> There's only so much of the hardware rat race worth keeping up with anymore at the desktop level.
I believe there's only so much of the hardware rat race worth keeping up with at all. Assuming most of Hacker News is coding, we're spending a lot of time in text editors; even if you are constantly recompiling code, CPU-wise is anything giving you that much of a boost over anything past Haswell or the PCIe/NVMe drives in the current MBP?
However, my work machines are a 2014 MacBook Pro 15 with a GTX 960 eGPU / TB2 when I need mobile hashcat, a T440s, and a Surface Pro, all pretty old hardware. 90% of the time I don't notice RAM pressure or that I am CPU bound, even when running a few VMs (say, Kali + Win10 on my MBP, or a few Win10 images in Hyper-V on the T440.) When I need more power than that, I can usually just rent it out of AWS/Azure.
I think sometimes the hardware game - especially on the Apple front - seems about keeping up the cycle and appearances of getting the new hotness. Yes, the exhilaration of having the next big thing is great, but functionally I'm inclined to believe that having the old thing is just fine 99% of users, and probably 80% of HN readers.
> Yes, the exhilaration of having the next big thing is great, but functionally I'm inclined to believe that having the old thing is just fine 99% of users, and probably 80% of HN readers.
A couple of months ago I dusted off an Acer Aspire One netbook (released in 2010, Atom N450 processor, 2GiB RAM) to install OpenBSD 6.0, after a few years with Linux and Mac OS X on other systems. Surprisingly it is my primary machine now.
Today I wanted to see if there were even smaller netbooks with usable keyboards around and came across this video comparison of the Sony Vaio P and Fujitsu UH900: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szbfvV4vwEI
The video was posted in February 2017 and the thing to notice are the complaints about the mini netbooks being unusable for web surfing and viewing videos in 2017. 99% of users are absolutely convinced that the reason web pages load slowly is not in fact horrible garbage JavaScript bloatware, but that their computers are too old and slow. HN users do things like uMatrix filtering and `youtube-dl -f`. I think that the 99% of users are much more demanding of their hardware than HN readers, unfortunately for all the wrong reasons.
if not constantly, then, really really frequently, i recompile Android projects.
before buying a new machine recently, i wanted to know what benefit a fast processor would offer for my specific usage pattern. so i repeatedly recompiled a representative Android project at different CPU speeds on my existing (over-clockable) machine.
the machine needed about 15% less time to recompile at 4.1 GHz than it did at 3.4 GHz.
I believe there's only so much of the hardware rat race worth keeping up with at all. Assuming most of Hacker News is coding, we're spending a lot of time in text editors; even if you are constantly recompiling code, CPU-wise is anything giving you that much of a boost over anything past Haswell or the PCIe/NVMe drives in the current MBP?
However, my work machines are a 2014 MacBook Pro 15 with a GTX 960 eGPU / TB2 when I need mobile hashcat, a T440s, and a Surface Pro, all pretty old hardware. 90% of the time I don't notice RAM pressure or that I am CPU bound, even when running a few VMs (say, Kali + Win10 on my MBP, or a few Win10 images in Hyper-V on the T440.) When I need more power than that, I can usually just rent it out of AWS/Azure.
I think sometimes the hardware game - especially on the Apple front - seems about keeping up the cycle and appearances of getting the new hotness. Yes, the exhilaration of having the next big thing is great, but functionally I'm inclined to believe that having the old thing is just fine 99% of users, and probably 80% of HN readers.