My laptop died this past weekend. It was a 2011 Macbook pro, and it served me well for almost eight years. That’s quite a while for a laptop of any sort, so I can’t say I didn’t get my money’s worth.
Or maybe I can, because I am pissed that it died.
I am pissed because we live in a weird time in which PC hardware does not age as quickly as it once did. The first time I bought a PC with my own money was in 2003. It had 120GB of disk, 512MB of RAM, and a single core AMD CPU. Eight years later I bought my Macbook Pro, and at that time most computers shipped with some sort of quad core CPU, and somewhere between 4-8 GB of RAM (though upgrading to 16GB was not uncommon among power users).
Fast forward another eight years, to 2019, and PCs are still shipping with quad core CPUs and 4-16 GB of RAM. The tech of 2011 simply did not exist in 2003, but the common tech of 2019 is, in some ways, just the fanciest tech from 2011.
This is why I was seriously considering upgrading the memory and swapping in an SSD to the Macbook Pro. I believed doing so would allow me to get another three or even four years of use out of it.
But now that hope is dashed, as my laptop finally suffered from an infamous graphics card/logic board failure that was so prevalent on 2011 MBP’s that Apple was fixing them for free until 2016. Also, I think I might have killed the harddrive. At this point trying to patch it all up myself doesn’t seem like a good use of my time or money (I am assuming that I would fail at fixing it, which is probably a fair assumption). It sounds weird to say it, but I wish it would have died a few years ago, as that would have helped me get it fixed, and I might be using it to this day.
Instead, a laptop that could have kept chugging along is dead, and I, the guy who makes a living writing software, yet hates buying new technology, need to find a replacement.
One thing I know for sure is that it won’t be another Mac, though not because I am mad at the hardware failure I just experienced. To be sure, I am still mad at that, but it would be dishonest to assume that faulty hardware in one model year of Macbook Pros implies that all of Apple hardware is poorly made.
No, the reason is that I am one of those people who believes that the current lineup of Macbook Pros are in no way pro. This 2016 piece from The Verge says it better than I can. I didn’t mind paying premium price for the 2011 MBP, knowing I could upgrade the memory and disk space, and knowing it had all the ports I could want. I can’t pay that same premium for a device that strips away tons of useful ports and cannot be upgraded or repaired. So I guess that means going back to Windows, with Linux appearing either as a VM, or in a Dual Boot setup. I feel somewhat ambivalent about this change: OS X has gotten a bit worse over the years, Windows 10 looks to be halfway decent, and Linux hasn’t really changed (in a good way). The switch itself won’t be a problem.
The challenge is going to be figuring out what kind of hardware I want. Despite the fact that PC sales are apparently in the trash heap, there are a lot of PC models out there, of all shapes in sizes. With just laptops alone, you have standard-type ones that look and perform as you would expect, as well as models with touchscreens, 2-in-1 models that can become a tablet, “Ultrabooks” which aim to be as thin, light, and metallic as Macs, and gaming laptops that try and fit a desktop’s worth of stuff into a portable form factor. The choices can be dizzying, especially since most of them have merit. The Ultrabooks and 2-in-1’s aren’t upgradeable, but they use SSDs and sometimes have solid hardware in them, making them easy to transport but still plenty zippy. The base models may not be fancy, but some of them are so dirt cheap it kind of doesn’t matter.
Then there are the gaming laptops, which are in some ways exactly what I wish the Macbook Pro would be, and in other cases the exact opposite. Gaming laptops really do want to be portable desktops, and this influences their design to a great degree. They have all the ports you would expect on a Desktop, including Ethernet, USB A, USB C and HDMI. They have big, full keyboards, usually with a number pad. They are usually made so that users can swap out components parts for the purposes of repair or upgrade. Lastly, they go balls to the wall with hardware. Even the “budget” level of gaming PCs usually have a Core i7 CPU, 16 gigs of RAM, and some kind of dedicated Nvidia graphics card. While these kinds of specs cannot beat a desktop rig specced out to the max, they are more than capable of playing all modern games at near-max settings, meaning they should be able to play most new games at some settings for the next few years. And if they can run modern games easily, they can certainly run all but the most demanding programming tasks, including running multiple VMs or Docker containers.
But then there is the darker side of gaming laptops. For one, they don’t tend to place an importance on battery life. Some are better than others at this regard, but even when not gaming they tend to die after anywhere from 2-4 hours of use. They also don’t tend to be pretty. They are usually plastered with lots of colored lights, and weird flourishes along their plastic shells. They are not the kind of thing a grown adult would want to have seen outside of their house.
Oh, and they are big and heavy. You aren’t going to pick one up with one hand and walk down the hallway with it, nor can you perch it upon a tiny patch of flat surface.
This puts me in a bind. I like the idea of having a small and light device. I find that the easier it is to carry a laptop around - and then put it down somewhere safe - the more likely I am to use it.
On the other hand, I want some power. I want to be able to run code in a VM (or two!) on a virtual network, so I can simulate real world conditions much more closely than I can by running everything as localhost. I want to be able to build a codebase and tinker in an IDE at the same time without bringing my device to its knees. And while I don’t want to become a full fledged PC Gamer, I would like the peace of mind that comes from knowing that my device will still be able to play new games when it is more than a year old.
If I could wave a magic wand, I would have multiple devices that I could use for different purposes. But right now that isn’t something I feel comfortable trying to pull off. For now, I need one new device, and I need to make it count.