
‘Low End’ Means Good Enough - protomyth
http://lowendmac.com/2017/low-end-means-good-enough/
======
crowell
It's pretty hard to take this article seriously.

The author writes

"I don’t consider Windows good enough. Historically there have been to many
ways to compromise a Windows-based computer, and new techniques keep showing
up with alarming regularity."

And then later

"I am writing this on my newest computer, a Late 2008 Aluminum MacBook running
OS X 10.11 El Capitan"

If you're going to knock Windows on a lack of security, at the very least do
as much as you can do to protect yourself on a Mac. Note the long list of
security fixes in the latest version of MacOS [https://support.apple.com/en-
us/HT201222](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201222)

~~~
patrickmn
Yeah, the security track record of post-Vista Windows is far better than OS X.

~~~
EGreg
Anecdotally, I have never had a virus on Mac (that I detected) and neither did
any friends, but Windows got infected all the time. This was true going back
to Windows 95.

~~~
hvidgaard
Anecdotally, I've never had a virus on Windows dating back to Win98. But my
extended family have had multiple on OSX.

My point is that both are very vulnerable, precautions are what keeps you
safe.

~~~
coldtea
> _Anecdotally, I 've never had a virus on Windows dating back to Win98. But
> my extended family have had multiple on OSX._

Did they really have viruses (of which for OS X there are very few and far
between, to the point of lore) or trojans?

------
twblalock
One of the interesting developments over the past decade is that computers
remain usable for much longer than they used to, unless you are a gamer or
need to do heavy programming work.

My 2011 Macbook Pro is still perfectly usable for everything a normal person
would want to do with a computer. So is my parents' 2012(?) Mac Mini. I just
bumped the RAM up to 8GB on both of those computers and they are just fine for
web browsing, word processing, and HD video playback.

I suspect that Apple's problem selling iPads is related to this -- my iPad Air
2 is never noticeably slow doing any task, and I know people with pre-Air
iPads who are perfectly happy with them. These are people who have plenty of
money to buy a new iPad and would do so if theirs felt slow; they just don't
notice any drawbacks to using an older one.

~~~
JustFYI
What? iPad Air 2 is slow as hell in many websites and always when using more
than one application. I recently had to buy a laptop just because doing any
kind of work was really slow on the Air 2.

~~~
lorenzhs
I don't know, I'm perfectly happy with my iPad Air 1. It's not as fast as my
fancy laptop, but it doesn't have to be. It's a very pleasant web-browsing
device.

------
bluedino
>> From a practicality standpoint, the top choice would be that last
generation 2011 17″ MacBook Pro

This is actually a bad idea - the 2011 15/17" MacBook Pros have dying graphics
chips, that Apple stoppped repairing at the end of last year.

~~~
matwood
My wife still uses my 2011 17" MBP. The graphics has been replaced once for
free. If it were not for the failing graphics chips, it's definitely 'good
enough'.

~~~
gcb0
if you buy one used, they won't replace the graphics for free.

my employer still have "late 2012" MBP with the nvidia-of-death cards as I
call them, and apple haven't replaced any of them. Even in 2013.

This whole article is a disservice. You do not need a second machine to write.
And even if I needed, i'd use a machine that runs the latest linux with all
the security considerations of a modern system, and then I would just install
my text editor and nothing else.

This is nothing but a gateway drug for people to join the mac cult. Meh. Not
even an expensive mac is any good. let alone a free one. As mac fans always
reminds us: you get what you pay for. And free+mac tax = lousy machine.

------
sfled
I use a 1998 "Wallstreet" PowerBook G3 running OS 9.2 and MS Office 98 for
word processing, some email, and spreadsheets. No Wi-Fi, so I tether it to
another laptop via Ethernet.

~~~
Bjartr
Why not just use the other laptop?

~~~
PeCaN
Probably widescreen with a flimsy keyboard, while older laptops are more
likely to be 4:3 with a nicer keyboard.

Or maybe to avoid getting distracted by all the stuff available on newer
computers (going to guess much of the internet is not easily accessible from
Mac OS 9.2).

Or maybe just cuz it's cool.

------
mechagodzilla
My SO is still using a 13" early-2011 MBP, recently upgraded with an SSD and
16GB of RAM, and running the latest OSX release. With only it's original 4GB
of ram it was constantly swapping on more recent releases of OSX, which was
pretty painful, but it operates just fine now. A brand new 13" MBP would have
longer battery life, weigh less, and have a High-DPI display, but wouldn't
really be any faster in day-to-day use (and it wouldn't even support more
RAM!). I was pretty surprised by how little computers had improved in the last
six years.

~~~
Baeocystin
I just picked up a 2011-era Air for a client. Honestly, after installing a new
battery, it barely felt any different than what is available today.

~~~
erikpukinskis
That's my daily driver. It's amazing. I looked at About This Mac recently and
was shocked that it's 6 years old! I could've sworn I had bought something
newer. Time flies on a good machine.

~~~
Baeocystin
I'm more of a PC guy, but I have to admit, I really liked it. Good screen,
great keyboard and touchpad. Good battery life once I swapping in a new pack.

(Significant minus for those stupid non-standard screws, though.)

I could easily see using one as my daily use machine if I was in a more mac-
centric environment without feeling like I was missing anything at all.

------
kraig911
I thought the nostalgia of the cult of mac from the early 00's was long and
dead... but I guess old habits die hard. I wonder what it will be like when
the next generation talks about browser versions because to me that's
basically the future. Most of the applications I use vary a tiny bit from mac
to windows. Gmail, Sublime, Adobe Illustrator, Dropbox... the applications
seem to match closer in parity whilst the OS's that host them get more
different.

Also his mention of Windows security is a little tired.

~~~
ido
For young people today, their computers are their phones.

------
owenversteeg
So I recently switched from a brand new top of the line Ideapad Yoga to an
older Thinkpad from 2012. Sure, it's kind of thick. 1.2" thick actually. But
it has a 3.8GHz processor that can actually sit at 3.8GHz for a very long time
because of the giant fans and fat copper heat pipes, and it has 8GB of ram
upgradeable to 16, and a decent solid state drive. It looks like a giant
hunking black thing, and I love it. Doesn't look expensive, so it won't get
stolen, and it cost me $250, so even if it does it won't be the end of the
world.

I think there'll be a minor trend of people keeping the same laptops they
have, or buying older laptops to save money, now that improvements have
stagnated. Processors are literally getting slower - I challenge you to find a
laptop today that is faster than my X230T. Sure, manufacturers might claim a
higher clock speed, but with modern horrible thermal management they can only
sit there for brief amounts of time. The X230T can literally sit all day at
3.8GHz, and fairly quietly too.

Sure you can go 0.6GHz faster, with the Alienware 18 with a 4.4GHz processor,
but that costs six thousand dollars, is as thick as six laptops stacked on top
of each other, and is twenty two inches measured diagonally. Oh yeah, and
people found that because of heat problems the processor wasn't able to reach
the clock speeds claimed. This review [0] shows that it only got to 3.2GHz,
which is substantially slower than my $250 laptop. Oh yeah, and that laptop
easily goes over 100F on the outside of the case in normal use, so not only
will your legs be crushed by the 12 pound 22" monstrosity they'll also be
burned if you dare put it on your lap.

[0] [https://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-
Alienware-18-Notebook.1...](https://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-
Alienware-18-Notebook.102566.0.html)

~~~
Sorreah
I got an equivalent Haswell processor on my 13inch and have never ever
experienced CPU throttling even while gaming.

It's very very rare for non-ultrabooks to throttle and usually when it happens
is because some manufacturers intend it for whatever marketing reasons and not
due to heat really building up.

You likely wouldn't benefit from a 7700 in a laptop in real life tasks but to
suggest that all new laptops with high end processors throttle enough that
your old one ends up performing better is an outlandish exaggeration.

Not to mention that the GHz race has been over for some time now and
clockspeed isn't all that matters.

~~~
owenversteeg
Post-Ivy Bridge mobile Intel processors can't maintain the same maximum all-
core clock speed as their predecessors. If you're looking for proof, take a
look at Intel's marketing materials for the processors: they start marketing
the Turbo Boost clock speed as the "Turbo Boost (single core)". That's because
the processor won't let you Turbo Boost the entire processor to the maximum
clock speed, only one core.

For even more proof, to dissipate power you need a lot of copper and some
giant fans. The X230T has a substantial amount of its very thick (1.2") body
dedicated to heat pipes, fans, and copper fins. A handful of things I work
with are very closely related to heat (Peltier elements, batteries, and
motors) so I often look at things with a thermal camera to see how heat is
dissipated throughout the laptop. In the X230T I was very impressed: Lenovo's
engineers did a fantastic job. The laptop is capable of a substantial amount
of heat dissipation. Meanwhile in my previous, fancy, new Yoga Pro laptop with
the fanciest processor you can put in it, the thermal management is crap.
There's a tiny little fan maybe 5mm thick that sits in a strange place and
doesn't seem too effective at anything except making noise. The same goes for
every other recent laptop I've seen: most of them seem deadly afraid of making
the laptop too heavy or too thick, so they sacrifice heat management.

For the equivalent Haswell processor, maximum TDP is 55 watts vs approximately
40 watts for mine. So your laptop, which is almost undoubtedly thinner and
with worse thermal management, has to dissipate almost 50% more heat. And
don't go thinking there might be some revolution in heat management that lets
yours dissipate more heat in a similar space, because "copper plus fans" has
been the formula for the past 30 years. (With the exception of water cooling
and peltier elements, which are most certainly not in your laptop.)

Furthermore, if your processor is putting out 55 watts of heat, _more than_ 55
watts have to go in somewhere. So that's also draining your battery. Standard
batteries are around 45ish watt hours in recent laptops, so assuming the rest
of your laptop (screen, RAM, motherboard, Wifi, hard drive, etc etc) literally
drains zero power you'd have less than 45 minutes of battery power at maximum
load. Does that sound like something that would freak out a consumer? Yep. So
even if the laptop was thermally capable, this maximum power mode is always
limited so the consumer doesn't freak out about getting a battery life
measured in minutes.

Meanwhile, my Thinkpad, which has a 55 watt hour battery, lasts about an hour
and change at maximum power. Did this freak out some people? Maybe. But 2012
Lenovo said "yep, we want to give our consumers maximum power, and if they
drain their battery that's their problem." Personally I love it. If I want to
limit performance I can just put it in energy saving mode. But most of the
time I keep it at maximum, because I like it and in a world with good RAM and
a nice SSD the CPU starts to become a bottleneck reasonably often.

------
lucidguppy
I wonder what would have been if Apple kept pushing the AppleII line in a much
more gradual tech road map.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7h4tepFbMso](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7h4tepFbMso)

In my opinion - computers should still have a boot to basic with a simple
interface to vga graphics and passable sound. Something like pico-8 but a
better editor with VI bindings. :-)

It's a good thing we have the raspberry pi.

~~~
sehugg
Well, we had the awesome IIGS (and the horrible Apple III :^P)

~~~
Narishma
Too bad it was intentionally crippled so as not to create competition for the
more expensive (and technically inferior in many ways) Macs of the time.

~~~
fzzzy
Can you elaborate? I hadn't heard this before.

I remember the IIgs being a pretty sweet machine.

~~~
Narishma
The main thing I remember being crippled on the IIGS was the CPU clock speed.

The 8-bit guy did a video about this a while ago:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7h4tepFbMso](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7h4tepFbMso)

------
i336_
Question. There are several mentions of $gigantic_resolution either providing
the same or less display area than $smaller_resolution.

Are there any hacks that can convince macOS (or the older versions of OS X
described in this article) _not_ to treat the display as HiDPI? Yeah, I
realize the machine will abruptly feel like it needs a magnifying glass to
use, but in a pinch (laptop on lap <2ft from eyes) it might work for some
(insert standard disclaimers here about eyes being non-replaceable and needing
to last the distance).

Also.

The late-2015 21″ iMac is ~$1.5k+, and "has a multi-core Geekbench score of
5623."

Then the late-2011 17″ MacBook Pro which is ~$1.3k checks in with a "9240
Geekbench score".

Is there some datapoint I'm missing here?

~~~
coldtea
> _Are there any hacks that can convince macOS (or the older versions of OS X
> described in this article) not to treat the display as HiDPI? Yeah, I
> realize the machine will abruptly feel like it needs a magnifying glass to
> use, but in a pinch (laptop on lap <2ft from eyes) it might work for some
> (insert standard disclaimers here about eyes being non-replaceable and
> needing to last the distance)._

macOs already supports several resolutions higher than the standard 1/2
_native which is what Retina uses (half the native pixels at each dimension
for twice the resolution).

IIRC, already the "default" resolution on newer MBPr with the touch strip is
higher than the 1/2_native (that used to be the default on retina laptops).

There are also apps like:
[https://www.thnkdev.com/QuickRes/](https://www.thnkdev.com/QuickRes/) and
[http://www.madrau.com/](http://www.madrau.com/) for more flexibility and
full-native resolution even.

That said, the full native retina resolution on something like a 15" screen
doesn't make any sense to me except for some special circumstances (maybe 4k
movie viewing, but doesn't that already use the full resolution?).

> _The late-2015 21″ iMac is ~$1.5k+, and "has a multi-core Geekbench score of
> 5623." Then the late-2011 17″ MacBook Pro which is ~$1.3k checks in with a
> "9240 Geekbench score". Is there some datapoint I'm missing here?_

Yes, one is a GeekBench 3 score, the other is a GeekBench 4 score. Scores of 3
and 4 editions of the GeekBench suite are not comparable.

~~~
i336_
> _Yes, one is a GeekBench 3 score, the other is a GeekBench 4 score. Scores
> of 3 and 4 editions of the GeekBench suite are not comparable._

Ah, _that 's_ what I was missing. Thanks.

------
triangleman
Still running my late 2006 aluminum Core 2 Duo Macbook pro, upgraded, with
10.6.8 snow leopard. Unfortunately it occupies an awkward space between
homebrew and the "tigerbrew" fork... Everything tries to compile and often
fails because of out of date compilers.

I think I'm trying to run too much locally, so these days I am still getting a
lot done using cloud VM's.

A computer like that really helps you write efficient javascript.

------
imwally
>> I can’t get too excited about the 2016 13″ MacBook Pro with 2 Thunderbolt
ports. It has a Retina Display, but its 2560 x 1600 pixel display shows no
more than my current MacBook’s 1280 x 800 display.

Huh? Out of the box resolution is 1440x900 and maxes out at 1680x1050 (without
using a 3rd party application like SwitchResX). Apple used to set the default
to 1280x800 but this is no longer the case.

~~~
jeffhuys
The author doesn't know what he's talking about. Credibility of the website
goes down a lot, even though the main idea is good.

~~~
owenversteeg
It's one mistake for crying out loud. If you're at all interested in a brand
new Macbook you aren't going to be considering a laptop from a decade ago, so
it also is completely immaterial.

------
epmaybe
To add to the critiques: the usable space on a 13" retina MacBook pro can be
increased in the software to support up to 1680x1050 if I'm not mistaken.
Further, there are apps that can extend that up to the native resolution.

~~~
Domenic_S
Correct. I'm on a 13" mid-2014 mbp scaled to 1680 x 1050.

------
PeterStuer
A IIcx with the full page display, 6.0.8 and Word 5.1 was a great writing
environment. In some ways I'd still prefer it to my current Word 2016.

------
anotheryou
for text anything with a terminal is fine...

If it can do vim and owncloud I'd be golden for text.

I do however work with media, so no, low end is not good at all.

------
JustFYI
42/60 GB available, so no. It's just a slow POS.

~~~
dang
We've banned this account for breaking the HN guidelines repeatedly. This
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We detached this comment from
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