I just purchased a laptop made in 2020 or 2021 to replace my previous laptop that was made in 2012 and I was still using
Fuck you LG, I’m gonna dig an old laptop out of storage this weekend because Fuck You
“Repurposing old laptops is a one-time delay strategy, not a permanent infrastructure model. Take a 4-year-old laptop, for example. This device will have a battery operating at 50% capacity… or worse. Even if it gets updated with a fast, low-resource system designed to run smoothly on older or weaker computers, such as a lightweight Linux OS, that battery will swell, fail, or die completely within 12-24 months.”
jesus, are y’all really dealing with laptops where the battery will swell fail or die after 4 years + 24 months of use? that sounds insane, I have an 8+ year old Dell Inspiron that I hammer every day and whose battery can still hold a charge
I actually did have a laptop battery fail recently – it swelled and the only reason i realized was the charging light switched from steady to blinking rapidly – something it usually does when the battery voltage is critically low.
Old laptops don’t always come with good battery charging software. Ideally you could set the battery to UPS mode and have it sit to 50%.
Funny enough there is a little Bluetooth dongle that can add this capability to usb-c laptops, but the development is now vibe coded and the developer has gone full AI and the quality of the software and customer support has taken a nosedive.
…yeah I have yet to own a battery that lived past 3 years lol tbf I only ever had one swell, but yeah they do not last with me
Damn, guess I’ve reached the ‘back in my day!’ Phase of life, but I’ve definitely had devices last past 3 years
The devices definitely last, I have plenty of decade+ old devices that do still work. The issue is if the battery swells, it takes out the device with it quite often. The one swollen battery was a Blackberry Passport in otherwise perfect condition. The battery swelled, cracked the screen and tore a ribbon cable, this was long after BB went out of business. I’m still sad about it, it was such a cool device.
Regardless of swelling though, once a battery can no longer hold a charge some devices become functionally useless. For example I have a number of old handheld consoles, fortunately batteries are still being produced for them, but once they stop the device will be useless. With how great emulation is and all the new emulation handhelds, I’m really not interested in playing my GBA SP or DSi tethered to a wall outlet.
For laptops in particular yeah they have plenty of uses, especially a “4 year old” laptop, that’s still quite good hardware (unless it’s e-waste at production, like chromebooks with soldered storage and RAM). But it’s not gonna be a laptop anymore, it basically becomes a desktop / server etc.
An LG executive explains why keeping your old laptop is secretly worse than buying a new LG thin client. Also, comparing a laptop charger’s maximum rating with a thin client’s actual power draw is some impressive accounting. Apparently the greenest computer is always the one the author sells.
An LG executive explains …
Pass.
They own the glass!
a new LG thin client
So replace a functional computer with what is basically e-waste out of the gate. Sounds like a plan.
Students at the university where I worked before retirement researched the environmental impact of PCs. Their conclusion: manufacturing is the most important part of the environmental impact. Using a PC consumes electricity, but even when a PC is kept in use for 10 years, the impact of that is still small compared to the impact of manufacturing.
I don’t think that in this regard, there is not much difference between PCs and laptops.
Also, halfway modern devices (last 15 years) have far smaller differences in efficiency than devices from the 10 years prior.
Basically everything with DDR3 RAM, give it a SSD and you’re good.
I was expecting at least a little math in an article making a claim about price differences.
This is disinfornation. Shouldn’t be posted 🤔 Also LG - privacy killers earned boycott, not a spreadind their lies.
LG: by not giving us money you kill kittens! Why are you so brutishly heartless?!
If you have a laptop with powerful hardware and a lot of RAM, you should definitely donate it to Sam Altman and buy a LG thin client so you can buy cloud services. Under absolutely no circumstances should you turn an old laptop into a server and self-host instead of giving your money and data to big tech companies.
wait, this is not !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world?!
EDIT: Why the heck are they talking about hinges, like there is breakthrough research every few years that make any previous hinge obsolete? The only situation where I hated having an old laptop was when I was forced to open a OneNote note inside of Teams on an 8 year old thinkpad with no dedicated GPU. But then again that’s Microsoft writing shitty software and not the laptop being bad…
Obviously old hinges are increasing your cost of owning an old Laptop??!!
PS:
We sold laptops in the early 90’s that had better hinges than most modern laptops.
Our new laptop (notebook) cannot be opened by simply lifting the lid, because the laptop is too light, so it lifts the entire laptop instead of opening. So you have to use 2 hands to open it, one to lift the lid, and the other to hold the laptop down.
It sounds like everything about that article is crap!I 'member when laptops required two hands to open because they had proper locking latches on either side.
Yes and that was actually easier IMO.
Nice try, LG.
One example of this is repurposing old laptops into thin clients. In simple terms, a thin client is a device that runs services and software from a centralized server, allowing users to access their desktop environment from any device with an internet connection.
Since the laptop is now primarily acting as a gateway to cloud-hosted applications, it can appear that the hardware itself no longer needs to be particularly capable. (…) The physical laptop is still at the end of its refresh cycle, and its components are still ageing.
Author: Thomas Epps, IT Product Manager & Cloud Device Business Manager at LG Electronics.
This must be the kind of shit that’s pushed straight down high executives, because no one in their right mind would read a word of this shit and think “OMG HE’S SO FUKKEN RIGHT!!!”
a dedicated thin client delivers both architectural and financial advantages over a 10-year lifecycle, with lower maintenance, reduced energy use and a significantly lower total cost of ownership.
translation: your ownership cost is reduced to zero, because LG owns the glass. Win-win, mr leader!
What a load of crap headline, I simply refuse to read the idiocy in the article leading to such a stupid headline!!
The comments here confirm it. Some commenting it’s the arguments of an LG executive, and others comment it’s simply disinformation, and one comment about old hinges not being a major problem, which apparently the article claims.Now I wonder why anyone would post this crap propaganda article?
