[ad133]

This looks really cool, but the author... is... replacing their laptop every year? Like, I'm writing this on an 8 year old MBP that has survived as my round-the-house driver because it still does everything well. My daily driver is getting on a bit now (3yr) and my desktop only just got replaced after 5 years.

Forget the cost, but the waste!

[dickfickling]

As the other comments have noted, Cory addresses this further down in the linked post. He further expanded on this in the post he wrote when he quit smoking[0]:

> That was my homework: go away and think of an immediate reason not to smoke. When I came back, I had my answer ready: “I spend two laptops per year on smokes. That money goes directly to the dirtiest companies on Earth, the literal inventors of the science-denial playbook that is responsible for our inaction on climate change. Those companies’ sole mission is to murder me and all my friends. I’m going to quit smoking and I’m going to buy a laptop this year and every year hereafter, and I’ll still be up one laptop per year.”

[0]: https://doctorow.medium.com/i-quit-9ae7b6010c99

[afterburner]

Or he could just save the money. But I guess he has to constantly reward himself for quitting? Man addiction sure is a pain.

[rozab]

Well, maybe he's happier this way? There's a classic joke about a lifelong smoker talking to a stop-smoking councillor:

"With all the money you've spent on cigarettes in your lifetime, you could have bought a Ferrari."

"Do you smoke?"

"No."

"Then where's your Ferrari?"

It's a good question. Most of us have the financial capability to be extremely extravagant with a few select areas of our life, but instead we average everything down to boring mediocrity.

[avgDev]

Sounds like giving up one addiction for another. But I guess buying laptops yearly is better for your health than smoking.

[aseipp]

The labor and physical footprint needed to produce modern electronics is completely insane. You're comparing little league basketball to major league baseball, and it's not like a player like Framework is going to change this at all.

There is a severe ecological impact to the wider environment that comes from electronics, let's not kid ourselves. That doesn't mean buying electronics makes you like, a terrible person, but if you're sitting around prostheyzing on blogs like Doctorow about how these companies are killing you, it's a bit funny to essentially go from a thing that kills people you know in the first world to one that only kills people in the third world you never cared for. Modern comforts like cutting edge electronics have extreme externalities. Like, okay, let me just throw the "murders people I care about" problem over the fence, where it will surely not be an issue for all those people halfway across the planet from me (that I coincidentally do not care or think about.)

In general I'm not trying to be too hard. It's not like anyone else deals with this level of cognitive dissonance much better, and I say that as someone who mostly quit cold turkey over a year ago...

[DharmaPolice]

>it's a bit funny to essentially go from a thing that kills people you know in the first world to one that only kills people in the third world you never cared for

I feel like you're not really representing his argument on why he quit fairly. He does talk about the effects of tobacco on the developing world for one and also his overall reason seems to be more relating to the wider idea of tobacco companies being pioneers in the misinformation industry.

[0des]

While acutely better for the individual, surely the e-waste and resource sequestration outweigh that over time

[ip26]

From the smokers in my life, it's apparent to me people generally need a fairly concrete reason or goal to successfully quit.

Otherwise it's always Sure, I'll quit - tomorrow

Willpower is a muscle. It fatigues. So simply willing your way out of an addiction is not effective for many people.

[felistoria]

My mom smoked for about 45 years and stopped the day she found out she was having a grand daughter. She didn't want to smell like smoke around her. Hasn't touched a cig in years. The whole family is better for it.

[0des]

People justify buying things they don't technically need in many different ways.

[mdoms]

Can't take your money to the grave man. Cory is well set up and isn't hurting for cash.

[aspaceman]

> Or he could just save the money.

What a stupid comment. He saved the money and spent it on what he wanted. The hell?

He should save the money and you should call your grandmother.

[comeonseriously]

Kudos to him for quitting. I quit, oh, about a dozen years ago. When I decided to quit, every time I smoked, I told my self they taste like shit; every drag off the cigarette, I told myself that. Eventually (about 2 or 3 months as I recall) it worked and I could no longer stand the taste and haven't touched one since.

[exolymph]

I don't care enough but I want someone to fact-check him on the environmental impact of a MacBook worth of cigarettes versus the MacBook itself. It'd be funny if the MacBook is ultimately worse for Nature.

[sudosysgen]

If he's giving his old one to someone else that presumably needs it, I don't see why it would be a negative.

The cigarettes are probably better for Nature since you'll live a shorter life.

[tombert]

Back when I was making crap wages, I would get the cheapest laptops I could afford that would more or less give me decent performance (on the order of ~$500-600). It's not too hard to find a new laptop that performs well at a reasonable price, but you always run the risk of them reclaiming those costs by cheaping out on all the mechanics of it, and it's not like I was able to afford paying ~$2000 for a high-quality machine. Usually within 2 years, the laptop would just start falling apart, I would get sad, and then I would repeat the pattern.

After the fourth or so time of doing this, and after getting higher-paying jobs, I ended up biting the bullet for a more expensive computer, and it lasted me five years, and I only replaced it because I wanted more RAM.

Point is, if you're lower-income, it's fairly easy to get stuck in the "one laptop a year" trend, because, while probably a better deal in the long term, it's really hard for lower-income to justify a multi-thousand dollar expense. I'm a proper tech bro now so buying a good computer isn't the worst thing in the world for me, but that wasn't always the case.

[da_chicken]

I bought a low end laptop back in 2005, and I used it for about 2-3 years until it started to fall apart. It just didn't hold up (hinges started to disintegrate). It's performance was terrible, too, and it couldn't be upgraded.

I got a business class laptop in 2007 for probably 3 times as much. That laptop lasted me until last month. I maxed out the RAM and replaced the HD with an SSD about 7 years ago, but it was ultimately the now-anemic CPU and graphics that got me to buy a replacement. I'd have replaced it last fall but laptop stocks were too low.

[danielmg]

That's the Vimes' boots theory of socioeconomic unfairness.

[toast0]

Looking at your trend, you've got $500 laptop / 2 year, or $2000 laptop / 5 year, which reduces to $250 laptop / year vs $400 laptop / year. Getting low cost laptops isn't necessarily a worse financial outcome, although it depends on how fast the processor updates are moving; when a 2020 intel cpu is about the same as a 2015 intel cpu, it would probably have been better to pay a little more in 2015 for a faster one; when a 2015 intel cpu smokes a 2010 intel cpu, incremental updates every year or two mean a low cost 2015 cpu is probably better than a high cost 2010 cpu. Plus, you get a battery refresh (even if it's small).

I think there's more junk at the low end to avoid, but it's not as if the high end doesn't have a lot of junk to avoid. Either way, you have to do careful shopping.

It's like just my opinion, but a lot of higher end laptop spending seems to be on increasing the screen's DPI, which is then run with scaling, at the cost of more CPU, more RAM, more GPU, and more software BS. Buying a cheaper laptop with fewer pixels that just runs 1:1 saves all that extra computation and BS, and maybe looks a bit less nice. Sometimes glossy screens are reserved for the high cost laptops, which is like wait, I want a matte screen, so I have to save money to get one, great!

[tombert]

Yeah, I've actually done this math too, though I don't think it's quite this simple. When a laptop started falling apart, I usually tried to just put up with it until I couldn't.

For example, I used to have an Asus computer whose plastic surrounding the screen decided to start coming detached from the monitor flap. This made the laptop substantially more fragile and annoying to use, and after a certain point I tried to remedy this with gorilla glue and it led to this ugly mess on the bottom left corner. The laptop still "worked" in the sense that still did computation, but it was crappier. Then the 7 key broke off the keyboard, I was unable to put it back on, so I just decided I didn't need the 7 key, since I didn't type 7 that often, and when I did I could still hit the little switch. Again, the laptop still "worked" in the sense that it still did computation, but it was crappier. A bunch of other stuff ended up happening (e.g. the LED for the backlight started to go out and become this flickery mess, the connector to the battery didn't always seem to make contact, etc).

Stuff like that starts to add up, and "experience" is substantially more difficult to quantify. I bought an expensive Macbook, and I never had any issues outside of the inevitable "moores law" depreciation.

[toast0]

> I bought an expensive Macbook, and I never had any issues outside of the inevitable "moores law" depreciation.

I hope that keeps going. I used a macbook for work for almost 8 years, and they did OK, but I had one that decided not to take external power and the hard drive wasn't removable, thankfully I noticed it wasn't charging while it was near full so I could pull a backup to a spare work hand. And then there was the year where iTunes would have a 25% chance of spewing high volume digital noise at me instead of playing music. I guess that was a software problem because it went away with the next major OS X release, but no useful forum contents. I think there was something else bothersome too, but not sure anymore.

[roland35]

Maybe next time your 7 key breaks you can set up a macro so everytime you type "6+1" it will replace it with "7"!

[volta83]

I have an apple macbook air from mid 2012, that i paid 1200$ for. If it survies 6 more months, then I've spent 120$/year on laptops over the last 10 years.

[lotsofpulp]

I have a 2015 air that was $1k. I expect to get down to $120 per year in a couple years, but I would have to add $10/year for replacing the battery every few years.

[bitwize]

Instead of buying a brand-new potato, consider buying a used or refurb'd laptop. Your performance stance doing this is much better now compared to.... any time else in PC history because PC hardware performance gains have flattened out. Plus, corporations get rid of perfectly good PCs like, every year because they want the latest model for their staff and especially their executives/management. Know where to shop and you'll find a glut of cheap and even free computers. I've been poor myself; used machines is how I got by. That and building my own.

Either way, you'll pay about as much for a used ThinkPad in good condition with good specs as you would for a new HP Stream or other cheaptop.

[tombert]

> Plus, corporations get rid of perfectly good PCs like, every year because they want the latest model for their staff and especially their executives/management.

Tangential, but a bit of a lifehack I figured out awhile ago is that corporations dump off old servers on eBay for basically nothing, and most servers allow you to install a regular desktop graphics card in there. Servers usually have a lot of CPUs and a lot of RAM, so 9 years ago when a broke me needed enough power to do cool stuff on the computer, I would go buy a used server on eBay, and it was good enough for video processing and editing and gaming and distributed computing experiments...as long as I remembered to turn it off when I wasn't using it. Whenever I would accidentally leave it on for a few days, I would end up increasing my power bill by ~$40, a lot of money when you don't have much.

Still, it's a trick I still use occasionally, even now that I make decent money. I semi-recently bought a 48 core, 128gb RAM server for around $400, which I use for any big computing experiments. Could I just spin up an AWS box with these specs? Probably, but I think there is value in being able to have the hardware locally.

[bitwize]

I once scavenged an HP workstation from behind a dumpster. It was just sitting there in the rain. I brought it in, dried it off, and checked the innards for rust or damage. All looked nearly brand new, so I let it dry out for a couple of days, and powered it on -- it worked. Put a hard disk in and it was ready to go. It's a fairly powerful machine, with four cores and 12 GiB of RAM, a real powerhouse for 2012 when it was new. Probably chewed through many a spreadsheet back in the day. Now I'm making it into a build server.

[tombert]

That's awesome. I think my wife would punch me if I got into the habit of dumpster diving, but there have been multiple times where I've seen what looks like awesome equipment (monitors, computers, surge protectors, etc.) being thrown away near universities and office buildings, and I always have to resist my hoarding nature to take them.

Four cores and 12gb of RAM would make a pretty solid build server, with enough room left for a Minecraft and video streaming server to boot! Sounds like a pretty awesome find.

[hyperman1]

I found it's better to buy a second hand top model, or even last year's best on sale, than brand new low quality stuff.

It's a little less visible for laptops than for, say, kitchen appliances, but even there my thinkpad x220 was bought and upgraded for €400 in 2015, and it did its job well untill half way this year.

[szundi]

I usually buy top quality laptops second hand from shops that give at least 6 months warranty. Best strategy. You get a $2000 laptop for $500. And honestly, Intel did not do too much in the last decade, so these are of great value.

[FullyFunctional]

I was going to say the same - you are often better off buying a quality not-too-old used than buying a crappy new low-end machine. Better for the world too. However I tend to keep my gears for a very long time (hello my well-loved 2007 MacBook Pro) so I can justify buying new (w/warranty).

[tombert]

Yeah, I got my fancy macbook pro now because I used to work for Apple and had a pretty substantial discount on it as a result. When I need to replace this one, I'll probably get something decent in the used market and just install Linux on there.

[itronitron]

In my experience, it's the laptop case that always fails first. So it's disappointing to see the trend toward ultra-thin cases.

[qolop]

The author does address that

> The environmental consequences of that system weren't lost on me, even given my very good track-record of re-homing my old computers with people who needed them.

[czechdeveloper]

That's not really addressing it. It's just acknowledging it.

[dathinab]

If it causes other people not to by new laptops, it kinda is addressing it. (As long as we assume the people getting the old laptop would have bought a new laptop, which might or might not be the case.)

[gattilorenz]

And apparently it made sense for him to pay 150$/year to get his laptop fixed in 24h if needed, and buy two powerbooks at once... I guess what he really should have bought is a Toughbook instead of a ThinkPad?

[ndiddy]

Buying a new thinkpad every year is especially confusing to me given that Lenovo’s switch from mobile to ultrabook processors in the x40 series meant that for around 5 years, buying a newer thinkpad than the x30 series meant getting a speed downgrade.

[riffic]

"the author" here is well known writer Cory Doctorow. No one here seems to be making this connection, but pluralistic.net is his blog.

[teekert]

Ah, hehe, I got confused opening the tweet. I wonder why I had in my head that this was a woman writing the story, must be the monica-byrne in the url :)

[mkka]

The author, Cory, links to a previous explanation of when he quit smoking he converted the cost into getting a new laptop annually. As he mentioned in the article he typically finds a new home for the used device. Laptop appears to be his primary device and critical to his work so updates annually makes sense, though a new device is partially due to the construction framework elimates(i.e. riveted or glued components).

[JZL003]

Also just bc the link is buried, see https://doctorow.medium.com/i-quit-9ae7b6010c99

He traded smoking for buying a new laptop every year. Now that it's been years, I guess he could quit and not buy a new laptop. But also people do more wasteful things. I do understand though, I drive laptops into the ground over many years but still 4-5 years per laptop

[flatiron]

2013 MacBook Air daily driver here. MagSafe? Usb A? Sd card reader? User replaceable battery? Runs Linux? All checks. It’s light on RAM (which for just chrome and light app use honestly it’s fine).

[tucosan]

It just haa a horrible screen resolution.

[flatiron]

yeah 1440x900 does kinda stink, but the screen is so small it doesn't really bother me too much. plasma does a good job shrinking itself down enough and virtual desktops help. 99% its a full screen chromium window so who cares.

[lotsofpulp]

I would guess that MacBook Airs, especially the current ones, are sufficient for the needs of 80%, maybe even 90%, of the entire laptop market, who I presume just need to be able to use a browser and spreadsheets.

And they last for years and years, and I doubt the cost:performance:longevity ratios can be beat.

[bitwize]

What you're supposed to do, apparently, is buy a brand-new laptop, use it for a few months, then flip it on eBay before it gets too old so you can recover most of what you spent on it and buy the next new laptop.

I worked with a guy who practiced this with all his personal hardware.

[sneak]

It's very, very normal for wealthy people to replace their daily-use tools every year, or even more often.

I replace my phone and laptop and iPad every year. I know people who replace their car and wardrobe and luggage every year, too.

In laptops and mobile devices in general, annual updates make a lot of sense as power efficiency is still regularly increasing. The M1 Air, is, for example, a fucking marvel. It's been out for way less than a year. I have an M1 Air, and will upgrade it again in less than a year when the Mx (where x > 1) Macbook Pro comes out.

[lapetitejort]

Further down the article:

> The environmental consequences of that system weren't lost on me, even given my very good track-record of re-homing my old computers with people who needed them.

[zumu]

>Forget the cost, but the waste!

They can just sell the laptop and someone else will use it. For example, I almost never buy new laptops, as perfect Linux support generally lags behind.

[bluedino]

>> replacing their laptop every year?

Not really that uncommon especially with a MacBook Pro where a new one is released...every year.

How much sense it makes, that's another story.

[JohnBooty]

Ignoring the (potentially substantial) environmental costs, if you do it "correctly" the total cost of ownership is about the same.

If you buy a $2000 Mac and use it for as long as reasonably, it's going to depreciate by several hundred dollars (let's say, roughly $300) a year. At a certain point it's worth nearly zero, and you must buy a new laptop. After 6-7 years your total outlay is $2000.

Alternatively, every year or two you can sell the old one for a few hundred dollars less than the new model, and buy the new model. You always have a new laptop. And your total outlay is still only about $2000. Plus you are covered by free AppleCare every time you buy the new one.

Plenty of people do this with mobile phones and automobiles and other things as well.

Please note that I am not advocating it. I was still using my 2015 laptop until very recently. But economically it is not necessarily insane.

(Assuming you are selling the old laptops, that is. It's not clear to me that the author is doing that. He says he's donating/rehoming them. Not sure if that includes selling)

[bluedino]

The downtime of setting up a new laptop, migrating data, etc is going to be worth several hundred dollars to many people

[JohnBooty]

Agreed.

Though, with Macs, it's trivial - their migration tool is peerless. (As one would certainly expect and demand: since they control the whole software/hardware stack)

[TwiztidK]

Many products are released on a yearly basis, but very few people are upgrading every year.