Aside from my homebuilt Windows XP-based desktop PC, I also have a trusty three or four year old Apple iBook G4; 1.33 GHz, 12" monitor with a couple of blotches, OS 10.5, and a whopping 512 MB of memory. For the most part, it’s a good on-the-road Web surfing/Photoshop/word processing machine; not fast, but not really slow, either.
When I go down to the neighborhood coffeehouse, where half of the patrons are taking advantage of the free WiFi, I noticed that all the laptops in use are brand spanking new; they’ve either got Vista running on a 16:9 screen, or a Macbook that is easily identifiable as new because of its chicklet keys. I never see any older laptops; almost nothing with a 4:3 monitor, nor Windows XP, except for the rare guy with a ponytail and neckbeard; they’re no doubt running some Linux distro.
My question to the SDMB masses: where do all the old laptops go?
I’ve kept the last two “discards” - one is a kitchen “cookbook” and my “XP machine because some of my old games don’t run on Vista” laptop. The other was our printer server until we got a wireless printer recently, so I’m probably finally going to use the “recycle your laptop” box I got when I bought this latest laptop. Before that I gave previous computers to an inlaw and her daughter who weren’t well off.
Missed the edit window: I don’t replace every year by any means, but my current laptop fits the “whoa, shiny new, 16:9 screen and Vista” criteria. (I could seriously live without Vista, it’s been more hassle than it’s worth, so far.)
If you get a laptop through your company, your company probably leases the laptop from somewhere. They go back to the leasing company after a year or two or three and you get a new one. The leasing company gets to sell them back to the public for a deliciously low price.
Although I must admit I am sort of baffled by the amount of “I am about to get a new laptop/I just got a new laptop/I got Vista with my new computer” threads around here. I think the price of computers has just come down enough that they’re easier to replace every couple of years instead of maintaining them, or living with outdated pieces and parts. Me, since I’m a major nerd, I both maintain and live with old pieces and parts. I don’t expect too many others to be that nerdy tho.
My current laptop is about two years old…a Gateway MX3228. The only reason I’d replaced my old one was that it stopped working. That one was a Toshiba I’d bought used on eBay several years before, which is still sitting in a closet waiting for me to get around to trying to figure out what’s the matter with it and see if I can somehow recover some files on the hard drive. If I do ever get it working again I may keep it to run older computer games. If for no other reason than the fact that it has a 3.5" floppy drive, which neither my current laptop and desktop have.
I think your sampling method is flawed. At the most basic level, people with money to spend on new laptops are way more likely to have money to spend on boutique coffee. The people with the really old laptops probably don’t even have WiFi cards, so there’s no need for them to hang out in the coffee shop.
I have plenty of friends with older laptops (3-7 years old). Generally, they don’t hang out in coffee shops.
This.
My husband works in ICT, so he got new pc’s and laptops a lot. The old ones are all sitting in boxes in the garage. I’ve asked him to sell them, give them away, or give them away to have recycled,. But he says he can’t do that untill he well and truly erased from the hard drive every possible trace of the on-line banking he did on them and the -um- private pictures we put on them. And erasing the hard disks has’t gotten priortity yet. So they’re still sitting in that box.
I rock out my IBM T21 at Dunkin Donuts sometimes. PIII, 4:3 screen, 256mb, XP Home, with a WiFi card. It does the internet just fine. So there’s some of us still out there.
I’m IT at a credit union. We replace all our machiens every four years, and sell the old ones to our employees. There’s massive demand each year for 4-year old IBM thinkpads. They might not use them in coffeeshops, but they do use them.
I’m running a 5 year old HP laptop. Last year the hard drive gave up the ghost and the tech recommended buying a new one (a new comp, that is). Let’s see, $800 for a new PC or $350 for a new 60 GB drive and having my files reinstalled from my old HDD. No-brainer. I got the new hard drive installed and it worked like new. This year I got cable broadband, and a wireless router and notebook card. Yep, there are still plenty of us who hold onto our old machines.
My current latest and greatest (been mine less than 2 weeks) is a rather boring exact replica of my previous computer, so I have two identical-twin vintage 2006 PowerBook G4 / 17"ers. If the main one gets sick (other than hard disk failure of course) I swap hard disks and send it to the shop and the other one lets me keep going w/o interruption.
Neither of them spend much time in Starbucks. I wear the main one on my back but mostly I set up shop on either end of my commute plugging in to real mice and keyboards.
The OLD laptop is a vintage 1998 PowerBook G3 (“WallStreet”). I don’t take it into coffee shops either. It doesn’t even have a battery (I use that bay for an expansion bay hard disk instead, so I’ve got a pair of internal hard disks in it, it’s pretty impressive for its age actually). It runs Panther very nicely but the thing it does that the more modern G4 PBs can’t do is run MacOS 9 and drive a pair of old scanners for which no OSX drivers exist.
I think computers have really peaked in power and utility, at least for a while. New CPUs come out and I really can’t tell a big difference in speed. Dual core is nice though.
But a ~2GHz computer with 1GB of memory, USB ports, wireless, and a 60GB or so hard drive is a good web computer, and has been for years.