A classic article from the infamous solar powered LowTechMagazine; the author describes their journey and how they ended up on a laptop from 2006.
I enjoyed this article a lot, it was eye opening. I hadnt thought in terms of cost per annum. I’ve been using a second-hand thinkpad T420 as my daily driver since January 2018. I bought it because i love its kind of keyboard. It works beautifully. It came with an i5 processor. I ugraded its RAM to 16GB , got two SSD and a slighter better screen. However this is its weak point, the resolution is only 1600x9000 and my eyes feel it. I run debian stable and fedora on it. It is very sturdy, it has survived falls, several coffees, three cats… It is a beast.
cost per annum.
I once bought a $5k MacBook Pro. It was very nice. But I like to get $1/day at a minimum from my devices. So I did the math, and it would have been sometime in the mid 2030’s before that device met my goals. I couldn’t imagine the keyboard lasting that long. Nor could I imagine the T2 chip being unlocked and everything working for Linux by then. And of course, absolutely nothing was upgradable. Fortunately, Apple has a very nice return policy, and so that is what I did. The X280 that replaced it for a fraction of the cost, has been used, abused, upgraded, and is still in use by my kids for school.
I don’t upgrade devices until my cost/month comes down to a target I’ve set at ~$20/month
So if I spend $960 on a used macbook then I must utilize it for at least 48 months before I am ‘eligible’ to upgrade again
In reality I can get even more usage with some light maintenance
my secondary machine is a 2012 Macbook Air which is the device I drag around the house and it still works great for web browsing, video watching, and light programming tasks! Of course I have needed to replace the battery multiple times, and even the hard drive once
I like to get $1/day at a minimum from my devices. I like your mindset, I tend to do this unintentionally, because I run linux and tinker with all my computers and it’s more sensible to buy second-hand. But you gave me a specific goal to aim to. Hate the gated garden but Apple does make pretty things. IIRC, there is a 1920x1080 panel swap from … nitrocaster(?) --> thanks for the tip! another thing to try.
IIRC, there is a 1920x1080 panel swap from … nitrocaster(?) … that allows pushing an IPS display in a T420.
Really interesting article which makes me wanna try that method on the oldest computer I have lying around 😇
@Dariusmiles2123 @unix_joe I have a Librebooted Thinkpad X200s and even that is capable of being a daily driver.
The only reason you’d need newer than a quad-core intel 2nd/3rd is video edit and gaming. Probably heavy compiling too, but I haven’t found them too slow.
Where I am, retailers have realized used ThinkPads are the buzz so they’ve start selling 5 year models at higher prices, close to a new laptop with the latest-gen Ryzen 5 / Core i5 processors, and everything that comes with it. Unfortunate, but that defeats the purpose.
OP ended up on a Core Duo limited to 3GB of RAM, back in 2017.
I expect today, the sweet spot daily driver for most people would be an X220 or X230.
How do you make a daily driver out of a computer that’s weaker than most phones and will struggle even in showing modern websites on a browser?
X220/X230 still has 2/4T cores, up to 16GB of RAM, and both mSATA and SATA ports for SSD upgrades. They also have IPS displays.
It was only five years ago that Intel moved their i5 and i7’s from dual cores. Some lower end machines still have these core counts. These are still viable machines.
I think this is as far back as most people would be comfortable with on a daily basis. One could still run modern desktop environments (KDE/Gnome) on these systems and browse the modern web without any tricks (adblock, disabling javascript).
That modern smartphones are more powerful only shows how overkill modern smartphones are, where the profit margins are, and how bloated our mobile operating systems have become. Why do I need more processing power to have less ability to do things on a smartphone?
Regarding the author’s (now 18 year old) machine, the author explains their workflow and how using a minimalist distribution for older machines works for them. I wouldn’t recommend this to any casual user however, but it also shows how one can make the most of what they already own.
This analysis matches my experiences with both kinds of devices. I am writing this on a T60, which is also from 2006 as the laptop of the author. It is a device I use regularly (I prefer the haptics of it over newer ones, especially when writing), but not as my only daily driver. The main stop gaps are video streaming sites. For those I have an X220, which has no problems at all with “modern” websites". Both run a “minimalist” Linux distribution (Bunsenlabs).
Moving towards newer Thinkpads has the downside that the article already mentions: the design quality of Lenovo’s Thinkpads did a sharp downturn between the x220 and 230 series and seems to recover only temporarily. One problem that the users of an X60 or T60 face, is that both are still 32bit systems, which will lead to increasing incompatibility of software. Going for a X61 or T61 can solve that problem.
Easy: don’t go to modern websites in a browser! I’m joking… Kind of ;)
I disable javascript whenever I have to browse on old hardware and websites load fast as lightning. That being said, some websites simply do not work without javascript, but those websites kind of suck anyway.
