rollin with the homies

  • 0 Posts
  • 1 Comment
Joined 10M ago
cake
Cake day: Jan 15, 2024

help-circle
rss

Not specifically waiting on right to repair, but older electronics have four things going for them:

  1. Very well documented: or you can just ignore the pieces that aren’t documented after so many years. This means they tend to work forever with Debian / Slackware / OpenBSD.
  2. Cheap / easy to find parts: the esoteric stuff falls by the wayside over time.
  3. More reliable: by virtue of the stuff that was going to die due to defects, dying in the first 18 months of use; and
  4. Generally easier to work on.

So all of my laptops all cost well over $1000 new (EDIT: I’ve never purchased a laptop new in 25 years of using laptops exclusively). But wait a couple of years and suddenly they’re the price of a couple nice meals. Wait a bit longer and you can do a curbside pickup. And when something breaks, I can fix it myself with cheap replacement parts instead of waiting on warranty repairs. Also, going back to the documented thing – used MacBooks used to be great for Linux, but then the butterfly keyboard and T2 chip became a thing and I know to avoid them because that keyboard was never solved and ended up being replaced after multiple class-action lawsuits.

Time works to our advantage in many ways.