Water is often fine, if dried quickly on a turned-off laptop. It’s the sugared/caffeinated/alcoholic drinks that are the main problem.
Lenovo might be fine… as long as you stay the hell away from the cheaper models. They are not just bad, they are worse than the average mainstream big-co cheap models. If you don’t have the budget for an X* model, just get any random Dell and it will be OK.
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I don’t usually wade into a discussion involving Apple but today I feel that I need to articulate that Apple is dicks. This is not because their technology isn’t waterproof.
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totally a breakup letter
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Like I said, I´m fine with Yosemite as well, the newer El Capitan runs even snappier on my 2010 MBP.
Any resons for the OS9 hate though? Everyone I knew, from sound and video people to designers, back then loved it and wanted to stick with it rather than switch to OSX. OSX slowed down my Computer considerably back then, which was not surprising considering the bloat it brought in comparison to the much leaner OS9.
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Sure. It’s not the nicest-looking typeface ever, but, much like the newer San Franciso, it’s designed to be readable on a screen.
Weird, long rant that simply leaves me wondering where is Roseanne Rosannadanna when we need her. Oh, nevermind!
El Capitan did not include a change in font size from Yosemite. You must have your new Mac set up differently from the old one. I mean, your previous Mac was only from 2014! Maybe the beer is causing more than just hardware failures…
A professional writer who doesn’t back up religiously to at least two external drives? If that’s true, the guy doesn’t deserve to call himself a professional.
Fortunately, I have never gone down the Apple rat-hole (what I meant to type was ‘rabbit-hole’, but sub-consciously, out came a more appropriate colloquialism).
Only recently, I have started to think about upgrading to a better laptop - mainly because some HD video is getting a little shaky and out of sync.
My current machine is a hand-me-down HP NX6120 laptop which has just had its 11th birthday. I classify it as an antique. It is also a but like a ‘grandfather’s axe’, in that it has had a replacement screen, battery, hdd and optical drive. I also replaced the main board at a cost of about 25 euro (actually, twice, but I blame my own rough handling and flexing a board with weak solder on the south bridge chip).
It failed again about 2 years ago and has been running steady ever since I located and replaced a cracked smd capacitor.
It is overclocked, has the max of 2GB RAM and a small SSD. Running Linux Mint qiana, which starts up in about 13 seconds and shuts down in 4. I really can’t complain, since my total spend on this thing is about 160 euros - there were so many made that you can get any part you want.
Everything is there - serial/parallel ports,4xUSB ports,IR port, card reader, LAN, modem, VGA, S-Video, firewire, mic, audio in/out, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth. They really packed it in back in 2005…
I don’t think I can squeeze any more performance out of this thing, but there you go - 11 years of usability is pretty damn good. One day I will upgrade (even though I wont want to).
Finding a replacement for this old beast is going to be difficult. Don’t get me started on cellphones now… I doubt I’ll be able to find anything I like as much as my Nokia E7 (now 5 years old).
Fortunately, we are reaching that point where these devices are almost throw-away affordable. I saw a smartphone for NZ$15 a while back, and the Amazon Fire has just dropped to $40, for example.
Oh yeah, so you paid a boatload of money for your new Apple and you hate it? I have no sympathy.
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There are lots of sites out there which serve as repositories for C64, or Apple II, or TRS-80 original software.
Give me an iOS 5 or 6 repository that lets me legally access those apps as originally released, and I’m a happy camper.
Apple doesn’t have to do one more god damn thing to continue releasing new apps that work on my iPod touch.
Just let me get some of the apps and games I didn’t get back in 2011…
Get something you can root. Then once it reaches the end of its useful life, you can reflash it with something else and use it as e.g. a wall-mounted touchscreen terminal or a smart TV remote.
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It was more than just icons.
and you read like… well. maybe reread the article?
So the solution is disposable hardware, which is doomed to the landfill in 2 years. I’ll take the old way of doing things, tyvm.
I’m sick of companies denying support, not because of outdated specs, but because you need the newest whizbang. My damn phone is 1 year old, and Motorola pulled support on a bunch of their apps, and probably use isn’t going to keep Android updated past 5.0. My first tablet got the same treatment from ASUS; one year then screw you (thanks for the $300 though!).
Your parenthetical on Windows was just wrong. MS is a terrible monolithic company with no respect for their users… But they do realize that it’s your hardware, and you can run whatever the hell you want on it. I haven’t found any older software that won’t run, with a bit of user ingenuity. MS might not help, but at least they don’t impede.
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Are we talking Macintosh or iDevices?
If you compare iDevices to Android devices, pretty awesome. I’m on my third Android device; first one was a Droid X2, second one was a Galaxy Nexus, and currently on a 2014 Moto X.
The first one was a crap device built to look like a much better device (the Droid X). I bought it right after it was released; it got a major update a month later, and then…that was it. To make it “better”, it had a hardware lock on the bootloader, so replacing it with Cyanogenmod was a no-go until someone backported to the Motorola kernel. Thankfully, a year in, my toddler dropped the damn thing. Apple has been a lot less scared about dropping legacy support.
Then the Galaxy Nexus. Unbelievably, it was a better device. At the time I had delusions of developing for Android, plus it had an unlocked bootloader. And hey, it’s a Nexus, so you get 2 years of updates, right? WRONG.
And now the Moto X. I bought it when Motorola mobile was owned by Google. It got a major update shortly after release…and, that’s it. I got bamboozled again. On top of that, I’m hearing some real horror stories about Lenovo tech support, stories from people who send their phones in for repair, and then they never see their phones again. No more Motorola; sadly, outside of Nexus, theyre the closest to plain ol’ Android.
Now on PCs, though…wouldn’t it be neat if you could run old Mac apps from the early 80s? Up until Windows 10, that was a priority. One of the more surreal things I’ve done in the last few years was set up proprietary DOS software on a Windows 7 machine. There was something weird about running software from 1984. Even weirder is that Microsoft made that a priority.
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Apple is the opposite of “disposable hardware”. As I’ve said repeatedly here, my old iPhone 4s is still working great (and running current iOS), my old MacBook Pro lasted for 9 years, and my current work setup is on a 2008 Mac Pro that’s in great shape. If you pour soda on your laptop, yeah, it’s not going to like it. But Apple products are durable and long-lasting.
In what way? My ‘parenthetical’ on Windows references the development nightmare of trying to create software for a platform where a huge number of users are still on XP, 95, or Windows 2000, which is similar to the difficulties in web development for multiple web browsers.
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The average age of automobiles on the road is 6 years. I’m guessing millions of Americans didn’t get your memo…
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Curious, do you discount your own opinion when you use hyperbole?
I’m using a Mac now for work, after using Linux for years. I hate it. It feels even more oppressive than Windows. I should have formatted this machine and installed Ubuntu.
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