In the US the manufacturers are required to provide spare parts for 10 years. So I guess it's how you define "old", though I don't consider a 10-year old car as old anymore. In practice, parts are usually available for longer because the manufacturers will make more than they think they need for a 10-year supply, and the simple fact that parts are shared between models and model years.
Fun fact: Supposedly not wanting to support this 10 year requirement is one of the reasons GM recalled and crushed all the EV1's.
Customizatizeable Start Menu? Windows 10 has the most inflexible start menu of any modern Windows, unless you want to count Windows 8 which doesn't actually have a Start Menu. The last version of Windows with a start menu you can really customize is Windows 7.
What more common and just as annoying is when you're typing and a dialog box pops up and steals focus, and you inadvertently select some option because you're still typing and you have no idea what you just did.
Also, when you go to click on something on a webpage that's still loading, and the browser decides to redraw the page at that very instant, and you click on something else because the thing now is to make the entire webpage a clickable element for some stupid reason.
The only real performance increases as i7's go was from the first generation to the second generation. Otherwise, the only way they've made them significantly faster is piling on the cores. Going from a quad-core Sandy Bridge (2nd generation) to a current quad-core i7 gets you maybe a 50% boost in performance. It's just not worth it, unless you're willing to pay for the 6-core and 8-core versions, and even then that only matters if whatever you're doing can take advantage of the cores as the single thread performance isn't that much improved.
My laptop is that old. Granted, I only use it when I need something portable, but when I do all I've got is a first-gen Core 2 processor and 3GB of ram, though the SSD helps a lot. Otherwise, I'm using my desktop, which is "only" five years old now, with no plans on replacing that anytime soon.
A modern Thinkpad chiclet keyboard may be one of the better chiclet keyboards out there, but it's terrible even compared to cheap membrane keyboards like the Microsoft Wired 200 which is a pretty typical $15 desktop keyboard, and ditto for a real mechanical keyboard. It's also rubbish compared to the keyboard on my R-series (what was the low-end Thinkpad from 2006). I assume a big part of it is the drive to ridiculously thin laptops. A chiclet keyboard probably lets them shave off 0.5 mm, and making it crappy probably another 0.2 mm or something like that.
I'm just hoping the Thinkpad Retro that supposedly is coming out later this year really has a "retro" keyboard. In which case I'll almost certainly buy one because decent laptops with a good keyboard is otherwise almost impossible to find (and that MSI GT83 is ridiculous).
A lot of that has to do with the gearing. Most cars now, if they have a manual version, the manual version is geared shorter than the automatic. I'm guessing this is to make the manual version more fun or sporty or something like that, but the end result is that when you are cruising on the highway the engine is spinning at a higher RPM in the manual than in the automatic and the mileage suffers as a consequence. That's also why when you compare the mileages it's the highway mileage where the manual takes the hit, whereas the city mileage is similar or the manual may still have an edge.
I have to agree. I had some classes like that in college, and once you got past about an hour and 15 minutes in a lecture it was hard to keep focus. Meeting four times a week for a hour was much better than the classes that met twice a week for two hours because you had more time for the information to soak in. This was for lectures, labs that went for a couple of hours weren't as grueling.
Of course, back then almost nobody had a laptop, if you did there was no wi-fi, and if you wanted it last through a 2-hour lecture you would most likely need a spare battery.
In my closet I have what must be one of the first Pentium II boards, a Tyan S1680 from 1997, with a 300 Mhz PII processor, and is populated with eight 32MB 72-pin SIMMs for a total of 512MB. Last I tried, it did work, though it's little more than a curiosity now. But that had to have cost someone a small fortune back in 1997, only to be eclipsed by commonly available hardware in about 2 years.
You don't have 8 years of uptime with 2 restarts along the way, though if you really only restarted it twice in 8 years that means you had at least 2.66 years uptime which is pretty impressive as Windows XP goes. I never really got XP (or 2000) to last much longer than 120 days, which iI repeated on multiple installations on multiple pieces of hardware. I've seen NT4 make it close to a year, and my personal best was a Vista(!) system that made it all the way to 497 days, which you might notice is 49.7 days multiplied by 10. Vista and Windows 7 have (had?) a bug in their networking stack that kills the networking after 497 days but doesn't actually take down the OS. You would think that kind of uptime would also be possible for Windows 7, but I've found Windows 7 to be too unstable to last more than a month or two. You can forget about Windows 10, though Windows 8 might be possible as it's really much improved over Windows 7 except for the whole UI thing.
Of course, my Linux computers will plug along until either I reboot them for some reason, a hardware failure happens, or the power goes out. I usually get a good power outage here about once a year that lasts several hours, which keeps me from usually getting more than about 300-400 days or so. As a matter of fact I can tell you it's been 279 day 5 hours, and 40 minutes since the last one.
The biggest problem is that you get some junior senator and former community organizer that comes out of nowhere and knocks your chosen candidate out of the primaries. Granted, Obama turned out just fine for the elites in the end, but they weren't going to have a repeat of that again. Hence in 2016 they decided "it's her turn".
Cash for Clunkers was a backdoor bailout to the auto industry, with a whole lot of green-washing to try to sell it despite most environmentalists being at best skeptical and many were completely disgusted by the waste. It was entirely pointless to destroy most of those vehicles when comparable vehicles were still being sold new which got basically the same or only slightly better mileage.
The fact that the vehicles traded in tended to be larger family vehicles hurt the poor that depend on vehicles like those becoming available on the second-hand market. Also, by requiring that a new vehicle be purchased, the true clunkers leaking oil and blowing smoke that really need to be taken off the road stayed on the road because they are driven by people who could not afford a new vehicle, even with the rebate. That's why the vehicles traded in tended were usually older but perfectly serviceable vehicles, not actual clunkers.
Another huge flaw is that the replacement vehicle didn't even have to be efficient to qualify for the rebate. The most popular trade in the program was to trade in a Ford F150 to be destroyed, only to be replaced with.... a new Ford F150. In many ways the program was just a bailout of people who bought into the whole SUV/Truck craze - people who had done the right thing and bought a fuel efficient vehicle in the first place got nothing, as usual.
With Europe, the average age is not going to get that high since used cars tend to get mass-exported to Eastern Europe, Africa, and other countries, which is why the average age there is so high since there aren't actually a lot of new cars actually sold in some of those places. That's also why you'll notice that certain popular models seem to almost completely disappear by the time they reach about 10 years old, when they were very common just a few years prior.
The US also exports some used cars, mostly to Latin America, but not nearly to the extent that happens in Europe, which is one reason why the average age in the US is higher.
Tesla really brought this upon themselves. They are the ones that decided to throw a temper-tantrum and attack the IIHS simply because they didn't award them a perfect rating. Nevermind that the Model S is still one of the safest cars out there according to the rating the IIHS did give it. I don't see GM, Ford, Chrysler, Audi, BMW, VW, etc. behaving like this when the IIHS gives them a rating they don't like.
My observations are that minivan drivers are some of the worst on the road, usually because they are driven by inattentive and distracted soccer moms who aren't particularly good at driving such a large vehicle in the first place. Though this is changing because minivans aren't the favored mommy-mobiles that they used to be.
I can believe them being safer though, as minivans (especially newer models) have considerable bulk and mass, and since they have a lower center of gravity, they don't have the same roll-over hazard that makes trucks and SUVs unsafe.
The obvious solution to that is to make marriage a requirement for that path, and have them present their wedding license as "proof". (I kid!)
The other thing that would be missing is entrepreneurship. Looks like working for the man is okay, but saying you're going to start your own business doesn't seem like it's going to be accepted.
The only problem I've had with micro USB is the shitty Apple-wannabe cables that lack strain relief, just like the ultra-expensive (and just as shitty) genuine Apple cables. The key is to buy a decent cable, and by decent I mean something from Amazon or Monoprice that's actually designed properly. They'll still only set you back a couple of bucks.
Though I still prefer the simple barrel connector on my Nokia feature phone.
With the X200, you can optionally remove the Intel ME, or just leave it in place. I assume for the price you're paying that they've gone to the trouble to remove the Intel ME. With the X230, you don't have a choice - you must have the Intel ME or it won't boot at all.
I guess it boils down to just how "free" the laptop must be. If you can't accept the ME, in the long run you've now got a bit of a dilemma. You can still get by today with a Core 2 but they aren't getting any faster and you've locked yourself out of anything newer. You might be able to get something more modern by jumping over to AMD, but they've got their own version of the Intel ME in all their chips now so it's same story as with Intel.
The Thinkpads from those generations are good machines. While Lenovo had started mucking around with them, there's still enough of the old IBM genes in them that the keyboards are still very good and overall build quality is far ahead of what you get now. While dated, throw a SSD in and max out the ram and you'll have a machine that'll run your favorite Linux distro* very well and is perfectly capable machine for many use cases (obviously not all). My Thinkpad is even older and except for gaming there really isn't anything I would need it to do that it can't actually do.
Of course, with that said, I don't see any reason to buy a used Thinkpad from them when you can purchase them for a fraction of the cost from other sources.
Nowadays i5's tend to be quad cores without hyperthreading for desktop CPU's, and dual cores with hyperthreading for mobile CPU's. As is typical with Intel there are exceptions. Though back 6-7 years ago the most popular i5 desktop CPUs were the dual cores with hyperthreading, though even back then you could still buy quad core i5's without hyperthreading.
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In the US the manufacturers are required to provide spare parts for 10 years. So I guess it's how you define "old", though I don't consider a 10-year old car as old anymore. In practice, parts are usually available for longer because the manufacturers will make more than they think they need for a 10-year supply, and the simple fact that parts are shared between models and model years.
Fun fact: Supposedly not wanting to support this 10 year requirement is one of the reasons GM recalled and crushed all the EV1's.
Customizatizeable Start Menu? Windows 10 has the most inflexible start menu of any modern Windows, unless you want to count Windows 8 which doesn't actually have a Start Menu. The last version of Windows with a start menu you can really customize is Windows 7.
What would you do with one? They all use BGA packaging.
I'm pretty sure they would be able to "see" your drone with it's giant mirror, using the WWII technology known as "radar".
What more common and just as annoying is when you're typing and a dialog box pops up and steals focus, and you inadvertently select some option because you're still typing and you have no idea what you just did.
Also, when you go to click on something on a webpage that's still loading, and the browser decides to redraw the page at that very instant, and you click on something else because the thing now is to make the entire webpage a clickable element for some stupid reason.
The only real performance increases as i7's go was from the first generation to the second generation. Otherwise, the only way they've made them significantly faster is piling on the cores. Going from a quad-core Sandy Bridge (2nd generation) to a current quad-core i7 gets you maybe a 50% boost in performance. It's just not worth it, unless you're willing to pay for the 6-core and 8-core versions, and even then that only matters if whatever you're doing can take advantage of the cores as the single thread performance isn't that much improved.
My laptop is that old. Granted, I only use it when I need something portable, but when I do all I've got is a first-gen Core 2 processor and 3GB of ram, though the SSD helps a lot. Otherwise, I'm using my desktop, which is "only" five years old now, with no plans on replacing that anytime soon.
A modern Thinkpad chiclet keyboard may be one of the better chiclet keyboards out there, but it's terrible even compared to cheap membrane keyboards like the Microsoft Wired 200 which is a pretty typical $15 desktop keyboard, and ditto for a real mechanical keyboard. It's also rubbish compared to the keyboard on my R-series (what was the low-end Thinkpad from 2006). I assume a big part of it is the drive to ridiculously thin laptops. A chiclet keyboard probably lets them shave off 0.5 mm, and making it crappy probably another 0.2 mm or something like that.
I'm just hoping the Thinkpad Retro that supposedly is coming out later this year really has a "retro" keyboard. In which case I'll almost certainly buy one because decent laptops with a good keyboard is otherwise almost impossible to find (and that MSI GT83 is ridiculous).
Not true at all. The vans are required to have drivers in them.
A lot of that has to do with the gearing. Most cars now, if they have a manual version, the manual version is geared shorter than the automatic. I'm guessing this is to make the manual version more fun or sporty or something like that, but the end result is that when you are cruising on the highway the engine is spinning at a higher RPM in the manual than in the automatic and the mileage suffers as a consequence. That's also why when you compare the mileages it's the highway mileage where the manual takes the hit, whereas the city mileage is similar or the manual may still have an edge.
I have to agree. I had some classes like that in college, and once you got past about an hour and 15 minutes in a lecture it was hard to keep focus. Meeting four times a week for a hour was much better than the classes that met twice a week for two hours because you had more time for the information to soak in. This was for lectures, labs that went for a couple of hours weren't as grueling.
Of course, back then almost nobody had a laptop, if you did there was no wi-fi, and if you wanted it last through a 2-hour lecture you would most likely need a spare battery.
In my closet I have what must be one of the first Pentium II boards, a Tyan S1680 from 1997, with a 300 Mhz PII processor, and is populated with eight 32MB 72-pin SIMMs for a total of 512MB. Last I tried, it did work, though it's little more than a curiosity now. But that had to have cost someone a small fortune back in 1997, only to be eclipsed by commonly available hardware in about 2 years.
You don't have 8 years of uptime with 2 restarts along the way, though if you really only restarted it twice in 8 years that means you had at least 2.66 years uptime which is pretty impressive as Windows XP goes. I never really got XP (or 2000) to last much longer than 120 days, which iI repeated on multiple installations on multiple pieces of hardware. I've seen NT4 make it close to a year, and my personal best was a Vista(!) system that made it all the way to 497 days, which you might notice is 49.7 days multiplied by 10. Vista and Windows 7 have (had?) a bug in their networking stack that kills the networking after 497 days but doesn't actually take down the OS. You would think that kind of uptime would also be possible for Windows 7, but I've found Windows 7 to be too unstable to last more than a month or two. You can forget about Windows 10, though Windows 8 might be possible as it's really much improved over Windows 7 except for the whole UI thing.
Of course, my Linux computers will plug along until either I reboot them for some reason, a hardware failure happens, or the power goes out. I usually get a good power outage here about once a year that lasts several hours, which keeps me from usually getting more than about 300-400 days or so. As a matter of fact I can tell you it's been 279 day 5 hours, and 40 minutes since the last one.
The biggest problem is that you get some junior senator and former community organizer that comes out of nowhere and knocks your chosen candidate out of the primaries. Granted, Obama turned out just fine for the elites in the end, but they weren't going to have a repeat of that again. Hence in 2016 they decided "it's her turn".
Cash for Clunkers was a backdoor bailout to the auto industry, with a whole lot of green-washing to try to sell it despite most environmentalists being at best skeptical and many were completely disgusted by the waste. It was entirely pointless to destroy most of those vehicles when comparable vehicles were still being sold new which got basically the same or only slightly better mileage.
The fact that the vehicles traded in tended to be larger family vehicles hurt the poor that depend on vehicles like those becoming available on the second-hand market. Also, by requiring that a new vehicle be purchased, the true clunkers leaking oil and blowing smoke that really need to be taken off the road stayed on the road because they are driven by people who could not afford a new vehicle, even with the rebate. That's why the vehicles traded in tended were usually older but perfectly serviceable vehicles, not actual clunkers.
Another huge flaw is that the replacement vehicle didn't even have to be efficient to qualify for the rebate. The most popular trade in the program was to trade in a Ford F150 to be destroyed, only to be replaced with.... a new Ford F150. In many ways the program was just a bailout of people who bought into the whole SUV/Truck craze - people who had done the right thing and bought a fuel efficient vehicle in the first place got nothing, as usual.
With Europe, the average age is not going to get that high since used cars tend to get mass-exported to Eastern Europe, Africa, and other countries, which is why the average age there is so high since there aren't actually a lot of new cars actually sold in some of those places. That's also why you'll notice that certain popular models seem to almost completely disappear by the time they reach about 10 years old, when they were very common just a few years prior.
The US also exports some used cars, mostly to Latin America, but not nearly to the extent that happens in Europe, which is one reason why the average age in the US is higher.
Tesla really brought this upon themselves. They are the ones that decided to throw a temper-tantrum and attack the IIHS simply because they didn't award them a perfect rating. Nevermind that the Model S is still one of the safest cars out there according to the rating the IIHS did give it. I don't see GM, Ford, Chrysler, Audi, BMW, VW, etc. behaving like this when the IIHS gives them a rating they don't like.
My observations are that minivan drivers are some of the worst on the road, usually because they are driven by inattentive and distracted soccer moms who aren't particularly good at driving such a large vehicle in the first place. Though this is changing because minivans aren't the favored mommy-mobiles that they used to be.
I can believe them being safer though, as minivans (especially newer models) have considerable bulk and mass, and since they have a lower center of gravity, they don't have the same roll-over hazard that makes trucks and SUVs unsafe.
The obvious solution to that is to make marriage a requirement for that path, and have them present their wedding license as "proof". (I kid!)
The other thing that would be missing is entrepreneurship. Looks like working for the man is okay, but saying you're going to start your own business doesn't seem like it's going to be accepted.
The only problem I've had with micro USB is the shitty Apple-wannabe cables that lack strain relief, just like the ultra-expensive (and just as shitty) genuine Apple cables. The key is to buy a decent cable, and by decent I mean something from Amazon or Monoprice that's actually designed properly. They'll still only set you back a couple of bucks.
Though I still prefer the simple barrel connector on my Nokia feature phone.
With the X200, you can optionally remove the Intel ME, or just leave it in place. I assume for the price you're paying that they've gone to the trouble to remove the Intel ME. With the X230, you don't have a choice - you must have the Intel ME or it won't boot at all.
I guess it boils down to just how "free" the laptop must be. If you can't accept the ME, in the long run you've now got a bit of a dilemma. You can still get by today with a Core 2 but they aren't getting any faster and you've locked yourself out of anything newer. You might be able to get something more modern by jumping over to AMD, but they've got their own version of the Intel ME in all their chips now so it's same story as with Intel.
The Thinkpads from those generations are good machines. While Lenovo had started mucking around with them, there's still enough of the old IBM genes in them that the keyboards are still very good and overall build quality is far ahead of what you get now. While dated, throw a SSD in and max out the ram and you'll have a machine that'll run your favorite Linux distro* very well and is perfectly capable machine for many use cases (obviously not all). My Thinkpad is even older and except for gaming there really isn't anything I would need it to do that it can't actually do.
Of course, with that said, I don't see any reason to buy a used Thinkpad from them when you can purchase them for a fraction of the cost from other sources.
* Or Windows 10, if that's your thing.
It's good for almost everyone who is not a tech giant like Microsoft or Apple.
Nowadays i5's tend to be quad cores without hyperthreading for desktop CPU's, and dual cores with hyperthreading for mobile CPU's. As is typical with Intel there are exceptions. Though back 6-7 years ago the most popular i5 desktop CPUs were the dual cores with hyperthreading, though even back then you could still buy quad core i5's without hyperthreading.
Yeah, but that's back when shit got done, like building railroads through mountain ranges in a year. You couldn't do the same thing today.