Hacker Remix

Ask HN: Can a 5 year old i7 laptop compete with one made today?

17 points by WheelsAtLarge 3 days ago | 57 comments

Moore's Law is mostly dead, so current i7s aren't much faster than the ones made many years ago. I'm thinking of buying a 5-year-old Dell i7 laptop, which will mostly give me the same speed as the latest model. Am I right? Is it worth saving the money? I mostly use spreadsheets and web apps.

pveierland 3 days ago

Nice CPU benchmark for year-on-year performance here: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/year-on-year.html

The data shows that the average laptop CPU in 2024 has 56% better thread performance, and 123% better total performance, compared to the average laptop in 2019.

Laptop thread 2019: 1689 avg. score

Laptop total 2019: 6396 avg. score

Laptop thread 2024: 2643 avg. score

Laptop total 2024: 14288 avg. score

For the specific case, just look up the benchmarks for the CPUs you are comparing.

osigurdson 3 days ago

For me, intel hardware is basically the same: slow, hot and noisy. ARM is fast, cool and quiet.

Once a company stops being cool it dies.

yjftsjthsd-h 3 days ago

> ARM is fast, cool and quiet.

Macs are fast, cool, and quiet; are there other ARM machines that are fast and not super expensive servers?

(Edit: To be clear, I'm skeptical but also if you know of one I'd be very interested)

GianFabien 3 days ago

I'm using a Lenovo ARM (8 core) ChromeBook on the road. Works very well and only cost a fraction of an Apple MacBook Air.

yjftsjthsd-h 3 days ago

Is it actually performant? I've got a https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Lenovo_IdeaPad_Flex_3_Chr... that I like - also for on-the-road use, actually - but it's not exactly a powerhouse.

GianFabien 2 days ago

For me it suffices, quickly lookup information that I need and handle urgent emails.

When on the road, I meet with clients, partners and vendors. I don't sit in coffee shops debugging complex apps. That is what my office with desktop computers and servers are for. Whilst traveling I try to address my sleep deficit.

talldayo 3 days ago

If it can run a Linux shell and launch Docker containers without heating up to 60c, it's got a leg up on my Macbook. That's for sure.

firecall 3 days ago

It’s not just CPU either!

The GPU and other I/O makes a noticeable difference to quality of life IMHO.

dotnet00 3 days ago

Worth thinking about efficiency/battery life. Might be fine performance wise, but if you tend to need it to last a while unplugged, a more recent laptop will be much better at the same performance level. I had kind of sworn off laptops because last time I had one, the battery life just wasn't useful. But nowadays they're actually good enough to treat as proper portable devices.

gardnr 3 days ago

This is the real advantage. Any crapbox with 16GB of ram is good enough for most things (unless you work on JVM microservices), the main benefit of the new laptops is the unreal battery life.

That, and USB-C charging is handy if you spend a lot of time on the road.

gardnr 3 days ago

It's worth it to note: When doing interviews for a new role, the camera quality really does matter.

jolmg 3 days ago

You can also get a USB webcam for like 15 bucks. Coming from the integrated 720p cam my laptop had, a 15 buck webcam was wonderful.

givemeethekeys 3 days ago

To whom does it really matter? How do you know?

gardnr 3 days ago

Thanks for asking. I should have mentioned this is based on anecdotal personal experience. I used to have an ancient laptop with a bad mic and a low res webcam.

I noticed much higher callback rate after upgrading. This is admittedly a small sample size.

palata 4 hours ago

In my experience working in a remote team, what matters is the audio. Ideally a headset (so that your voice does not get cut while someone is talking) with a decent mic. Not understanding what the remote person says is very frustrating.

Any webcam does the job as long as you can recognize the person. Anyway most people use this blurry background thingy, I really don't believe that the video quality matters.

OccamsMirror 3 days ago

I agree with you that if you're doing a lot of remote interviews having a decent camera is worth the investment. I have no doubt that people will subconsciously judge people who have meet through a potato.

nicolaslem 6 hours ago

In my experience audio is an order of magnitude more important than video.

jolmg 3 days ago

If you get a laptop with removable batteries, it doesn't really matter. Just carry a backup battery if you need it and you outdo modern laptops with non-removable batteries.

firecall 3 days ago

You don’t need to do that anymore!

You can just buy batteries that will do USB-C PD.

Then you get a versatile external battery solution for charging multiple devices!

dotnet00 3 days ago

That's adding more weight to carry around, and anyway, if needed, modern laptops can also use battery banks, which once again puts them ahead. Bonus that since laptops tend to use USB-C nowadays, you get the versatility of being able to use that bank for both phone and laptop.

yjftsjthsd-h 3 days ago

USB-C is amazing, but my 2019 laptop has it.

dotnet00 3 days ago

Oh man, it really has been 5 years since 2019...

yjftsjthsd-h 3 days ago

LLOL:D Yeah, the other thing that really helps get nice tech into the hands of cheapskates like me is the truly relentless march of time:P

If it makes you feel any better, this machine replaced my previous daily driver because I realized that the machine I'd been thinking was "surely just like 5 years old right?" was 11 years old.

dotnet00 3 days ago

The laptop I got last year also "replaced" one that was 11 years old, from the awful interval where they had internal batteries and limited ports but custom chargers and almost useless batteries.

Replaced in quotes because for the covid years I used a desktop and didn't have to be able to function outside often enough to bother with a laptop.

Considering that 5 years ago is 2019, I figure that efficiency gains are probably also not as dramatic as I'm imagining.

cm2187 3 days ago

If you are not doing gaming, there are still things that can make them obsolete. Driving big screens (like multiple 4k screens), hardware acceleration for video playback (hevc/av1 is on recent models only, you need hardware acceleration particularly for 4k playback). Also for laptops that actually travel, TPM is a bit of a must to me. It's bad enough if your laptop is lost or stolen, it's a lot worse if your private data is freely accessible to anyone who finds it. TPM wasn't standard on laptops.

Otherwise agree, my main work computer remains a i7-6700k, plenty of power for anything I don't run on a server, plus low idle usage. Never needed more than 64GB RAM. I have no use for PCIe 4 or 5 speed (any nvme speed over 2GB/s is kind of wasted on me).

[edit] and watch the battery. I had batteries starting to swell after 4-5y on many laptops. You might even want to replace it preventively and while you can still find the model.

ChrisNorstrom 3 days ago

My main desktop is running on a 14-15 year old Intel Core i5 750 and I've got 20-30 google chrome windows open each with about 100 tabs (sorry I know... I'll clean them up eventually) and I photoshop all the time and multi-task with excel spreadsheets and VPNs and Thunderbird email client with 10-20 accounts, etc... And my numerous laptops are running on 10 year old processors just fine. I've got a 16 core AMD threadripper PC for intense cases but I haven't powered it on in months.

It depends on WHAT you are using them for. Generally the public has reached a point where we don't need more processing power. Unless you're into gaming, streaming, editing, or a specific CPU intense use case we have enough computing power. The only thing left to do is make them more energy effecient.