The data shows that the average laptop CPU in 2024 has 56% better thread performance, and 123% better total performance, compared to the average laptop in 2019.
Laptop thread 2019: 1689 avg. score
Laptop total 2019: 6396 avg. score
Laptop thread 2024: 2643 avg. score
Laptop total 2024: 14288 avg. score
For the specific case, just look up the benchmarks for the CPUs you are comparing.
For me it suffices, quickly lookup information that I need and handle urgent emails.
When on the road, I meet with clients, partners and vendors. I don't sit in coffee shops debugging complex apps. That is what my office with desktop computers and servers are for. Whilst traveling I try to address my sleep deficit.
They predate it, but windows RT was essentially unusable. Windows on ARM has only become mostly usable with the introduction of the Snapdragon Elite CPUs this year
Performance wise a 5 year old notebook is more than enough given that it has enough RAM and an nvme 4.0 or higher.
What you should keep in mind is the following:
- degrading battery: replacing can get expensive to impossible depending in the model.
- Temperature: old thermal paste may need replacement, Core i7 are getting pretty hot and throttled, maybe an i5 is the better choice
- Display: dead Pixels, degrading colors, lower contrast
- touchpad: smaller, less accurate, no glass
- Connectivity: no Bluetooth 5.0, no wifi ax
I would buy a used one but only because i'm willing to do replacements and repairs. If your time is valuable and you are not an expert, it's probably not worth.
Laptop CPUs run hot, there isn't a lot of room for airflow or cooling. Hardware degrades with time/heat/cycles, so if it was used hard, it might be close to the end of its usable life.
Are there any good companies which sell laptop to rackmount conversion kits (or vendors which offer such)?
This has been a problem for me pretty much every time I've recycled an old laptop. The CPU/mobi/ram still works fine but the cooling screen battery and case are often going after a few years in and out of the backpack.
I'd love to recycle them myself, suppose I could ask the folks at Re:PC next time I do a drop off
You're mostly right, hard usage may lead to fast degradation, but unfortunately it is hard to tell how a device has been used as long as there are no obvious signs. Especially when there was more than one owner.
It's a bit like buying a used car - if you are not an expert, it's risky, but avoiding obvious red flags 70% of the time you're not getting ripped of and you save a lot of money.
Worth thinking about efficiency/battery life. Might be fine performance wise, but if you tend to need it to last a while unplugged, a more recent laptop will be much better at the same performance level. I had kind of sworn off laptops because last time I had one, the battery life just wasn't useful. But nowadays they're actually good enough to treat as proper portable devices.
This is the real advantage. Any crapbox with 16GB of ram is good enough for most things (unless you work on JVM microservices), the main benefit of the new laptops is the unreal battery life.
That, and USB-C charging is handy if you spend a lot of time on the road.
Thanks for asking. I should have mentioned this is based on anecdotal personal experience. I used to have an ancient laptop with a bad mic and a low res webcam.
I noticed much higher callback rate after upgrading. This is admittedly a small sample size.
In my experience working in a remote team, what matters is the audio. Ideally a headset (so that your voice does not get cut while someone is talking) with a decent mic. Not understanding what the remote person says is very frustrating.
Any webcam does the job as long as you can recognize the person. Anyway most people use this blurry background thingy, I really don't believe that the video quality matters.
I agree with you that if you're doing a lot of remote interviews having a decent camera is worth the investment. I have no doubt that people will subconsciously judge people who have meet through a potato.
If you get a laptop with removable batteries, it doesn't really matter. Just carry a backup battery if you need it and you outdo modern laptops with non-removable batteries.
That's adding more weight to carry around, and anyway, if needed, modern laptops can also use battery banks, which once again puts them ahead. Bonus that since laptops tend to use USB-C nowadays, you get the versatility of being able to use that bank for both phone and laptop.
LLOL:D Yeah, the other thing that really helps get nice tech into the hands of cheapskates like me is the truly relentless march of time:P
If it makes you feel any better, this machine replaced my previous daily driver because I realized that the machine I'd been thinking was "surely just like 5 years old right?" was 11 years old.
The laptop I got last year also "replaced" one that was 11 years old, from the awful interval where they had internal batteries and limited ports but custom chargers and almost useless batteries.
Replaced in quotes because for the covid years I used a desktop and didn't have to be able to function outside often enough to bother with a laptop.
Considering that 5 years ago is 2019, I figure that efficiency gains are probably also not as dramatic as I'm imagining.
If you mostly use spreadsheets and web apps, you can safely buy a 10-year-old i5 and you'll be fine.
I regularly sell refurbished i3/i5/i7 machines with first/second/third generation processors to customers for very low prices (think $60 for a laptop that used to cost $800). They work fine. You can check your email, do spreadsheets, use Discord, watch Netflix.
This is an extreme example, of course, but the truth is the idea you don't need something new to do the same things you were doing ten years ago. If your expectations are to do reasonable normal people stuff, you'll have no problem at all.
Minus the caveats others have mentioned about battery life, charging speed, and portability, you'll be fine.
It depends on what you are doing and what compromises you are willing to take.
I'm still using my dell M6800 and t430 for work, they are decade old laptops.Ubuntu for Os and it's been working great. It's an i7 system and i work on php projects and sometimes dabble in python and some ml projects. Never ever disaapaointed me.
It's been showing it's age when some ml projects throw that the current cuda library is not supported by the nvdia graphics that i currently have.
I buy and sell used laptops and computers parts as my side hustle.
There afew points that you should keep in mind, while buying used laptop.
1.Don't buy U variants or any other low power variants of the i7 processor.
2.Don't buy dual core i7 variants.
3.Try to buy 8th gen or above. Better battery life and performance ratio.
4.If you are not everyday carrying or portablity is a must , stay away from slim and designer ones, that do not have adequate cooling.
5.Check if the display is TN or an IPS panel. TN is a straight no no.
6.Do not buy the models that are targeted towards students and home users, buy something that for professional users. They are more durable and tend to last long. Example lenovo T-series, W-series, HP also has some, Dell M-series, Precision-series.
7.Check the number of output ports.
8.Physical condition of the laptop, if it is kept clean or not. The fans might be clogged, hinghes are loose, some keys might not be working. Some usb ports might not be working or loose, etc etc
9.Reapply thermal paste , even if it's running fine. Factory ones dry out quickly, so you will get the chance to clean up the fans as well
My main desktop is running on a 14-15 year old Intel Core i5 750 and I've got 20-30 google chrome windows open each with about 100 tabs (sorry I know... I'll clean them up eventually) and I photoshop all the time and multi-task with excel spreadsheets and VPNs and Thunderbird email client with 10-20 accounts, etc... And my numerous laptops are running on 10 year old processors just fine. I've got a 16 core AMD threadripper PC for intense cases but I haven't powered it on in months.
It depends on WHAT you are using them for. Generally the public has reached a point where we don't need more processing power. Unless you're into gaming, streaming, editing, or a specific CPU intense use case we have enough computing power.
The only thing left to do is make them more energy effecient.
I was using a 2018 MacBook Pro with an Intel Core i7 processor and 32 GB RAM as my daily-driving laptop at work from early 2019 until this summer when I resigned and thus turned in the laptop. I had no performance issues with the laptop at all, and I still wouldn't have an issue using it as my daily driver today.
The more pressing matter is the amount of RAM the laptop has, especially given that many laptops have soldered RAM. I have a Surface 7 Pro (released in late 2019) with a Core i5 processor and 8GB of RAM that performs quite fine for Web browsing, Microsoft Office, and some programming. I don't do anything heavy-duty on my Surface Pro, though; I have more powerful machines with much more RAM for that.
IIRC the limiting factor for late Intel Macs was cooling. It would frequently throttle the CPU down to 20% to cool it down.
And even if the numbers are great on a sunny day (or rather a cool day, to fix this I would have to sit with it in an open window), this is a real performance sink.
I’m using a 2018 MacBook Pro with 16gb RAM and just sent a ticket for an upgrade. I run a lot of docker containers and between that, jet brains IDEs, multiple browser, etc it’s pretty slow.
Check out 'refurbished' ThinkPads when trying to get a deal on laptops. Many are off lease business machines that were lightly used, best value for the money imo.
Highly recommend this: you can hit 50% to 70% discount from original price, plus contribute to reducing e-waste.
I've been using a third-hand T480 for many (5? 7? Can't even remember anymore) years now, and it's probably the best Linux experience anyone can hope for. Performance vs. efficiency is crazy - easily hitting 20 hours, screen-on battery life after all this time and many full discharges.
That battery performance really surprising me. My T14 running debian averages ~5-6 hours of coding + browsing. Did you do anything fancy to get those sorts of results.
As an axis of comparison, I work on a really snappy and fast 5800X3D desktop with a couple of 180Hz monitors. My laptop is a 15" Macbook Pro i7 from 2018. Comparatively, the most sluggish-feeling part of the laptop is the 60Hz display. Everything else feels fine. Comparable. Laptop-y.
The differences between laptops now and 5 years ago are subtle – finer photolithography processes mean lower power draw which means longer battery life and/or faster charging. Screens are sharper, more responsive, have better color. Little things that make a difference to some and not to others.
Generally speaking, as long as it has a NVMe SSD, it’s modern? maybe?
I had a 2019 MacBook Pro until last year when my work issued me an M2. It's noticeably snappier and its battery life is far better than the 2019's was.
Performance will be significantly better. Power consumption will be way way way better. Integrated graphics (Intel) will be extremely better than 2019. Just check the benchmarks. Your drivers will still be supported for years by all vendors (even on Linux that matters somewhat: although everything is always supported, vendors tend to put most of their resources on the newer stuff).
Also, you'll have USB-C ports, the newer hard drive standards, memory, latest wifi protocols (I don't know if there is one, to be honest), etc etc.
You are off by a couple of years. My seven year old laptop (8th gen Intel) has usb c/thunderbolt ports, more than fast enough nvme ssds, which are easily upgradable, wifi card upgradable (except for whitelist nonsense), a 500nits, 2560xsomething IPS screen.
Performance of my new laptop (amd 7840hs) is better, yes, but it is much, much less significant than you would think. If not for hardware issues, I would not feel any pressure to "upgrade".
My personal laptop is a Dell 7490 running Ubuntu. It's from around 2019 and the cpu is the i7-8650. The ram and nvme card are replaceable so it currently has 64G and 2TB respectively. In this configuration it's very pleasant to use and I see no compelling reason to move to a newer machine. Parts or entire replacements are cheap.
I think if you want to run Windows it might be more painful as the upgrade treadmill might force you to a place where drivers are no longer available.
Battery life is poor compared to a Mac but about average for a PC (I've replaced the battery once so far though).
My "fast" computer uses a 5-year-old Ryzen 5 3600. The laptop I'm using right now is a Lenovo T460 from 2016, with an i7-6600U and 16GB of RAM. It's been perfectly fine for web browsing and some little programming projects (8-bit game system emulators, some reverse-engineering of old DOS stuff).
The 16GB of RAM and the SSD I put in here are what're keeping it usable. That, and I'm not trying to use it for heavy gaming or any giant programming projects.
I'm still using a ThinkPad T560 bought in 2016, with a i7 and 16Gb RAM, running Pop!_OS. It has discrete nvdidia graphics as well as integrated. Battery life is still OK for my needs (I got the larger battery option originally, and I still get about 6-7 hours).
So it works fine for everything I need to do. I sometimes look at new laptop models, but there is nothing much they have that would make any difference to me.
Kinda surprised that no one has pointed out than an I7 is grossly overpowered for "spreadsheets and web apps". Seems better to get something that has long battery life with a CPU that uses less watts.
OP here, my thing was that I would get an i7 in case I need to run a once-in-while resource-hogging app but you have a point there's no need to waste the watts if I don't have to. Also, not being able to run Win11 will mostly kill my future ability to run most of those types of apps. It's something to think about.
FWIW, you might also look into including i5's in your search. Often the only difference between an i5 and an i7 of the same generation is Hyperthreading support.
If you are not doing gaming, there are still things that can make them obsolete. Driving big screens (like multiple 4k screens), hardware acceleration for video playback (hevc/av1 is on recent models only, you need hardware acceleration particularly for 4k playback). Also for laptops that actually travel, TPM is a bit of a must to me. It's bad enough if your laptop is lost or stolen, it's a lot worse if your private data is freely accessible to anyone who finds it. TPM wasn't standard on laptops.
Otherwise agree, my main work computer remains a i7-6700k, plenty of power for anything I don't run on a server, plus low idle usage. Never needed more than 64GB RAM. I have no use for PCIe 4 or 5 speed (any nvme speed over 2GB/s is kind of wasted on me).
[edit] and watch the battery. I had batteries starting to swell after 4-5y on many laptops. You might even want to replace it preventively and while you can still find the model.
> I'm thinking of buying a 5-year-old Dell i7 laptop, which will mostly give me the same speed as the latest model.
Heck, no. Moore's law applies to the doubling of transistors. But efficiency gains are still being had every year.
An i7 mobile chip released 5 years ago would likely be the i7-8750H (high performance). An intel chip released recently would be the 'Raptor Lake' generation - let's say i7-13650HX (also high performance).
The i7-13650HX is at least 50-80% faster (single-core) and over 100% faster in multi-core.
While it is true that an i7 from 5 years ago is probably sufficient for basic tasks, RAM+SSD is perhaps more important than raw CPU performance than anything else these days. If you have at least 8 cores, you'll probably have a good time.
There are 2 big leaps in laptop speed (SSD adoption and ARM CPU)as well as incremental battery improvements and then the ARM lower power/cycle = where we are now.
For most tasks the time used is minimal compared to human reaction time.
Only with computationally intense tasks, video edit, matrixes etc will humans see the difference in minutes/hours where task time can be charted.
I find adding an SSD to an older thinkpad makes it good enough for Word etc. I tolerate the shorter battery life, and mitigate this with new third party battery packs with good reputations at a good price. Very low cost ali-express packs are avoided due to fire risk.
So that 5 year old will serve quite well for you.
Yes you will be fine. Of course benchmarks wise recent laptops will be faster for sure but for regular work a 5 years old laptop is still a beast, especially if you use Linux.
Depends on your need. In general I would say if it has 16G memory then yes. Or can be upgraded to 16G. Likewise on the video card, depends on how Graphic intense. But some, not many, laptops you can change the video card. So a i7 cpu that is 5 yo should be ok. It is the other things, and like dotnet00 said, battery life is likely an issue. In the old days it was easy to replace the battery, I used to keep a charged spare on me when traveling.
Claims of its death have been greatly exaggerated.
>mostly give me the same speed as the latest model. Am I right? Is it worth saving the money? I mostly use spreadsheets and web apps.
Any CPU from the last 10 years can handle Excel perfectly and JavaShit mostly fine. However, RAM could become the chief issue because there's only so much bloated Chrome and JavaShit you can fit in there.
If you can find a laptop with at least 16GB of RAM you will likely be fine.
Linux on a Skylake-era i7-6820HK (quad core, ~3.2ghz) runs modern GNOME or KDE just fine. I had 64gb of ram and had cleaned the guts and installed a slightly bigger/faster NVMe to use in the last year. It runs LibreOffice or GoogleDocs just fine. It's slow to finish big compiles owing to 4 slow cores, but it's responsive even when bazel is doing its best.
The biggest issues I have with my system is that even with a brand new battery, battery life on 45W Skylake portables isn't ideal (this system is nearly 10 years old now), yielding about 2.5 hours with light browsing or terminal work. The 4k IPS screen is also dim-ish, but I remember it being pretty nice for the era in late 2015/2016. Compared to an M3 macbook pro is like the moon compared to the sun. This isn't inherently an issue with the CPU though.
If you leave the laptop plugged in, it's fine compared to a modern machine. Connected to an external display to avoid the dim screen and I'm able to do my programming/administration work just fine. I don't need a ton of cores to run GNOME powering Chrome and Kitty + tmux + ssh.
My portable machine is a Motile M141 with a Ryzen 3 3200U. That's a 2-core 4-thread CPU from 2019. It's pretty smooth for older/less graphically intensive videogames, cloud game streaming, light Python software development in even heavy IDEs like PyCharm, playing around with SDRs in the field, having a few dozen tabs on Firefox, etc. It plays back HD and 4K videos just fine. When the battery was fresh I was getting close to 7.5-8 hours of battery life; after five years of lots of portable use it is more like 5ish hours of battery life.
The only real upgrades I did was bump it to a 16GB stick of RAM and add bump the WiFi to an Intel 6E 210. I'm contemplating getting a new or secondary NVMe for it. The only real complaint I have is it doesn't charge by USB-C.
I haven't been a gamer for about 15 years, so I don't buy new any more. My browsing, server management, and spreadsheet needs are easily served by cheap, second hand i5 8-series systems in handy ultra small form factor boxen.
Lenovo ThinkCentre's and Dell Optiplex types.
I'll probably upgrade to 9- or 10-series in a year or two, depending on what's available for low low prices.
Sure, as long as you're not fantasizing about gaming or training neural nets on it. I've got a relatively old i7 6600u in my current travel laptop and it handles coding while playing YouTube just fine. Before that I ran Linux pretty comfortably on an i5 520m minus the HD video acceleration and 1080p display.
Not sure Windows 11 would run fine on either device, but NixOS sure does.
Depends on what OS you plan on for your daily driver. If you're wedded to Windows and the laptop lacks TPM 2.0, you might face security headaches once Win10 gets mothballed, unless you're willing to handle the hacks for shoehorning Win11 onto it.
My perception is that for consumer hardware raw CPU power stopped mattering some 10 years ago, it seems to me what matters more these days is CPU cache size/latency as well as RAM latency. Is this really the case?
I think lately we have been seen a surge of efficiency cores because of this, turning on all that silicon to do just a little bit of computation and sitting idle is wasteful.
My impression is that this applies to a lot of server infra as well.
First it depends what kind of i7 it is, I have a laptop from 2017 with a budget i7 cpu and it's slow as hell even on basic coding tasks. There's so much variance in i7 cpus that you can't guess from that alone.
And then Moore Law might be close to dead but the performance increase of newer cpus isn't, the new Ryzen are pure magic and a big leap forward.
why does it have to compete? can you get utilization out of it?
my desktop is 12yrs old, i5 quad core. my thinkpad is 9 years old, my macbook is 10yrs old. so yes, a 5 yrs old laptop is more than sufficient for you. I find that for laptops I need 16gb to be happy, and for desktops 32+gb
My laptop is an old high end thinkpad. Every time I look at replacing it, I see very expensive toys that seem like a downgrade in most ways, so I just keep running it. Runs Linux just fine, almost certainly couldn't handle windows anymore.
If you usage is mostly spreadsheets and web apps the 5 year old i7 will be perfectly fine.
I'm currently on a Quad Core Q9650 desktop from only God knows how many years ago, and it works perfectly fine after upgrading to 16Gb RAM and an NVME SSD, with the latter being what a 5 year old i7 may be equipped with.
On a laptop battery life is your main concern and it is something you have to look into.
Some newer peripherals may be a bit of a problem, but if you are mostly on the go you'll be fine.
Nice CPU benchmark for year-on-year performance here: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/year-on-year.html
The data shows that the average laptop CPU in 2024 has 56% better thread performance, and 123% better total performance, compared to the average laptop in 2019.
Laptop thread 2019: 1689 avg. score
Laptop total 2019: 6396 avg. score
Laptop thread 2024: 2643 avg. score
Laptop total 2024: 14288 avg. score
For the specific case, just look up the benchmarks for the CPUs you are comparing.
For me, intel hardware is basically the same: slow, hot and noisy. ARM is fast, cool and quiet.
Once a company stops being cool it dies.
> ARM is fast, cool and quiet.
Macs are fast, cool, and quiet; are there other ARM machines that are fast and not super expensive servers?
(Edit: To be clear, I'm skeptical but also if you know of one I'd be very interested)
I'm kinda psyched about this:
https://system76.com/desktops/thelio-astra
It's an arm64 Linux workstation.
The Ampere CPUs are super interesting, I am a bit sad it is only absolve for OEM customers
I'm using a Lenovo ARM (8 core) ChromeBook on the road. Works very well and only cost a fraction of an Apple MacBook Air.
Is it actually performant? I've got a https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Lenovo_IdeaPad_Flex_3_Chr... that I like - also for on-the-road use, actually - but it's not exactly a powerhouse.
For me it suffices, quickly lookup information that I need and handle urgent emails.
When on the road, I meet with clients, partners and vendors. I don't sit in coffee shops debugging complex apps. That is what my office with desktop computers and servers are for. Whilst traveling I try to address my sleep deficit.
If it can run a Linux shell and launch Docker containers without heating up to 60c, it's got a leg up on my Macbook. That's for sure.
Windows runs on ARM, they have ARM based surfaces now
And they even predate ARM Macs! Even for full fat Windows 10/11.
They predate it, but windows RT was essentially unusable. Windows on ARM has only become mostly usable with the introduction of the Snapdragon Elite CPUs this year
It’s not just CPU either!
The GPU and other I/O makes a noticeable difference to quality of life IMHO.
Performance wise a 5 year old notebook is more than enough given that it has enough RAM and an nvme 4.0 or higher.
What you should keep in mind is the following:
- degrading battery: replacing can get expensive to impossible depending in the model.
- Temperature: old thermal paste may need replacement, Core i7 are getting pretty hot and throttled, maybe an i5 is the better choice
- Display: dead Pixels, degrading colors, lower contrast
- touchpad: smaller, less accurate, no glass
- Connectivity: no Bluetooth 5.0, no wifi ax
I would buy a used one but only because i'm willing to do replacements and repairs. If your time is valuable and you are not an expert, it's probably not worth.
Laptop CPUs run hot, there isn't a lot of room for airflow or cooling. Hardware degrades with time/heat/cycles, so if it was used hard, it might be close to the end of its usable life.
Are there any good companies which sell laptop to rackmount conversion kits (or vendors which offer such)?
This has been a problem for me pretty much every time I've recycled an old laptop. The CPU/mobi/ram still works fine but the cooling screen battery and case are often going after a few years in and out of the backpack.
I'd love to recycle them myself, suppose I could ask the folks at Re:PC next time I do a drop off
Given that you have USB-C /Thunderbolt, you could buy a dock and a notebook stand.
I personally don't like external Docks at all, i prefer displays with integrated usb-c pd docks.
You're mostly right, hard usage may lead to fast degradation, but unfortunately it is hard to tell how a device has been used as long as there are no obvious signs. Especially when there was more than one owner.
It's a bit like buying a used car - if you are not an expert, it's risky, but avoiding obvious red flags 70% of the time you're not getting ripped of and you save a lot of money.
Eh are CPUs really a wear and tear item or even RAM for that matter?
Slightly but this is not a real Problem AS long AS they were not used too heavy under too high temps.
Worth thinking about efficiency/battery life. Might be fine performance wise, but if you tend to need it to last a while unplugged, a more recent laptop will be much better at the same performance level. I had kind of sworn off laptops because last time I had one, the battery life just wasn't useful. But nowadays they're actually good enough to treat as proper portable devices.
This is the real advantage. Any crapbox with 16GB of ram is good enough for most things (unless you work on JVM microservices), the main benefit of the new laptops is the unreal battery life.
That, and USB-C charging is handy if you spend a lot of time on the road.
It's worth it to note: When doing interviews for a new role, the camera quality really does matter.
You can also get a USB webcam for like 15 bucks. Coming from the integrated 720p cam my laptop had, a 15 buck webcam was wonderful.
To whom does it really matter? How do you know?
Thanks for asking. I should have mentioned this is based on anecdotal personal experience. I used to have an ancient laptop with a bad mic and a low res webcam.
I noticed much higher callback rate after upgrading. This is admittedly a small sample size.
In my experience working in a remote team, what matters is the audio. Ideally a headset (so that your voice does not get cut while someone is talking) with a decent mic. Not understanding what the remote person says is very frustrating.
Any webcam does the job as long as you can recognize the person. Anyway most people use this blurry background thingy, I really don't believe that the video quality matters.
I agree with you that if you're doing a lot of remote interviews having a decent camera is worth the investment. I have no doubt that people will subconsciously judge people who have meet through a potato.
In my experience audio is an order of magnitude more important than video.
If you get a laptop with removable batteries, it doesn't really matter. Just carry a backup battery if you need it and you outdo modern laptops with non-removable batteries.
You don’t need to do that anymore!
You can just buy batteries that will do USB-C PD.
Then you get a versatile external battery solution for charging multiple devices!
That's adding more weight to carry around, and anyway, if needed, modern laptops can also use battery banks, which once again puts them ahead. Bonus that since laptops tend to use USB-C nowadays, you get the versatility of being able to use that bank for both phone and laptop.
USB-C is amazing, but my 2019 laptop has it.
Oh man, it really has been 5 years since 2019...
LLOL:D Yeah, the other thing that really helps get nice tech into the hands of cheapskates like me is the truly relentless march of time:P
If it makes you feel any better, this machine replaced my previous daily driver because I realized that the machine I'd been thinking was "surely just like 5 years old right?" was 11 years old.
The laptop I got last year also "replaced" one that was 11 years old, from the awful interval where they had internal batteries and limited ports but custom chargers and almost useless batteries.
Replaced in quotes because for the covid years I used a desktop and didn't have to be able to function outside often enough to bother with a laptop.
Considering that 5 years ago is 2019, I figure that efficiency gains are probably also not as dramatic as I'm imagining.
If you mostly use spreadsheets and web apps, you can safely buy a 10-year-old i5 and you'll be fine.
I regularly sell refurbished i3/i5/i7 machines with first/second/third generation processors to customers for very low prices (think $60 for a laptop that used to cost $800). They work fine. You can check your email, do spreadsheets, use Discord, watch Netflix.
This is an extreme example, of course, but the truth is the idea you don't need something new to do the same things you were doing ten years ago. If your expectations are to do reasonable normal people stuff, you'll have no problem at all.
Minus the caveats others have mentioned about battery life, charging speed, and portability, you'll be fine.
It depends on what you are doing and what compromises you are willing to take. I'm still using my dell M6800 and t430 for work, they are decade old laptops.Ubuntu for Os and it's been working great. It's an i7 system and i work on php projects and sometimes dabble in python and some ml projects. Never ever disaapaointed me. It's been showing it's age when some ml projects throw that the current cuda library is not supported by the nvdia graphics that i currently have.
I buy and sell used laptops and computers parts as my side hustle. There afew points that you should keep in mind, while buying used laptop. 1.Don't buy U variants or any other low power variants of the i7 processor. 2.Don't buy dual core i7 variants. 3.Try to buy 8th gen or above. Better battery life and performance ratio. 4.If you are not everyday carrying or portablity is a must , stay away from slim and designer ones, that do not have adequate cooling. 5.Check if the display is TN or an IPS panel. TN is a straight no no. 6.Do not buy the models that are targeted towards students and home users, buy something that for professional users. They are more durable and tend to last long. Example lenovo T-series, W-series, HP also has some, Dell M-series, Precision-series. 7.Check the number of output ports. 8.Physical condition of the laptop, if it is kept clean or not. The fans might be clogged, hinghes are loose, some keys might not be working. Some usb ports might not be working or loose, etc etc 9.Reapply thermal paste , even if it's running fine. Factory ones dry out quickly, so you will get the chance to clean up the fans as well
My main desktop is running on a 14-15 year old Intel Core i5 750 and I've got 20-30 google chrome windows open each with about 100 tabs (sorry I know... I'll clean them up eventually) and I photoshop all the time and multi-task with excel spreadsheets and VPNs and Thunderbird email client with 10-20 accounts, etc... And my numerous laptops are running on 10 year old processors just fine. I've got a 16 core AMD threadripper PC for intense cases but I haven't powered it on in months.
It depends on WHAT you are using them for. Generally the public has reached a point where we don't need more processing power. Unless you're into gaming, streaming, editing, or a specific CPU intense use case we have enough computing power. The only thing left to do is make them more energy effecient.
I was using a 2018 MacBook Pro with an Intel Core i7 processor and 32 GB RAM as my daily-driving laptop at work from early 2019 until this summer when I resigned and thus turned in the laptop. I had no performance issues with the laptop at all, and I still wouldn't have an issue using it as my daily driver today.
The more pressing matter is the amount of RAM the laptop has, especially given that many laptops have soldered RAM. I have a Surface 7 Pro (released in late 2019) with a Core i5 processor and 8GB of RAM that performs quite fine for Web browsing, Microsoft Office, and some programming. I don't do anything heavy-duty on my Surface Pro, though; I have more powerful machines with much more RAM for that.
IIRC the limiting factor for late Intel Macs was cooling. It would frequently throttle the CPU down to 20% to cool it down.
And even if the numbers are great on a sunny day (or rather a cool day, to fix this I would have to sit with it in an open window), this is a real performance sink.
I’m using a 2018 MacBook Pro with 16gb RAM and just sent a ticket for an upgrade. I run a lot of docker containers and between that, jet brains IDEs, multiple browser, etc it’s pretty slow.
Check out 'refurbished' ThinkPads when trying to get a deal on laptops. Many are off lease business machines that were lightly used, best value for the money imo.
What you described sounds fine also.
Highly recommend this: you can hit 50% to 70% discount from original price, plus contribute to reducing e-waste.
I've been using a third-hand T480 for many (5? 7? Can't even remember anymore) years now, and it's probably the best Linux experience anyone can hope for. Performance vs. efficiency is crazy - easily hitting 20 hours, screen-on battery life after all this time and many full discharges.
That battery performance really surprising me. My T14 running debian averages ~5-6 hours of coding + browsing. Did you do anything fancy to get those sorts of results.
Let's say 60% single thread improvement and double in multi thread in the last five years. https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/8244301?baselin...
It's true that performance was already good enough in many apps, so better than good enough might not be noticeable.
You’ll probably be fine!
As an axis of comparison, I work on a really snappy and fast 5800X3D desktop with a couple of 180Hz monitors. My laptop is a 15" Macbook Pro i7 from 2018. Comparatively, the most sluggish-feeling part of the laptop is the 60Hz display. Everything else feels fine. Comparable. Laptop-y.
The differences between laptops now and 5 years ago are subtle – finer photolithography processes mean lower power draw which means longer battery life and/or faster charging. Screens are sharper, more responsive, have better color. Little things that make a difference to some and not to others.
Generally speaking, as long as it has a NVMe SSD, it’s modern? maybe?
I had a 2019 MacBook Pro until last year when my work issued me an M2. It's noticeably snappier and its battery life is far better than the 2019's was.
I don’t disagree! I’d much prefer an M-something mac!
Posed as a question of workability, the Intel macs are still on the table imo / ime.
Performance difference between the slowest [0] and fastest [1] "i7" processors is ~100x so it's best to specify the model.
I suggest >9000 passmark score like the 10th gen i7-10710U [2] or newer, or earlier if it is a higher power chip.
[0]https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-2630U...
[1]https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-14700...
[2]https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i...
Performance will be significantly better. Power consumption will be way way way better. Integrated graphics (Intel) will be extremely better than 2019. Just check the benchmarks. Your drivers will still be supported for years by all vendors (even on Linux that matters somewhat: although everything is always supported, vendors tend to put most of their resources on the newer stuff).
Also, you'll have USB-C ports, the newer hard drive standards, memory, latest wifi protocols (I don't know if there is one, to be honest), etc etc.
You are off by a couple of years. My seven year old laptop (8th gen Intel) has usb c/thunderbolt ports, more than fast enough nvme ssds, which are easily upgradable, wifi card upgradable (except for whitelist nonsense), a 500nits, 2560xsomething IPS screen.
Performance of my new laptop (amd 7840hs) is better, yes, but it is much, much less significant than you would think. If not for hardware issues, I would not feel any pressure to "upgrade".
My personal laptop is a Dell 7490 running Ubuntu. It's from around 2019 and the cpu is the i7-8650. The ram and nvme card are replaceable so it currently has 64G and 2TB respectively. In this configuration it's very pleasant to use and I see no compelling reason to move to a newer machine. Parts or entire replacements are cheap.
I think if you want to run Windows it might be more painful as the upgrade treadmill might force you to a place where drivers are no longer available.
Battery life is poor compared to a Mac but about average for a PC (I've replaced the battery once so far though).
My "fast" computer uses a 5-year-old Ryzen 5 3600. The laptop I'm using right now is a Lenovo T460 from 2016, with an i7-6600U and 16GB of RAM. It's been perfectly fine for web browsing and some little programming projects (8-bit game system emulators, some reverse-engineering of old DOS stuff).
The 16GB of RAM and the SSD I put in here are what're keeping it usable. That, and I'm not trying to use it for heavy gaming or any giant programming projects.
I'm still using a ThinkPad T560 bought in 2016, with a i7 and 16Gb RAM, running Pop!_OS. It has discrete nvdidia graphics as well as integrated. Battery life is still OK for my needs (I got the larger battery option originally, and I still get about 6-7 hours).
So it works fine for everything I need to do. I sometimes look at new laptop models, but there is nothing much they have that would make any difference to me.
Kinda surprised that no one has pointed out than an I7 is grossly overpowered for "spreadsheets and web apps". Seems better to get something that has long battery life with a CPU that uses less watts.
Only half joking: "web apps" include ElectronJS stuff like Slack, that are not exactly lightweight.
OP here, my thing was that I would get an i7 in case I need to run a once-in-while resource-hogging app but you have a point there's no need to waste the watts if I don't have to. Also, not being able to run Win11 will mostly kill my future ability to run most of those types of apps. It's something to think about.
FWIW, you might also look into including i5's in your search. Often the only difference between an i5 and an i7 of the same generation is Hyperthreading support.
exactly, the total lifetime cost of operation for an old i7 may be much higher, depending on the cost of your electricity
Everything local on my 2015 laptop is fine, but the web, it's super laggy.
If you are not doing gaming, there are still things that can make them obsolete. Driving big screens (like multiple 4k screens), hardware acceleration for video playback (hevc/av1 is on recent models only, you need hardware acceleration particularly for 4k playback). Also for laptops that actually travel, TPM is a bit of a must to me. It's bad enough if your laptop is lost or stolen, it's a lot worse if your private data is freely accessible to anyone who finds it. TPM wasn't standard on laptops.
Otherwise agree, my main work computer remains a i7-6700k, plenty of power for anything I don't run on a server, plus low idle usage. Never needed more than 64GB RAM. I have no use for PCIe 4 or 5 speed (any nvme speed over 2GB/s is kind of wasted on me).
[edit] and watch the battery. I had batteries starting to swell after 4-5y on many laptops. You might even want to replace it preventively and while you can still find the model.
> I'm thinking of buying a 5-year-old Dell i7 laptop, which will mostly give me the same speed as the latest model.
Heck, no. Moore's law applies to the doubling of transistors. But efficiency gains are still being had every year.
An i7 mobile chip released 5 years ago would likely be the i7-8750H (high performance). An intel chip released recently would be the 'Raptor Lake' generation - let's say i7-13650HX (also high performance).
The i7-13650HX is at least 50-80% faster (single-core) and over 100% faster in multi-core.
While it is true that an i7 from 5 years ago is probably sufficient for basic tasks, RAM+SSD is perhaps more important than raw CPU performance than anything else these days. If you have at least 8 cores, you'll probably have a good time.
There are 2 big leaps in laptop speed (SSD adoption and ARM CPU)as well as incremental battery improvements and then the ARM lower power/cycle = where we are now. For most tasks the time used is minimal compared to human reaction time. Only with computationally intense tasks, video edit, matrixes etc will humans see the difference in minutes/hours where task time can be charted. I find adding an SSD to an older thinkpad makes it good enough for Word etc. I tolerate the shorter battery life, and mitigate this with new third party battery packs with good reputations at a good price. Very low cost ali-express packs are avoided due to fire risk. So that 5 year old will serve quite well for you.
Yes you will be fine. Of course benchmarks wise recent laptops will be faster for sure but for regular work a 5 years old laptop is still a beast, especially if you use Linux.
Depends on your need. In general I would say if it has 16G memory then yes. Or can be upgraded to 16G. Likewise on the video card, depends on how Graphic intense. But some, not many, laptops you can change the video card. So a i7 cpu that is 5 yo should be ok. It is the other things, and like dotnet00 said, battery life is likely an issue. In the old days it was easy to replace the battery, I used to keep a charged spare on me when traveling.
>Moore's Law is mostly dead
Claims of its death have been greatly exaggerated.
>mostly give me the same speed as the latest model. Am I right? Is it worth saving the money? I mostly use spreadsheets and web apps.
Any CPU from the last 10 years can handle Excel perfectly and JavaShit mostly fine. However, RAM could become the chief issue because there's only so much bloated Chrome and JavaShit you can fit in there.
If you can find a laptop with at least 16GB of RAM you will likely be fine.
A top-end CPU from 10 years ago... sure. But not an intel celeron or i3... You need at least 6-8 cores minimum for a smooth experience these days.
Linux on a Skylake-era i7-6820HK (quad core, ~3.2ghz) runs modern GNOME or KDE just fine. I had 64gb of ram and had cleaned the guts and installed a slightly bigger/faster NVMe to use in the last year. It runs LibreOffice or GoogleDocs just fine. It's slow to finish big compiles owing to 4 slow cores, but it's responsive even when bazel is doing its best.
The biggest issues I have with my system is that even with a brand new battery, battery life on 45W Skylake portables isn't ideal (this system is nearly 10 years old now), yielding about 2.5 hours with light browsing or terminal work. The 4k IPS screen is also dim-ish, but I remember it being pretty nice for the era in late 2015/2016. Compared to an M3 macbook pro is like the moon compared to the sun. This isn't inherently an issue with the CPU though.
If you leave the laptop plugged in, it's fine compared to a modern machine. Connected to an external display to avoid the dim screen and I'm able to do my programming/administration work just fine. I don't need a ton of cores to run GNOME powering Chrome and Kitty + tmux + ssh.
My portable machine is a Motile M141 with a Ryzen 3 3200U. That's a 2-core 4-thread CPU from 2019. It's pretty smooth for older/less graphically intensive videogames, cloud game streaming, light Python software development in even heavy IDEs like PyCharm, playing around with SDRs in the field, having a few dozen tabs on Firefox, etc. It plays back HD and 4K videos just fine. When the battery was fresh I was getting close to 7.5-8 hours of battery life; after five years of lots of portable use it is more like 5ish hours of battery life.
The only real upgrades I did was bump it to a 16GB stick of RAM and add bump the WiFi to an Intel 6E 210. I'm contemplating getting a new or secondary NVMe for it. The only real complaint I have is it doesn't charge by USB-C.
> Any CPU from the last 10 years can handle Excel perfectly and JavaShit mostly fine.
Thank you for the new word :). TIL JavaShit
In terms of performance defined on passmark, than probably not with rank and or power efficiency.
However, given most mobile platforms will heavily throttle the CPU on battery, than the answer may be more complicated.
CPU choices became good enough for most use-cases years ago, and only the GPU and installed RAM bumps the capability these days.
For example: A slower 24 core i7 CPU with 64GB ddr4 and rtx4070 on laptops will perform a little better than an older platform. =)
I haven't been a gamer for about 15 years, so I don't buy new any more. My browsing, server management, and spreadsheet needs are easily served by cheap, second hand i5 8-series systems in handy ultra small form factor boxen.
Lenovo ThinkCentre's and Dell Optiplex types.
I'll probably upgrade to 9- or 10-series in a year or two, depending on what's available for low low prices.
Sure, as long as you're not fantasizing about gaming or training neural nets on it. I've got a relatively old i7 6600u in my current travel laptop and it handles coding while playing YouTube just fine. Before that I ran Linux pretty comfortably on an i5 520m minus the HD video acceleration and 1080p display.
Not sure Windows 11 would run fine on either device, but NixOS sure does.
A $200 mini-pc will do spreadsheets and web apps without a hitch. They'll probably be rocking a 4 core Celeron or something.
Depends on what OS you plan on for your daily driver. If you're wedded to Windows and the laptop lacks TPM 2.0, you might face security headaches once Win10 gets mothballed, unless you're willing to handle the hacks for shoehorning Win11 onto it.
My perception is that for consumer hardware raw CPU power stopped mattering some 10 years ago, it seems to me what matters more these days is CPU cache size/latency as well as RAM latency. Is this really the case?
I think lately we have been seen a surge of efficiency cores because of this, turning on all that silicon to do just a little bit of computation and sitting idle is wasteful.
My impression is that this applies to a lot of server infra as well.
First it depends what kind of i7 it is, I have a laptop from 2017 with a budget i7 cpu and it's slow as hell even on basic coding tasks. There's so much variance in i7 cpus that you can't guess from that alone.
And then Moore Law might be close to dead but the performance increase of newer cpus isn't, the new Ryzen are pure magic and a big leap forward.
Still rocking a Thinkpad t450 from 2015. Aside from one or two dead keys it works great. 12gb ram is plenty for a modern Linux installation.
why does it have to compete? can you get utilization out of it? my desktop is 12yrs old, i5 quad core. my thinkpad is 9 years old, my macbook is 10yrs old. so yes, a 5 yrs old laptop is more than sufficient for you. I find that for laptops I need 16gb to be happy, and for desktops 32+gb
My laptop is an old high end thinkpad. Every time I look at replacing it, I see very expensive toys that seem like a downgrade in most ways, so I just keep running it. Runs Linux just fine, almost certainly couldn't handle windows anymore.
Media heavy web browsing frequently brings my comparable laptop to a crawl.
Get a ~1yo off lease Dell.
It'll run just fine but it may gently roast your crotch if you use it on your lap.
I use a 2012 i5 laptop for your usecase.
But it suffers a bit with extremely heavy simulations in Excel.
I'm using a 5 year old 8th gen i5. Works perfectly fine for me. I run linux
If you usage is mostly spreadsheets and web apps the 5 year old i7 will be perfectly fine.
I'm currently on a Quad Core Q9650 desktop from only God knows how many years ago, and it works perfectly fine after upgrading to 16Gb RAM and an NVME SSD, with the latter being what a 5 year old i7 may be equipped with.
On a laptop battery life is your main concern and it is something you have to look into.
Some newer peripherals may be a bit of a problem, but if you are mostly on the go you'll be fine.
I still use a 13 year old thinkpad sometimes and it's fast enough for regular laptop needs. I'm not running any games on it but it doesn't need to