I came to a rather huge, albeit anticlimactic, decision today.
I will not buy a new laptop!!
Crazy huh?
Basically, I dropped an entire cup of tea on my current one, and I assumed it was doomed, but thankfully my tea had no sugar in, and the laptop is still chugging along 2 weeks or so later. There's a replacement keyboard online pretty cheap if all else fails.
And THAT is the beauty of this beast that I need to appreciate. The fact that almost everything can be switched out. This old generation of laptop, and this brand, is particularly modular in that way, something that was standard across most laptops for a while except Macbooks.
With the new AI technology being forced upon us in the new generation of laptops, this comes with a massive downfall of everything being integrated and soldered in. In the laptop I was looking at buying, it topped out at 32GB of RAM, that can never be upgraded!
For that, each model I looked for which I felt was even a slightly significant step forward in the last 5 years are going for a base price of over $3,000, and topping off at over $5,000.
It's absurd. And all so I can play games with 200fps compared to 60fps even though I can't tell the difference and I don't even play games more than a couple of times a year now. Just... unnecessary.
So yeah, I just don't see the point in upgrading.
So, I won't.
Well, I will, but I'll be upgrading my current laptop
For my music production work, the more RAM the better. My current ancient laptop is on a paltry 16GB, fine for small projects most days, but it already hits the limit on occasion.
To fix this, I have quadrupled my Memory at a cost of about $50!! 64GB!!
My WiFi card can also be upgraded to the latest generation, allowing greater speed, stability and wall penetration. That'll arrive tomorrow.
My SSD's are already pretty decent at 2.5TB, but I might boost that to 4TB.
My battery is still going strong but again, very cheap to replace here in China if needed.
The only thing I want and can't get is the bottom chassis panel which has suffered a lot of wear and tear over the years. I guess they've all been dumped in a landfill by now. One thing I've solved for free is replacing the rubber foot grips by borrowing the school's art department GLUE GUN, and I glued on new feet (the glue itself being super grippy and rubbery).
Dunno how long that will last but damn, it works a charm (doesn't look pretty but who's looking)
Accepting one's Lot in Life
Ultimately, I'm approaching 40. I have a ps5 and I haven't even turned it on in months. Since Elden Ring pretty much. I'm just not a gamer as much as I was and I never will be. I have zero usage for the multi-billion dollar NVIDIA industry that's pushing to the extremes. I've changed, and times are changing too. They no longer market things to me. The weird outskirts of the market are where I'm at.
To be honest, not many people in this world need these high end laptops beyond showing off. Yes, there's a niche audience who needs an absolute beast of a laptop to heavy duty game while also on the bus, or they might need incredible screens with visuals indistinguishable from the eyes of Gods for their professional artwork.
But for 99% of us... nah.
I reckon this lappy will serve me another 5 years. Hopefully 15. Nothing in the future inspires me:
- Holographic video calls? Meh
- 24 hour battery life? Why?
- USB 5 transferring 100 petabytes per second? What, like the 400 million movies I need to transfer back and forth every day? Gimme a break.
- 4K webcam? I used a webcam to teach during the pandemic for about a week. That's it. Unnecessary.
Now that my new old people mindset has saved me $3,000, what else can I apply this mindset to...
I feel you, fellow human. I made changed the CMOS batteries in both my wife and mine's desktop computers. I don't plan to upgrade either machine until at least 2029. If they're still going then, I'll let the run into the ground.
We've both got 64GB of RAM. We've both primarily switched to runing Linux distributions (Bazzite) for our gaming, and it has better performance in many games than Windows 10, or 11. I still dual boot, begrudgingly, but only for Photoshop and a bit of PowerBI.
I too have arrived at the point where I feel like my current level of tech is "enough", and anything more won't actually help me be more productive, happier, or wealthier.
Instead, like a grumpy old man looking through his collection of bolts and screws in his shed, I want to keep my "tractors" going for as long as possible.
I guess there's a certain age where these longevity projects become universally appealing. Life slows down while time speeds up so we want to make the most of what we have rather than constantly switching things out? I dunno. But I'm certainly finding myself fantasize about having a shed with a bunch of tools I can't use but come in handy one day for some obscure repair job lol.
The Clock of the Long Now is such an interesting thingy-ma-doo. I read a book on it. Some folk wanting to build a massive, mechanical clock in a cave in a really geologically stable area so that it records our definition of time ... mechanically.
It seems like "fun", but uuuuh, maybe you can go help them?
That's pretty cool! I'd much rather be involved in the chord change of John Cage's musical number 'As Slow As Possible', which is currently being played in a small village in Germany for the next 600 years. Each chord change is met with crowds of cheering fans who gather for the momentous occasion lol.
Man, imagine going from A, to D, but hitting D# by mistake. Imagine the shame! You'd have to correct for it by the time you hit E for the next progression...
Haha, do they have to correct it at the same speed? Interesting
Also, that sounds incredibly dull, a 600 year long musical number. I demand (when you have the time) .. to feature a post on it, so we might learn about music and 600 years.
Sure! It might take me a while to write it though. In the spirit of the matter ^__^
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