thinking about how foreign the concept of an "upgrade cycle" is to me.

[whitequark@social.treehouse.systems]

thinking about how foreign the concept of an "upgrade cycle" is to me. i use devices until one of the following happens:

1. i outgrow their capacity
2. they break and i cannot repair them any more
3. it is impossible to get software/firmware updates that work with it... plus a few years usually

(mostly a mix of 2 and 3 depending on the device)

[whitequark@social.treehouse.systems]

i anticipate having

\4. it is economically unjustifiable to run them any more

in a while but not with my current setup

[whitequark@social.treehouse.systems]

when i say "they break and i cannot repair them" what i mean is "the price of board level repair exceeds the cost of a new device / my skill is insufficient / it is literally impossible to get parts anymore". i can do, and do, board level repair on anything i own if i have to

[datenwolf@chaos.social]

@whitequark

Same here. I only recently upgraded my PC so that I could implement features depending on resizable-BAR mapping of GPU memory, and support for RDNA4 architectures.

If not for that, I'd probably have kept with that Xeon E5-1620 in an X99 board for another 10 years, or so (it's been relegated to a NAS system now).

[henearxn@chaos.social]

@whitequark I'd have said that is an upgrade cycle. maybe not the one the manufacturer wants you to have, but still one. Does that word imply something different for you?

[r@glauca.space]

@whitequark afaik it's "mostly" hyperscalers that are the ones likely to run into this (especially in relation to power usage)

[whitequark@social.treehouse.systems]

@r no there are deffo server motherboards you can't reasonably run anymore as a home warrior

[whitequark@social.treehouse.systems]

@HeNeArXn a scheduled/planned one, yeah

[whitequark@social.treehouse.systems]

@HeNeArXn like how carriers in the US do with phones

[follpvosten@karp.lol]

@whitequark I aspire to be like this. though I have been thinking about permacomputing more (using that as an argument to e.g. use an old laptop hard drive I have instead of getting a new SATA SSD after my last one broke), and I’ve always preferred to buy used, so that’s something…

[henearxn@chaos.social]

@whitequark ah okay. I keep forgetting that's a thing (the regular phone plan replacements)

[whitequark@social.treehouse.systems]

@follpvosten i've flip-flopped on buying used

when i was younger it felt nice to get a device that was manufactured 'just for me'. nowadays that has long faded so i choose used because it's cheaper and in many ways more efficient; phones that are 1-2 versions behind can still be in very good condition while also being so much cheaper it's basically unjustifiable to get a flagship one

(especially if one is willing to replace the battery, like i am)

[whitequark@social.treehouse.systems]

@follpvosten plus some of the tech that i still like and which still works fine (like my current laptop) hasn't been manufactured 'new' for years

[snowfox@tech.lgbt]

@whitequark Many businesses seem to do an anticipatory (1): "The average software (mainly websites) you're expected to use doubles in compute requirements every 3 years."

I also see "this one feature is flaky so I guess I need an entire new computer" a lot and it's tiring, but I also don't want to play tech support for people I'm not good friends with.

[mnf@mastodon.social]

@whitequark My Pixel 4 basically works like it did on day one except for battery life. Sometimes I just go to the Google store to see if it has been dropped from the trade-in program. 😁

[claudius@darmstadt.social]

@whitequark I'm going to replace a 0402 fuse for the backlight of a thinkpad in a few days. First time that I'm doing something this advanced in terms of repair. Wish me luck!

[claudius@darmstadt.social]

@whitequark I did swap out plenty of THT capacitors in various devices. In fact I'm running a Samsung 245B screen *right now* that now runs longer post-repair than it has run before the repair :-D

[mrdos@hachyderm.io]

@whitequark @follpvosten Optimistically, it sounds like we're seeing tech mature like vehicles. Thank goodness for the suckers who can't fathom buying a used car to keep new-ish cars flowing into the used car ecosystem. Same for tech. Just wish both groups would stop overvaluing their property when they put it on the resale market.

[follpvosten@karp.lol]

@whitequark my current de-facto main laptop is kind of a special case because when I learned that someone made a laptop that walks like a netbook and quacks like a netbook with decent specs and modern hardware in 2023, I just had to get that because it had a pink version and I love small cute things

...like my current phone, which is an iphone se from 2022 that I bought used last year :)

[mupuf@social.treehouse.systems]

@whitequark What? People don't repurpose their old computers for CI?

My 12 years old desktop computer (i7 4790) is there, from 2 upgrades ago. So is my previous PC and some friend's old test machine 🤣

The steam decks are pre-production units from me and my colleagues. Only the NUCs and SBCs were somewhat bought for the purpose.

Hopefully, #ci_tron will enable more devs to share their old machines with the world for Linux testing, thus keeping it working for longer.