make better choices when
writing software.

------
AdmiralAsshat
> This laptop is a great piece of hardware. 100% of the hardware is supported
> by the upstream Linux kernel, including the usual offenders like WiFi and
> Bluetooth. Niche operating systems like 9front and Minix work great, too.
> Even coreboot works!

If it's a Thinkpad X200 like he says, it could even support Libreboot:

[https://libreboot.org/docs/hardware/x200.html](https://libreboot.org/docs/hardware/x200.html)

~~~
eloy
Yes, but you can also use Coreboot without blobs on this particular machine,
so it doesn't really matter. Libreboot is just a Coreboot fork which is only
compatible with machines that are usable without blobs. And they deliver the
firmware as a blob, for more easy installation, Coreboot is basically a git
repo.

------
interfixus
Over the last thirty years, I have bought exactly one brand new device - an
Asus Eee, which I still have around somewhere, but which, ironically, I never
really used. Everything elese has been other people's lay-offs, including my
beloved Thinkpad T440p on which I'm typing this. I am forever baffled by the
quality and newness of hardware everybody simply wants to get rid of.

Believe me, I ship lean and speedy code.

------
bkcreate
What are some features that you would look for in a laptop so that you could
still be using it in 10 years if you bought it new today?

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
\- User upgradable/servicable parts, notably the battery & HDD

\- All hardware supported by open source drivers in the upstream Linux kernel

\- Durable frame

\- Standard ports which have already been shown to stand the test of time
(USB, 2.5mm headphone jack, and HDMI)

\- x86_64 or RISC-V architecture

------
exitcode00
Guess what? Electron is everywhere and everything. Electron is taking over -
its raining hamburgers.... RUN

Seriously though, I guarantee it would nuke old hardware into orbit. Its
unfortunately not feasible IMHO due to modern software glut. More power to
Drew, but many people are forced into using Skype, Slack, Discord :/

------
hyperman1
I've got an interesting comparison here: I have a 2nd hand x220 thinkpad, 10
years old. This machine serves me very well today on linux and KDE. I did give
it an SSD and 16g ram. Otoh, most of the time it is forced on the lowest CPU
speed to get some extra battery.

My previous employer gave us recent laptops. But it has a virus scannerbogging
it down to unusable slowness. It has tons and tons of agents for licensing,
network security, proxies,etc... It has draconian group policies eating away
speed. It has SCCM scanning the whole hard drive on a regular base, which of
course awakens tje virus scanner just for some bonus slowdown. I dreaded
developing on that beast, and coworkers tended to copy code to their personal
laptop, just to get some work done.

Now on paper, that work machine was a lot better than my thinkpad. In reality
however...

~~~
jandrese
However your ancient Thinkpad is now a hole in your network security...

Most virus scanners are security theater IMHO, so you're probably not much
different than those other laptops. At the very least full disk scans are
pretty unnecessary after the first if you're running in the default active
protection mode. Anything the active protection misses your full disk scan is
unlikely to find.

~~~
hyperman1
why would it be? It runs a fully patched Debian with ports closed, etc...

There is no difference software wise with a laptop from today.

------
systematical
This makes me question my desire to replace my 4 year i7 laptop with ssd and
16gb memory. To be fair. The performance is fine. But it's a 17" screen with
an full HDD as well. It weighs a lot and traveling is a bitch. I guess I could
get an older used slim and light system for just travel....?

------
frou_dh
I like my X200s too, but Lenovo were so miserly with the TFT panels they
specced. Absolute bottom of the barrel stuff in terms of colour and viewing
angles.

Something that's cool about the X200 design is that they didn't bother putting
a token trackpad on it. It's got the TrackPoint and that's it!

~~~
_emacsomancer_
At least the X200 (so I presume the X200s as well) you can put a good AFFS
screen [LCD HV121WX4-120] in.

------
astazangasta
KDE development in particular seems to have zero figs available for users with
hardware limitations. It seems to me all sorts of apps are constantly building
indexes and scanning my system, which might be fine on a fancy modern desktop,
but not on the curmudgeonly junk I always end up using.

~~~
Symbiote
That's my one gripe about KDE. I'd like an easy way to disable these indices,
since as far as I know I've never used any of them.

------
erikschoster
I've been using an x201 for programming and music production (and everything
else) since 2014 and don't see myself making a change anytime soon. (Though I
recently picked up an IBM server from around the same era for less than the
cost of a new cellphone, and now I have what feels like a supercomputer to do
offline audio renders and such that are possible on the x201 but take a long
time...)

I do enjoy the peace of mind that if I drop my laptop in a lake, the cost of
replacement is somewhere in the $100 range and dropping every year. But I
agree with the author of this article that it's also a nice way to (without
really having to think about it) keep the software I write reigned in and
usable for people who don't have the latest multi-thousand-dollar hardware.

~~~
wilsonnb3
Unless you’re doing music production in a non-standard way, you would benefit
greatly from a better computer.

DAWs and plugins eat a lot of ram and processing power.

------
3xblah
Regarding the 11-yr-old laptop I would be interested to know not only the
compile time but also the storage required, e.g. size of src tree plus any tmp
space required, etc.

I like to compile kernels using memory-backed filesystem without any
persistent storage mounted. This helps with speed.

For example, with BSD, I only need about 200 MB RAM to produce a more-than-
adequate kernel (about 17 MB).

One of the benefits of doing "development" on old hardware IMO is that the
programs I write on the old machines is guaranteed to be very fast on the new
machines. I can move these programs back and forth between machines without
worrying about performance.

If I only used new machines to write programs, e.g., small, relatively simple
ones, then I could not be sure that they would run well on the older machines.

------
jeremy7600
Just built a NAS from an Asus m3a78-MC, Phenom 2 x4 920, 8gb of ddr2800 and an
old case. my Desktop pc is only one gen newer on the motherboard from Gigabyte
(990FX-UD3) and 2 gens newer on Processor (8350) with a 560ti, and 16gb of
DDR3. the NAS cost $75 for all the parts listed in the last month ($17 cpu,
$38 mobo, $20 memory). The desktop was probably $400 for the parts when they
were new ($135 mobo, $230 CPU, $50 memory). Right now going just a few years
back gets you gobs of processing power for very little. But of course its all
relative, in another 10 years these DDR2 based systems might seem quite slow.

------
dkersten
> I showed him how it could cold boot to a productive sway desktop in <30
> seconds

I'm currently using a new cheapo HP laptop, it cost €600 (substantially lower
than the 2k+ Macbook Pro's I've been using prior). I run Manjaro Linux with i3
as the window manager. I'm blown away at how fast it boots. From power on to
login prompt in about 3 seconds (bootloader is setup to just boot right away)
and from login screen to usable i3 desktop in about a second. I've never had
anything boot so fast before. Not that boot speed is meaningful for actual
usage performance, but anyway.

------
mixmastamyk
In the old days it made a lot of sense to have the fastest computer available
and multiple monitors. It was a huge boon to productivity and short-sighted to
ignore.

However, computers these days are fast enough, have SSDs, and enough memory
for 95%† of tasks, for at least a decade. For everything else there are beefy
servers and the cloud. As the poster says, there are advantages to old
hardware. Like useable laptop keyboards with key travel.

A second monitor would probably be a better investment if you don't have one
already. I recommend portrait orientation to avoid scrolling.

------
rafiki6
I wonder...do the makers of MacOS use old macs? Do the makers of Windows use
old ibm pc clones? You can learn to empathize with your user by testing on a
range of hardware that would simulate their environment. Your own development
hardware doesn't need to be handicapped for this to happen.

This is all very context specific. If I am developer working on a web app, and
my shop uses several heavy but feature rich IDEs, chances are I need pretty
decent hardware. If I'm programming nintendo gaming cartridges, I'd probably
be ok with simpler hardware.

------
admax88q
Imagine how much smaller/faster Chromium would be (or any of Google's big web
apps) if the primary developers didn't get to use supercomputers to build and
test on every day.

------
clircle
The X200 is an exception I think. I can get along with an X200 because of the
incredible build quality, keyboard, upgradeability, etc. But any other laptop
from 2008? probably not.

------
nwah1
Energy efficiency gains mean that usually a new computer can pay for itself
after a certain number of years or months, in terms of electricity savings.

And fast hardware is key for performance in certain careers, such as software
engineering.

Even for a working class casual user, it would make a lot of sense to upgrade
an old power hogging computer to a new netbook. It would be better in every
way, and still likely save money in the long run. Not to mention time.

------
ris
This is so close to my experience it's eerie, down to the X-series thinkpad
and KDE. I downright dread each major OS upgrade and the KDE that comes with
it - they only ever get slower and more unreliable. I will almost certainly
make the jump for the next debian release.

I don't know if goes without saying, but the single thing that makes "old"
hardware bearable these days is an ssd. Without that the pain can be
unbearable.

------
paavoova
_and it can play 1080p video in real-time_

I'm skeptical of this claim given my X220 (Sandy Bridge) has trouble decoding
1080p with any medium/high quality playback options. Enabling debanding
algorithms, for example, which is default in mpv, causes dropped frames with
high-bitrate 1080p x264 both software and hardware decoding, and dropped
frames in general decoding 1080p HEVC (software only, iGPU doesn't support
HEVC).

------
romeisendcoming
For my laptop(s) I tend to go with the best I can afford for multi-purpose
development (because everything I do is HPC oriented or virtualized with a
need for SMP vms) but I still have a Dell e6400 latitude that provides
directory, dns and monitoring services for the in-house testbed. When it dies
I have a celeron road warrior from WalMart ready to take it's place. Fit
purpose to function to hardware.

------
flitzofolov
I think the answer to this question has to do with his previously featured
blog post: "I'm going to work full-time on free software" :)

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Haha no doubt!

------
alexeiz
I doubt it's possible watch Youtube in a browser on Linux on a 10 year old
system. That's the only factor that forced me to upgrade my old PC: I just
couldn't watch the damn youtube videos. Everything else worked perfectly fine.
Windows 7 32bit upgraded to Windows 10, latest Ubuntu Linux with Gnome
desktop. And thanks to an SSD it cold booted quickly enough as well.

~~~
SomeHacker44
Now I am definitely switching to an old computer. I can’t wait to get
streaming video and Youtube out of my professional life. :)

(I find video and talking to be in general an amazingly “low bandwidth” way to
ingest information, even watching/listening at 1.5-2x speed.)

I do listen to podcasts/NPR while doing the dishes or other mindless housework
though.

------
yingw787
I try and get the best computer money can buy, because the quality of life is
better on better hardware, I can always configure software-based restrictions
if I need to create performant software (network throttling, cgroups, etc.),
and because there's things you can do with new hardware you can't reasonably
do with old (like training ml models). It keeps your options open.

------
cr0sh
Here I was hoping for actual "old hardware"...sigh.

I'm in the process of refurbishing, possibly with some custom upgrades
(ESP8266 wifi-serial dongle would be interesting), of a TRS-80 Model 100.

Days of runtime from a handful of AA batteries.

True, I won't be able to do anything modern with it - but that's kinda the
point.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
You might appreciate one of my older blog posts:

[https://drewdevault.com/2016/03/22/Integrating-a-
VT220-into-...](https://drewdevault.com/2016/03/22/Integrating-a-VT220-into-
my-life.html)

------
agumonkey
I use similar class laptops. My only issue is they get hot when compiling too
much or HD video (or even non HD actually).

Maybe it's a thermal paste issue but anyway, that's my main issue with them,
if they could run at full speed without reaching 90degC they'd be near
perfect.

------
TheJoYo
My current employer gave me an HP with a TN panel. That's made it quite
frustrating when viewing code. Average memory and average cpu are find
especially when ssh into a build server. IPS displays have really changed how
I use laptops and switching back to TN shows it.

------
TrolTure
I've been developing in go/node/python on a headless 1cpu 512mb 20gb vultr
instance. Tmux, vim, w3m and weechat. I use mosh and firefox from a
laptop/desktop/phone/tablet and never had any issues. It does prevent me from
writing rust though.

------
kemiller2002
Here's my reason for never wanting to use old hardware. Admittedly, I don't
need the latest and greatest, but I want something that is reasonable. Several
years ago I was optimizing a DB query that was a real hog in the development
environment. Two days later, and after trying everything I can do, I
essentially gave up and checked in the meager optimizations I squeezed out of
it. The query gets moved to QA, and runs completely fine. Why? Because the
company had a mindset that developers should program on slower hardware to
"make it more efficient" and none of them thought through that the run time
optimizers might actually perform differently when given enough memory and
processor power to run effectively.

Older hardware within certain performance metrics are fine, but it's often a
waste of everyone's time to do it to try and save a dollar here or there.

------
Max-20
I have the same problem at the moment, I am working with a 4.5 year old
MacBook Pro and asking myself when replacing is actually increasing my
productivity rather than just a luxury to have a shiny new laptop.

------
swsieber
I'd add "working on a monolith java app, along with running Node, IntelliJ and
occasionally a VM with Gitlab in it" to the list of domains that require
enthusiast grade specs. Oh, and slack.

------
meuk
> In reality, this high-end hardware isn’t really necessary for most
> applications outside of video encoding, machine learning, and a few other
> domains.

This should say "really isn't" instead of "isn't really".

In practice, most Microsoft software will still run slow even on high-end
hardware. I have a high-end gaming laptop that cost 1500 dollars, and my
download folder still takes 10+ seconds to load. Even at work, I regularly
find myself waiting because Visual Studio hangs (and this is on a Xeon Phi
with 12 gigs of RAM). Meanwhile, XFCE runs happily snappily on my $200
Thinkpad that is more than a decade old. Newer systems just seem to focus on
improving throughput instead of improving latency. I am so fed up with
unresponsive systems!

~~~
winrid
Do you have an SSD?

~~~
zerohp
I have the same problem with Windows 10 on my XPS 13 and it has an SSD. File
browsing in certain folders makes the machine nearly unusable. Also, windows
updates fill the drive and require periodic manual cleanup. My other Windows
machine doesn't have this problem.

~~~
winrid
Interesting. I have an X1 extreme and even it feels slow at times w/ Windows
10 however my much older Win10 desktop is much more responsive.

I am not sure why laptops suck in this regard. Maybe drivers.

------
drannex
Have you upgrades the specs on the x200 at all, say to an IPS display or are
you still using the standard?

I personally use an x220 for very similar reasons (upgraded to the Surface Pro
3, hated it, and went back).

------
purplezooey
I use an X2xx too and agree it's awesome if you just run i3 or something. The
major downside, which is not mentioned, is the 1366x768 max resolution. Ugh.

------
axiometry
Bigger, better monitors are important accessories for the productive
developer. Integrated graphics can't power those monitors. Most laptops sport
only integrated graphics. Therefore most laptops are insufficient for the
productive developer nowadays. There are a few scenarios where the developer's
hardware should certainly be better than the user's, and screen space is one
of them. Old hardware is not an excuse to stick to 1080p. Every developer
should have moved to the much more spacious 1440p or 4K by now.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
As a reasonably productive developer who has used both 4K and 1080p displays
regularly, 4K has done very little for my productivity. It just looks good.

~~~
kerbalspacepro
If you're going to be staring at a screen for 8 hours a day, you should expect
it to look good.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Okay, but it doesn't make me more productive.

------
infiniteseeker
How is sway for a daily driver?

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Naturally I have a severe bias when answering this question, but I think it's
quite good. If you give it a shot, be sure to build the latest version from
master or one of the recent betas - don't use 0.15.2.

[https://repology.org/metapackage/sway/versions](https://repology.org/metapackage/sway/versions)

------
calimac
I love the perspective of the author. Beautifully tuned pragmatism and
humility.

------
sureaboutthis
I used to inherit computers for free from friends and relatives who were
"upgrading" their Windows systems and turn them into servers or workstations
at my company. I hadn't bought hardware in many years as I was getting off the
ground.

Nowadays, I guess most people have laptops or use mobile cause I haven't
gotten one of those in quite a while.

------
drosan
> can compile the Linux kernel from scratch in 20 minutes

so large projects compile time is very big, that's actually kinda bad for
software developers.

> it can play 1080p video in real-time

yep until he tries to watch 1080p60fps on youtube, or gets videofiles encoded
with 10bit x264 with large amount of reframes (that happens more often than
you think btw)

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Well, how often do you recompile the whole project from scratch? Incremental
builds are a thing.

~~~
drosan
Happens quite often with large c++ projects and some quirky includes. Change 1
header, recompile whole thing.

For comparison, rebuilding linux kernel with make defconfig takes about 3-4
minutes tops on my laptop, rebuilding one of the work projects - at least 15.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
I don't think this points to a problem with the workflow, but rather to a
problem with the codebase. If your codebase is so big and complicated and
interlinked that it requires frequently recompiling large swaths of it - it
may be poorly designed.

