[Linux-aus] Inexpensive laptops (was: ARM laptops)

[Les Kitchen]

On Mon, Oct 23, 2023, at 22:18, Russell Coker via linux-aus wrote:
> On Saturday, 21 October 2023 16:59:02 AEDT Mike Carden via linux-aus wrote:
>> I'm typing this on a circa 2010 Lenovo X201 laptop which I bought second
...
> I had an X301 I got for free for a while and it was nice.  After the battery 
> died on that I moved to the Thinkpad X1 Carbon series as I wanted small and 
> light but decided that if I was going to pay I'd get something a little 
> faster.

> On eBay you can get Thinkpad X1 Carbon series laptops for under $300 with SSD 
> and good battery (which incidentally you can't easilt replace).  The older 
> ones like the X301 and X201 are hardly worth the savings.  If you get a new 
> SSD and battery then you are getting into the price range of an X1 Carbon but 
> with a lower resolution screen, less RAM, and slower CPU.
...
> The MNT Reform looks nice but starts at E1,199 which is a lot.  I've paid more 
> than that for laptops in the past, but now that there are so many cheaper 
> options and so many nice laptops that are hardly used on eBay it's hard to 
> justify.
>
> Buying a new laptop for $300 every time an important part breaks is cheaper 
> than E1,199 for something that can be repaired easily.  MNT are ARM based 
> laptops which are good for developing portable code, but I think a PineBookPro 
> is better for that as you can run phones in the same way.

Well, yes, but that's not the whole story.  Sure, there's the
immediate cost.  For the price of one MNT Reform I could buy
half-dozen Pinebook Pros.  But there's the broader issue of the
costs to the environment and to future generations of the mining of
raw materials and the manufacturing of new electronic devices.

And really, the Pinebook Pro itself shouldn't be the point of
comparison, because it is quite repairable and sturdily made (if
not as much so as the MNT Reform, and is in a way better value,
much as the Pinephone is better value than the Purism Librem-5).
The real contrast should be with the many non-repairable
mainstream consumer devices.

It's one of the failings of capitalism that those costs aren't
really accounted for in normal business and commercial
operations.

A lot of the minerals and resources are likely to be worth much
more in the future, and are sold off too cheaply now, IMHO.
Same for petroleum and coal, hundreds of millions of years in
the making.  They'll be worth more in decades to come as
chemical feedstocks, and it's a waste just to burn them for
energy (even aside from greenhouse-gas emissions and global
warming).

Part of it is a balancing act between the interests of future
generations and the interests of those currently living, with a
lot of uncertainties.  But too often future interests aren't
given enough weight.

If you think of it as an optimization search problem, the unruly
processes of capitalism are probably pretty good at finding
local optima, but can get stuck in a local optimum that is far
from any more global optimum, and need some external push to get
out, I guess by governments.

If I spend some money and effort to upgrade an old machine, or
pay (possibly a lot more) to get a machine that's repairable and
will have a long life, then that's at least showing that such
things are possible.  Voting with my wallet as I can afford it.

This is somewhat separate from the matter of user control (not
corporate control) by running Free Software, but it is all
intertwined.

And at a more mundane level, if I have a machine that I know
works well, then I'll feel more comfortable replacing a failed
component, or upgrading, then taking the risk of buying a whole
new machine, which might be a lemon.  Even if it fails within
the warranty period, it's still a hassle, and after that you're
on your own.

It depends on what your use is, but short of demanding things
like high-end gaming and bioinformatics, etc., fairly modest
computing machinery can handle well enough what most people do.
And given human visual acuity at usual viewing geometry, there's
little or no benefit from going beyond FHD screen resolution.  I
might be wrong, but I feel that we've reached something of a
plateau in real everyday computing requirements, and will likely
be there for a while.  A fair bit of my laptop use is
essentially as an X-terminal (via VNC) to my main home server.
For that, not so much is demanded of the laptop itself.

As they used to say in church (and may well still do, for all I
know):  Here endeth the sermon.  :-)  Thank you for your patience...


> https://frame.work/au/en
>
> The Framework laptops have an interesting design as well, but at around $1,369 
> (I think Australian dollars) it's cheaper than MNT but still a bit expensive.  
...

Yeah, thanks for the reminder of that.  I'd looked at the
Framework machines a few years ago, and thought they looked
very interesting at the time, but had forgotten about them.
Yeah, that is their AU website, so I guess the prices are in
AUD, which would make them cheaper than the MNT Reform.

— Smiles, Les.

P.S.
> My Main Blog         http://etbe.coker.com.au/
> My Documents Blog    http://doc.coker.com.au/

I really should read your blog more often.  Thanks for putting
it up.