Why do a lot of programmers use old laptops?

Why do a lot of programmers use old laptops?

Just think, is programming a resource intensive task?

Lower resolution = better readability,
& programming languages are just text.

When it come to compiling there will be a difference though.

Because they're made to last

Are you serious or just memeing?

Because you don't need a $3000 laptop made this year to run Ubuntu and a text editor, you basic bitch.

So I am a professional developer. I mostly work in Java, C#, C++ and C. I do most of my work on an oldish ThinkPad because I like the keyboard. I only do small compiles on the laptop with full builds pushed to a dedicated build server. Performance isn't an issue so I just go with what I am comfortable using. Also while I earn good money I am still quite tight with what I spend money on. I am 33 now and plan to retire when I am 40 and spending £3k on a laptop every year or two isn't going to help me do that. I save as much as I can. I used to buy all the latest stuff but then I realised I will end up working many more years if I keep wasting money on crap so I cut back on all the pointless crap. I still have nice holidays and a nice house but I don't waste money on phones, computers, TVs, etc. every time something new comes out.

Old laptops are as cheap as dirt and as long as I'm using it for barely more than a ssh terminal, why would I need some cutting edge tech on my lap? I've got better things to spend my money on, like adderall and hookers.

4:3 aspect ratio and superior tactile keyboards.

Because they are poor or are saving a lot of money so they can retire early.

compiling is

>I am 33 now and plan to retire when I am 40 and spending £3k on a laptop every year or two isn't going to help me do that.

You plan on retiring on 7x3k per year? Check your maths

are you a wizard?

>What's an africa ghetto?
You dont need money down there

because once you get deep enough into emacs, your custom configurations are so large and get changed so often that you can't transfer them to another computer

They don't make laptops as well as they used to. The guts may improve, but everything else got worse.

Because for programming you often don't need fast hardware

Also, when you have a specific tool chain set up, it can be a world of shit to transfer to a new computer.

Really it's about reliability. If you are a serious programmer you rely on your computer like a parachuter relies on their parachute so you can't have fucking garbage that updates automatically and fucks you over

It isn't just a new laptop every year but all the pointless things people spend money on these days. Almost a thousand pounds on a phone contract a year, buying a fancy car on HP that they don't really need, etc. It all adds up. I currently earn £121k a year and own 3 properties, one I live in and the other two I rent out for 150% of the mortgage. I will have paid off all 3 mortgages by the time I am 39. I changed my habits with money when I was 26 so 7 years ago. I have already saved an extra £100k in that time. If I stay on target with my savings and budgeting I will have £600k in cash and around £1.3m in property when I am 40. Of course that depends on how much the properties go up by.

Not a wizard, just sensible with what I spend money on.

Most large code bases are broken up into tons of modules that can be compiled independently and many language have incremental compilation.

I upgraded the SSD in my laptop but most other upgrades wouldn't make that big of a difference to my work day.

It's a tool and not a fashion statement. Also GNU/Linux tends to run better on older hardware.

Coding doesn't need much spec wise, older machines are economical, easier to work with, cheap to repair, and in the case of old thinkpads at least, very comfortable to use.

I thought they use macs idc btw

They used to be big on ThinkPads, but they all went Mac.

I keep it extremely well. I often cringe when I hear a normie had to upgrade because computer was too slow, or battery lasting too little.

Because new ones are shitty overpriced and have not upgraded actual performance much.

Combine that with 90% of real computer work is done in either a text editor or a text terminal and there you go.

Most programs are made of smaller stuff. Also you can always either have a server compile for you or just ssh into the server to begin with.

>Really it's about reliability. If you are a serious programmer you rely on your computer like a parachuter relies on their parachute so you can't have fucking garbage that updates automatically and fucks you over

Microsoft is fucking itself over with the automatic windows 10 updates.

Don't "retire", people become depressed when they aren't working at something.

Maybe just start up a side business, or go travelling and volunteer.

Too many people I know hear "retire" and think "no more work" and that scares me.

Well good thing jewtel never made any advancements to cpu performance in the past few years until baby lake then

Hey, admirer here. How much did you save and then spend (down payment, and total cost) of your first property? Did you live in it then rent it out once you saved up enough to buy another? Or did you just buy a home and save to invest in other property. I'd really like to do this, I've been living with my parents and savings while working IT full time.

Oh I don't plan to stop working, just retire from *having* to work. I plan to travel a bit and spend more time on hobbies I don't get as much time to do now like skiing. I want to be able to go skiing for the season for example. Ideally I would like to do it now (or back in my 20s) but I didn't have the money to do it then so I did the normal thing of just having a two week ski holiday in the winter.

I also plan to do a lot of volunteering but again on my terms. Basically I am working and saving now so that when I am 40 I can retire from working a regular 9-5 office job and do the things I want to do with the remaining 40 or so years of my life.

I bought my first house with my ex-wife. We got married too young and split after 3 years of marriage. That was a wake up call for me to be honest. I bought my wifes share of the house and then a few years later sold it and bought a smaller place. Then I bought the other two as buy-to-let properties. Things have changed now but back then it wasn't as hard to get such a mortgage. I have been lucky with renting it out though to be fair. Some people get fucking awful tenants. Mine have all been really nice so far.

I dunno man, it seems like some use an old af laptop or some new high tech shit. Not much in the middle.
You do realize you can clone your HDD/SSD, right?

Bait

Exactly why vim wins, you can just save your .vimrc online and you're good to go on a new machine

>2006 laptop
>1400x1050
>2016 laptop
>1366x768

Not if your code is efficient.

Because modern laptops only have keyboards with 0.005 Ångström travel distance which aren't comfy for writing code

This.

It can be. If you have to test inside of a virtual machine (for say, kernel development or cross platform development), it can be resource intensive. It can also be resource intensive if the program you are making is resource intensive and you test on your development machine.

Because they are autistic and autistic people like routine, buying a new laptop would change that routine so they just continue to shill their high school/ undergrad shitbooks.

Hey similar here. We didn't opt to have kids which has saved us a crazy amount of money. My dev laptop is a t420, and I picked up a dell optiplex with a 4790 in it for next to nothing because it was refurbed. The upside of so many people being obsessed with new tech is that it makes it really easy and cheap to find good refurbished stuff.

me on the left

because they use circular spinning disks
we don't have circular spinning ssd's yet
ssd chips are still arranged in a matter that make electrons and protons fall out due to sharp turns and no magnet to keep them in. in spinning disks the magnet keeps the electons from faling out due to centrifugal forces

damn right! I use a T420s most of the time hooked up to a nice monitor at home as the screen isnt great. My next machine will have the best screen possible though. My perfect machine would be something like the Dell XPS 15 with that infinity display but a solid ThinkPad keyboard. An i5, as much RAM as possible and the fastest 500GB SSD on the market. Maybe, just maybe, if such a machine were available I would buy one new but as it doesn't exist I will have to accept tradeoffs so I would rather save money and buy something old.

that's just people on Sup Forums
real programmers use macs

because all you're doing on that old shitty laptop is writing code && are probably running whatever on a server that is much more powerful

all that really matters (to me anyway) is the keyboard, and old laptops have better keyboards

This.

Reminds me of my old HP Compaq 8710w workstation, it was a beast for it's time. And I am yet to use a more comfortable keyboard.

it doesn't take a lot of horsepower to compile the average hello-world tier project that passes for "programming" on Sup Forums

not to mention build servers and SSH are a thing

replace the screen with one from a t440 senpai

>not retiring with a 7.62x39

Pleb

Because anyone who's been using computers for awhile knows all laptops are shit and that buying a new one isn't going to change that fact.

Older laptops are better built, and programmers don't need fast computers.

/thread, retard.

one could argue that this Unity fuckshit has taken it's toll on programmer's laptop memory, but I mean there is also Lubuntu. Pretty much Ubuntu but without the bullshit.

because lets face it, if your running Ubuntu 16.04 and ^ you pretty much should just run Kubuntu and be done with it. that's on a laptop of course.

They just werk and they're cheap.

>Old laptops are as cheap as dirt and as long as I'm using it for barely more than a ssh terminal, why would I need some cutting edge tech on my lap? I've got better things to spend my money on, like adderall and hookers.


spoken like a true developer. do all these node.js fags make you want to kill yourself as well?

no it's not.

unless your compiling something that is gigs than no it isn't . shit I worked at for Aulitiac as a C++ developer and they made everyone use a Pent4 in 2013.

The only people that use those computers with lights and rainbow keyboards are boners who "game" with it or people who think that by filling up a newegg cart full of overpriced shit makes your an expert in computers. Honestly, aside from being at work, 96% of my programming is done on a laptop at home with a USB mouse connected.

and yes, I use an used old laptop I bought on Ebay for 250$

>Don't "retire", people become depressed when they aren't working at something.

what a crock of shit, when I was in school and graudated back in 99 I used to think "wow, i'm a programmer now, i've done it! I have a career ahead of me that is also my passion", the I enter the life of a day to day programmer and it's mind numbing and soul crushing work. I honestly hate my job, I cant wait to retire and spend my days fucking my wife or someone else and smoke these cigarettes until the cancer kills me like richie aprile in the sopranos.

tl;dr. writting c++ for a massive company will make you want to kill yourself if you do it for too long.

Underrated

Just stopping by to say that you are living my dream, though I doubt that I can be making that same kind of money by that age. What is your profession?

>writting c++

Writing C++ for a living must be an elaborate form of torture.
After trying to learn C++, without success, C looks liberating. And I don't have a high opinion of C.

Keyboards. That being said, most programmers i know use macs

>I have failed at something
>That means everyone else has failed at it and they are just suffering through it

a moron, ladies and gentlemen, a moron.

With the knowledge you gained from devving with c++ professionally, it would have been relatively trivial to transition to another technology at a company that did work that actually interested you.

Why did you stay?

Says the guy who can't even write FizzBuzz.

BTW there are probably 5 people in the entire who have learned C++, so I'm in good company.

FizzBuzz

I use what my job gave me because it's on them to pay for my tools, and I'm sure as hell not putting wear and tear on my personal stuff for my boss's sake.

Pajeet detected

>$250 laptop
>Bad

Retarded fat cat die already

because the only laptops currently produced with good build quality are macbooks, which have shitloads of other problems?

>save your .vimrs online
what did he mean by this

Because they know that there's nothing to be gained from a new one as far as they're concerned.

>boners
Reddit pls go.

He's a professional bullshitter.

Not only does it usually not require much power to program, but it's a fundamental basic of programming to support old hardware as long as possible without compromising too much functionality.

If you made hospital software that relied on windows 7 and up, you'd get no customers because news flash, most hospitals run on equipment that can't even support windows 7. Office PC's don't count.

I worked at a pharmacy, just a pharmacy, and the cost of upgrading the computer that auto sorted pills and handled scheduling for the machine would have cost over 8,000$ to upgrade and install by the books for a UI upgrade only. Old shit gets shit done.

Tl;Dr the world is stuck in 2001 and in all fairness, 2001 tech was all we need. Anything after 2001 is aesthetic upgrades only.

>production sever
senpai

>cheap
>physically sturdy
>reliable
>decent hardware
there's probably more for some people, but those are what I can think of from the top of my head.

Stop using c++

>not compiling on a remote development server

I see a trend emerging

cos i don't need a lot of power
is more about robustness

like someone said here
why pay £2k for a laptop
get a refurb

also why buy it and have to pay for a new windows which you blow away

# of licenses of windows have blown away - lost count

wrote to mfcturer once to ask for refund of windows - no reply

Some people arent interested in IDE and would just use vim/emacs/sublime and the code would be compiled on a sever anyways.

Tfw my company uses Surface Pro 3s docked to dual monitors and all development is done in Azure VMs.

Get with the times dudes.

Pretty much. We plateaued in terms of hardware grunt actually being limiting for most purposes years ago. There are things that a 1995 PC couldn't do that a 2001 PC can with ease. There's not much a 2001 PC can't do that a 2017 PC could in terms of real world uses.
No, bloated crapware doesn't count.

ha, just bought op's pic last week to use as a dedicated programming machine

Look at it from this point:

>use a fast modern computer
>write some software
>it works
>someone else uses it on a bit slower machine
>it's unstable

vs

>write software on a slow, old machine
>it works
>it works everywhere else

op's favorite term emulator must be hyper

A distro is not a desktop environment. Lubuntu IS Ubuntu, but with LXDE.
Ubuntu ships with Unity, but you could simply install a different DE. I like XFCE.

Linux kernel can run in userspace and it's not that heavy, no need for a virtual machine to debug.

How do you have fun without spending money???

Just because you don't need the power doesn't mean you need to use the oldest decrepit laptops that belong in a museum. Fucking hipsters.

ur companys apps are rly crep

no offens

>2017
>not cloud compiling
baka

Keyboards suck now and nobody seems to care.

Being powerful doesn't mean it has to look dated

Because seting up our develoment enviroment again make us think twice, it may be a painful experience.