←back to thread

Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop

(geohot.github.io)
224 points cspags | 2 comments | 01 Dec 25 01:08 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
Show context
forty ◴[07 Dec 25 08:57 UTC] No.46180249[source]▶
I think the kind of laptop this person wishes should simply be made illegal to make. We cannot sustain having all electric devices being thrown after a year or two, these things need to last, to be repairable and make it easy to grab pieces and materials when they die anyway
replies(9): >>46180264 #>>46180418 #>>46180657 #>>46180912 #>>46181031 #>>46181380 #>>46181801 #>>46183188 #>>46185126 #
PaulRobinson ◴[07 Dec 25 17:07 UTC] No.46183188[source]▶
The half-life of Apple kit is so high, they are arguably a lot more sustainable than their repairable PC counterparts.

Apple laptops I have that boot include a 2007 iBook (my folks used it until this Summer and then bank websites would stop working with the Chrome browser they could get working on it), which I'll be putting a BSD or Linux distro on over Christmas, a 2012 Intel MBP that has Linux on it and a couple of 2015-2017 era MBPs that I inherited via one means or another.

I'm typing this on an M4 MacBook Air I picked up cheap during Black Friday sales. I fully expect it to still be functional in 10 years.

I don't think I've ever had a PC laptop last close to that.

replies(3): >>46183419 #>>46186918 #>>46198801 #
2b3a51 ◴[07 Dec 25 17:34 UTC] No.46183419[source]▶
Posting from a Thinkpad X61s laptop (Jan 2008) running Trisquel Linux 11.

(I take your point that I would not be able to participate in this discussion using the original operating system that came with this laptop).

replies(1): >>46183505 #
1. kalessin ◴[07 Dec 25 17:46 UTC] No.46183505{3}[source]▶
Apple’s support for MacOS can been shorter than their laptops longevity (the longevity of their laptops got quite bad when then tried to make them as thin as an usb-c port). So Linux support is also important there imo, and as the original post pointed out because Apple makes it so hard to for Linux to support their hardware, long-term software support may be something to think about before buying a MacBook.
replies(1): >>46186683 #
2. dham ◴[07 Dec 25 23:54 UTC] No.46186683[source]▶
MacOS is abysmal with backwards compatibility. In the music space, everything just breaks every few years. With Snow Leopard, Lion, Catalina, Sequoia. While Windows versions work forever, you're stuck having to upgrade and buy new versions of software to run on newer versions of MacOS. That's if you're lucky. Sometimes you might have no path and you need to look for new software.