
Ask HN: How often does your company replace your laptop? - feischi
A large industrial corporation I have worked for would only replace a company laptop after 5 years unless it really stops working. It&#x27;s all Windows laptop, and the laptops employees could order are mostly models from more than 1 year ago. Needless to say that productivity drops significantly after 2-3 years.<p>I just would like to know if this is a common practice, and how often does your company replace your laptop?
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zhte415
I've refused to give up my laptop, a T420 i7 8GB, from 2011. It's the
keyboard. SSD upgrade and battery. When leaving my manager tried to give it as
a leaving gift, but was blocked (I bought a second hand one for myself with
similar upgrades for a ridiculously low price instead). As a compromise it
will forever sit in her desk 'in case you come back'.

Give the employer they want and need, justified. A business or tech head (not
just manager, but someone the buck really stops with) has a budget and they
should spend it as justifies the business case, not conforming to an arbitary
rule.

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gshdg
3-year leases aren’t all that uncommon. I’ve also been at a SmallCo that would
buy brand new top of the line Mac laptops for developers and number crunchers,
and then cycle them down after a few years to staff whose workloads were less
demanding. They averaged 6-8 years out of a computer.

Asking developers to work on 6-8 year old hardware is definitely penny
wise/pound foolish, tho.

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segmondy
Have you been to Amazon? I don't think I saw anyone with a laptop that was
newer than 4 years old. Being Frugal seems to work for them and they are the
top cloud company.

I would say most developers don't need new hardware unless they are building
games or developing CPU intensive application. Most laptops today have more
resources than your microservice will have in the cloud.

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gshdg
So now your test suite takes 15 minutes to run instead of 15 seconds. Sure,
that doesn’t matter at all.

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eb0la
Test what? you don't work in consulting, right? The only way _some_
consultancy firms have to earn the contract each year is: \- Give crappy
hardware to devs, so they can bill more hours. \- Skip testing because if the
customer wants to fix those bugs with anoter company, they will ask for an
audit fee beforehand.

~~~
gshdg
We’ve just moved from amazon to consulting firms?

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bobochan
It used to be three years, but five years is now becoming common unless there
is a compelling need. Honestly, I am okay with it. My current laptop is a
Early-2015 MacBook Pro with 16 GB of RAM and it has been flawless since they
day that I bought it. The battery life might be slightly less, but it really
does everything that I want it to.

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llampx
Where I've worked, laptops are often seen as fungible resources aside from OS,
i.e. all Mac laptops are interchangeable and all Wintel laptops are
interchangeable. On the other hand, laptops haven't gotten much faster until
very recently with Intel's 8th gen chips going to quad-core so I can see the
IT and bean-counter perspective as well.

The bigger the company the more likely they are to have a policy such as the
one you mentioned. I've been working for startups recently, and what you are
issued is what you'll be working on for a long time, at least unless it stops
working and can't be replaced (eg, a 2012 Macbook Air that isn't manufactured
anymore)

As a team lead I have to fight to get the best hardware for my team sometimes,
like 16GB RAM and good screens. So sometimes someone gets an upgrade just
because of that, and the old laptop goes to someone who doesn't need to run
demanding apps.

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LarryMade2
As a developer I don't want the latest and greatest - I gotta think of the
least common denominator, Having the best may be convenient for its speed and
capacity, but will lead me to not realize problems others are having running
things on older hardware.

If I can get my performance boost through software decisions and better
development practices I get less complaints.

Hard part is sometimes we are forced into upgrades as 3rd parties end support
for one thing or another, then it dominoes into everything else (Yeah, Windows
10, talking about you.)

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Spooky23
We do 4-year refresh cycles. Any less is a waste imo, unless that’s done
intentionally as some sort of employee perk.

95% of the developers who claim to need frequent refresh (absent of failures)
are full of malarkey. If you have enough resources to begin with, computers
don’t improve on fast enough cycles. Exceptions are people doing GPU workloads
or who have very high memory requirements.

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marm7
Before 2017 I got a new one every year/6 months. Right now I see it as a
environmental issue... So I’m still running code and managing 20 engineers
with my old 2017 model and won’t give up until it gives up on me.
Sustainability?

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astrosloth
Company I work for supplies us with the new MacBook Pros every two years

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Trias11
I can open ticket with my IT dept at any time and they will replace my current
laptop with whatever one i like (among Mac/PC availables)

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nik736
In Germany laptops are written off for 3 years, so I would imagine 3 years is
the period most companies are replacing laptops here.

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feischi
I am talking about a German company. I think in the 4th and 5th year the total
work time wasted on waiting for the machine to finish something costs more
than a new laptop.

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t34543
Brand new device every two years for me - and I can request any device.

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pkalinowski
Macbooks every 2 years

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spectramax
4 years, it’s painful.

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segmondy
Why? There's not much difference between 4 years old laptop anymore.

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reilly3000
4 years of physical cruft is something. Gunk deep in the keyboard, tired fan
bearings, HD wear- it all adds up to more risk of data loss. That may be a
random reboot or data corruption. One or two days of lost work is generally
more expensive than a new machine.

