[bhouston]

> My daily-driver laptop at home is a T420 from 2011 with a Core 2 Duo, SSD and 8GB RAM. Works fine still.

I am not sure I would be productive with that. Any Core 2 Duo is 10x slower single core and 20x slower multi-core than a current generation laptop CPU at this point.

Eg: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/8588187?baselin...

I think it would mostly be good as an SSH terminal, but doing any real work locally on it seems frankly unfeasible.

[pixelfarmer]

The problem is software, though. I have a X200s with 4 GiB RAM from 2009. It was interesting to see how Firefox got slower and slower over the years. Granted, it not only is Firefox but also retard websites which use loads and loads of JS to display static content in the end. In return, it is not like JS didn't exist back then: The XhtmlRequest thingy for dynamic website updates or whatever the name for that was has been added years prior to that.

So, yes, a lot of this comes down to software and a massive waste of cycles. I remember one bug in Electron/Atom where a blinking cursor caused like 10% CPU load or something along that line. They fixed it, but it tells you way more about how broken the entire software stack was at that time and it didn't get better since then.

I mean, think about this: I used 1280x1024 on a 20" screen back in the mid 90ies on (Unix!) machines that are insanely less powerful than even this X200s. The biggest difference: Now you can move windows around visually, back then you moved the outer frame of it to the new place and then it got redrawn. And the formatting options in browsers are better, i.e. it is easier to design the layout you want. Plus there is no need for palette changes when switching windows anymore ("true color"). The overall productivity hasn't kept up with the increase in computing power, though. Do you think a machine 100x the performance will give you 100x the productivity? With some exceptions, the weak link in the chain were, are, and will always be humans, and if there are delays, we are talking almost always about badly "optimized" software (aka bloat). That was an issue back then already and, unfortunately, it didn't get better.

[TrainedMonkey]

This depends on the workflow heavily. For working with text, listening to music, or even doing some light paint work my museum 75mhz K5 running windows 2000 is enough. For building a multi-platform python package embedding a compiler you really want lots of cores. At this point we are talking about 20x+ difference between Core 2 Duo and a modern part. For modern day web experience you want something in between.

[throw88888]

Horses for courses ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I do development and DevOps on it. Sure there are some intense workloads that I probably couldn’t run, but it works just fine as my daily driver.

I also have a corporate/work laptop from Dell with 32GB RAM, 16 cores @ 4.x GHz etc. - a beast - but it runs Windows (+ antivirus, group policy crap etc.) and is slower in many aspects.

Sure I can compile a single file faster and spin up more pods/containers etc. on the Dell laptop, but I am usually not constrained on my T420.

I generally don’t spend much time waiting for my machine to finish things, compared to the time I spend e.g. writing text/code/whatever.