Hardware can last a long time
Originally written 2025-03-01.
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And it could last even longer, and I wish it would.
Even I, a full-contact computer user, would probably still be using a mid-2012 Macbook Pro as a daily driver laptop if it weren't for the fact that the battery in it, and the replacement battery i put in it, both died.
Cathode Ray Dude made a point in one of his videos, 7 Users on 1 PC! - but is it legal?, about something he called 'the plateau': the idea that computers have simply gotten 'good/fast/capable enough' for certain tasks. You only need so much oomph to read your email and use Word. The rest is, realistically, a waste. So why upgrade if you don't have a need for it?
Just ask the grandmas around the world who only keep a laptop around to do their banking online and to send and receive emails. Maybe a dash of Word and Excel, but rarely anything more than that. And for that alone, you don't need much in the way of hardware. Hell, you probably specifically don't want newer software, since it will A.) probably be more unfamiliar and 2.) be less performant (*cough* Windows 11 *cough*).
Well, my mid-2012 Macbook Pro would still have been in use if it weren't for the fact that the battery in it died (well, it didn't die per se, but it did start to bulge, and I wasn't having that around me). That machine was great for me. I did everything on that thing before I had a proper desktop. I ran VMs on it. I played games on it. I edited Wikipedia on it. I read article after article and comment section after comment section on it. Realistically, there's nothing I am now doing on my much newer M1 Pro Macbook Pro that I couldn't do on that thing, if it had a functional battery. I even prefer the keyboard on that old machine compared to the new one (I was lucky enough to miss the scourge that was the butterfly switches, thankfully). The serious stuff gets done on my desktop nowadays, but all the casual stuff could easily be done on a machine that is well over 10 years old now. Heck, if it weren't for the fact that it throttles to hell and back when running without a battery, I would probably have just continued using it without that battery (I would at-least have tried, although I imagine that would have been too impractical, since I do use my new Macbook untethered every now and then, even if it doesn't come up that often).
Sure, my new machine has a significantly better screen. It's a lot brighter, and a lot higher resolution. But I practically never use my Macbook outside, so the brightness is mostly pointless for me, although just having the option is nice. That extra brightness would have been useful, I think once during the 9 years I used my old Macbook. The higher resolution is nice, but it's not like I'm watching 4K blu-ray quality films on this thing. It's mostly random Youtube and whatever else, and beyond that, its mostly reading, which my old machine's display was perfectly serviceable for.
The speakers on my new machine are a lot better than the ones on my old machine, but in just the same way as with the screen, this mostly goes unused. My new Macbook's speaker can get quite a bit louder without distorting. Very nice if you need an impromptu Spotify machine at a party. Not needed at all for what I use it for. I don't think I've ever used the speakers at more than 50% other than when showing them off or testing them. The keyboard on my old machine was straight up better then on my new one. Guess that's what happens in the name of making them thinner. Same goes for the glow-up Apple logo on the back. I liked that. It had charm. Now it's just a black logo.
If I could put a new good battery in it, and get it back to the 7-ish hour battery life it had when it was new, it would be a miracle. It would be perfectly usable for what I need it to do. And even if I eventually wanted to move on to something better, it could have been passed along to someone who doesn't need it to do all that much. But the battery I did put in it after the old one started to bulge after 8 years of service, also started to bulge not long after the 1 year mark, and the place I bought that battery from was the only reasonably trustworthy place I knew about where I could get a battery. So in practice, replacing the battery isn't really viable.
However, the Web probably would catch up with me. I don't need much performance, but I do need a web browser, the chat client du jour, and at-least the notional ability do some gaming. It doesn't need to be fancy; it can just be Minecraft or some Steam game no older than the machine itself, but it does need to be able to do that if I am to be happy with it. Firefox and Discord are probably gonna keep being supported for a long time on even fairly old x86 machines, and so long as no major performance regressions show up, that thing could have several years of life left. Some performance regressions probably are gonna happen eventually, but I doubt it's going to get to the point where I can't read a mostly text based website with minimal JS. And I like to believe I'm patient enough to deal with it when I need to access some government website or my bank which has way too much JS compared to what it reasonably needs, since the need is pretty rare. Heck, even if MacOS itself proves too unworkable for whatever reason, Linux could probably extend its life a fair bit, assuming the hardware is decently supported, and there aren't any non-obvious issues like, say, the trackpad being horrible to use in Linux or whatever. Maybe lack of hardware acceleration eventually kills any viability for me. Youtube kinda needs to work, and decoding AV1 on a dual core processor, even if it's a hyperthreaded i7, is probably asking a bit much, although I haven't actually tested that; and it's probably moot anyway, since H.264 is probably going to be the lowest common denominator for video on the web for a long time.
This is of course in the context that I now do have a powerful desktop PC where all of the Full-Contact Computing™ happens nowadays. If I need to render a video, it happens there. If I need to run some stupid Windows program in a VM, it happens there. If I'm playing video games, it mostly happens there. And even if I'm not within walking distance of my desktop computer and need to do some inane thing that would take ages on my laptop, I can remote into my desktop and do it there instead and transfer the files I need back to my laptop fairly quickly. No Serious Computing™ is happening on my laptop unless I'm dicking around, in which case the stakes are non-existent, and thus it doesn't really matter if things don't work out. If it's important, it happens on my desktop. Not everybody has this option, but most people also aren't full-contact computer users.
I hate to think about how much this applies to businesses and non-personal computing. How many banks and other non-tech businesses would be perfectly happy using Windows XP on their back-end if it weren't for the fact that security updates are something you can't really ignore. Heck, even their front-end, that is whatever the relevant employees are interacting with for their job, be that the interface for some industrial machinery, some variation of a database program, or whatever else, probably doesn't need updates in any meaningful sense of the word for the work to continue, unless that update provides tangible and obvious benefits. In any case where that computer is single-purpose, and only really running a program and not much beyond that, there's little reason to not just continue doing what works and is known to work well for the past several years. But in practice, continuing to use hardware that is no longer secure, ends up being irresponsible and unviable.
It's one thing if Grandma loses all her life savings because she's on Windows XP. It's something else entirely if her bank functionally ceases to exist because they were on XP. Or for a real world example, if a hospital were to still use XP and thus have devices stop working once an attack breaks out.
Many businesses don't need the new features any substantial upgrade is gonna give them. They need a file server. It needs to host files, and that's it, plus some regular maintenance to make sure the backups are still working. They might need an email server. It needs to do email, and that's it. There's often a bit more too it than that, and some places do need more hardware as they grow, but probably not to the extent that they need to upgrade their hardware as often as they do. How many ATMs out there would realistically have only been replaced on an as-needed basis, if security updates weren't a concern?
I hate to think about the amount of e-waste generated simply because whatever server or other device didn't get security updates anymore, despite the fact that they were still completely fit for purpose in all other respects.
It's a real shame that what should be a reasonably fixable issue causes me to go out and have to buy an all new machine. Even if I did find the performance to be a bit lacking after a few more years, it could have made for a convenient backup machine, or I could have passed it along to someone who really only needs it to read their email and not much else. But what should be and what actually is, are two very different things.
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