9Benua

My 2007 white Macbook C2D 2.2 4GB RAM 500GB 7200rpm, running OSX Lion refused to die on me. 7 years and still fast enough for my need. I did change the battery couple of times though. Eventually, I'll give it to my son and get another MBP.

Loren Pechtel

But it's an old one he's talking about.

QMConsultant

I change laptops every 3 - 4 years. I am currently using a Lenovo Ideapad U160 (bought in January 2011) with which I have been extremely happy. Small, light weight and fits into every small bag. It has been running 7 days a week, 18 hours on average. There is nothing wrong with it, except that one plastic piece at the left hinge was broken and cannot be glued together.

Now I am looking for a replacement for work and may use the current one for private stuff at home.

Scifience

I'm somewhat embarrassed to confess that I upgrade my primary laptop pretty much every year, whenever Apple comes out with an updated MacBook Pro. My work is very computationally-intensive ("big data" stuff), so having the latest-and-greatest has an actual impact on my productivity.

Thankfully, Apple products tend to hold resale value so well that I can usually do this for about $500 out of pocket after selling last year's model on eBay or Craigslist. The way I look at it is that I'm "renting" a high-end laptop with full warranty coverage for a bit more than a netbook costs.

nkedel

Durability is huge; when I initially went SSD (very early), the speed benefits were somewhat less clear, but I was killing about one laptop hard drive a year with drops.

I've got pretty much my whole life on my laptop (100+TB of pictures, for one) ... plus 3 OSes (Windows 8.1, 7, and Linux... plus virtual machines for XP and an alternate Linux distro) and have 2x 1TB drives in it now (and about 700gb free, since the 2nd was upgraded from an a 256gb very recently.)

That sounds like the guys who were selecting laptop for my employer's professional services organization back around 2005-2006. They bought 17" Entertainment notebooks. On the earlier of the two models (Inspiron 9300) they got them with a big GPU, too, and the attendant extra heat sink and fan... at least the 2nd (9400) was slightly lighter without the GPU.

The first of the two was old enough that in laptops there pretty much only were only pretty much crap processors to be had; the second was decent when it came out although for no good reason they kept ordering the Core Duo when the much improved Core 2 Duos came out for another year and a half.

Absolutely beautiful screens, though; when they disposed of a bunch, I rescued two (one to run, one for parts) and dropped a C2D 2ghz into it. Makes a pretty nice media player and terminal for use around the house.

I was (and am) in software development and in particular we do big customer-hosted enterprise apps where it's a HUGE convenience to be able to build and test the whole app on your own machine rather than building and deploying on the network somewhere. Nobody even thought about using a laptop for our kind of development back then; the first machine anyone liked enough to make an optional standard for developers was when the first good quad-core laptop chips came out in very early 2011.

Surprisingly, after a decade and a half of "no matter how fast we buy, it's not fast enough" for my work the first generation i7 quad core desktops we bought in 2009 and the first generation quad core i7 laptops we bought in 2011 have all remained pretty good for use now. It's been really nice to actually have machines stay ahead of needs... even if it is a bit weird to see other developers deciding not to bother to take an offered upgrade when the machines go out of warranty.

Actually, he was talking about both -- saying that at the < $500 range, both older and newer ones were still topping out at 4gb.

"Over 4 years old" covers a broad range, and the nearer end of that is also going to be essentially 100% 64-bit systems.

kdlynn06

Well, when my last MacBook's screen would go black at random times, I got a new MacBook Pro. Wouldn't you know that my old MacBook has NEVER went black again. I do love my MacBook Pro, so I guess I can't complain too much.

richard

used to be every 2 - 3 years, but seeing less need now. My Macbok Air is approaching 3 years and is plenty fast, and the Macbook Pro is 4 years old I think (Sandy Ridge quad core i7) and plenty fast.

I might get a new one one of these days, probably replace the Macbook Air with something only to get a better screen but it's 11" and it's really an incredible machine other than battery life.

I think the improvements that are coming are more in the realm of battery life, displays and storage rather than CPU speeds which are plenty fast enough.

ou81two

The hardware is designed to have a predictable lifecycle of 3 years so that's the sensible thing to do.

nkedel

On laptops, absolutely -- especially since quad core machines are still a pretty narrow chunk of the market. If anything, the huge success of ultrabooks in the past two years (and the MacBook Air for a couple of years before them) has probably brought average CPU speeds down a bit compared to early 2012 when the Ivy Bridge chips came out and the first really good ultrabook chips were still "coming later this year."

Even with a quad core machine, my current personal laptop has a slightly slower CPU than my last one (i7-4702HQ vs. i7-3720QM)... and I really, really don't care. The graphics (both discreet and integrated) are a lot better, and the machine is 2 1/2 pounds lighter with a bigger screen -- it's basically Dell's attempt to clone the MacBook Pro form factor. Major wins all around except for the CPU, and fast enough CPU that the differences are never actually noticeable.

HMO

He is probably talking about the Windows 32-bit memory limitation - in order to add more memory above 3GB, you'll also need to change the OS for a 64-bit one.

brendog

Really? Source?

Badenoch

Mine do not get replaced until which time they no longer do what I need them to do. If they get the job done reliably I don't need the latest and greatest product.

linsj

Every one of my Toshiba laptops have lasted longer than that!

ScottC

Every 6-8 months. I upgrade while my old machine still has residual value. Current machine is a Samsung Ativ Book 9 plus. When something better comes along, I'll switch again.

el344

This thread is extremely helpful since I have to buy a new laptop because I'm retiring and have to give back my trusty ThinkPad x120e.

Here's what I want:
an Intel 4th gen processor
a solid state drive at least 256 G
a screen that doesn't have absurd resolution that makes everything tiny
small, lightweight, durable
Windows 7 pro

Here's what I don't know:
Would a 128 GB solid state drive leave me any room for anything, or would I have to depend on the cloud / external drives?

What about hybrid drives?

Is it time for me to bite the bullet and try Windows 8?

Work is offering me a ThinkPad 11e with a 1.86 Celeron processor, 8 GB ram, 128 GB SSD, for about $700. Windows 7 pro. I'm leary of the Celeron processor -- the processor is the weak link on my X120e.

I'm looking at the Dell outlet site (thanks, nkedel) at an assortment of choices, starting with a 3330 with a hybrid drive and working my way all the way up to a 7240.

I would like to keep this under $1000. And it has to be a windows machine, for a whole assortment of valid (to me) reasons, so the Mac Book Air is not an option.