Just replaced my wife's Air last month after 7 years. If the charging circuit hadn't failed, it would still be running. We even limped along on her 2013 Air for a few weeks until I could get together the money. I'm on a 2018 Lenovo AMD Ryzen laptop that is still going strong and still seems fast enough for what I do with it.

For any non-power-user who's bought a computer in the last 8-10 years, odds are the only things that will compel you to upgrade are equipment failure, physical damage, or sluggish video decoding in some new CPU-heavy streaming codec.

I hope Apple isn't judging Mac sales by the iPhone yardstick. Phones have plateaued too in terms of CPU power vs. utility, but iPhones have a vanity factor to them that laptops will never have.

Specifically with CRT monitors, because there were physical LC time constants that had to be observed, lest you blow a horizontal output transistor.
 

How do you go back and find the tab you're looking for when they're all shrunk down to one letter wide?

I was living in SW Florida at the time. There were several hurricanes that year. IIRC, Katrina cut across FL before going out into the Gulf and recharging. We dodged several bullets that summer, but places less than an hour away like Arcadia and Punta Gorda were not so lucky.

Ancient?! I just went from a ca. 2006 2Ghz Core2Duo to a 1.7Ghz i3 a few months back. I don't game or do anything particularly CPU-intensive, so I wasn't expecting big changes, but DAMN! I had no idea. I think the drastically improved memory bandwidth really shows, particularly in Chrome. These are both 4GB machines with an SSD too. Anyway, the i3 was really excellent bang/buck. No regrets.

Precisely. All of it.

The most infuriating thing lately is the inability to turn off scroll wheel acceleration on my Logitech trackball. 3 clicks never does the same thing twice.

My '07 MacBook still runs 10.6.8. I tried 10.7 when it came out and went back after about a month. They took out things I liked (PPC emulation, proper Spaces), and put in stuff I didn't like or need. That trend has continued through present day. (Twitter/FB integration in the OS?? Come. On!) IMO, 10.6.8 was the last "pure" version of OSX.

My HTPC is also on Windows 7. It is rock-solid. Setting up a reliable HTPC that can aggregate and play from multiple disparate sources is practically an artform. I feel like I'm messing with a Jenga tower if I so much as have to change a driver.

I only update my Android phone if the new version has been proven to not make things worse, or at least fixes some bug that annoys me.

I could drive to work in under 20 minutes and use very little gas. But my job subsidizes my public transit 100% and parking downtown costs an arm and a leg. So I use the hell out of public transit. I walk 20 minutes to the train stop and ride for 10. The walk is great exercise. All in all, I would be a fool not to use public transit.

Fortunately I live in one of the few US cities that really does it well (Portland, OR), and it's intimidating at first but you soon realize that all of the horror stories you hear from people that have driven all their lives are grossly exaggerated. You'd think the train would be full of people being stabbed and vomited on, and sketchy guys carrying TV's that they just stole from that affluent neighborhood they just opened a new stop near. No. It's mostly just tired people going to or from work, 80% of them with their faces buried in their phones. A few tourists. Some teenagers on their way to the park or the mall. Every now and then there will be a stinky guy or a loud phone talker or a screaming baby, or some guy (illegally) trying to sell you incense sticks. That's about the extent of it, and if it's too crowded, most of the time you can wait for the next one and it will be near empty.

At my previous two jobs I drove every day and eschewed public transit. Here it's gotten so that I actually dread the day I have to commute by car again and feel sorry for the people that have to. The next time I move, proximity to public transit will be very high on my list, probably above access to fast broadband.

Was scrolling through to see if anyone else made this joke before I did.

+1, good sir.

The real question here is: when did "compute" go from being a verb to an adjective?

This blew my mind. I always thought that the Federal Reserve and the Treasury were basically just two sides of the same coin (so to speak).
That somehow value could be extracted from the exchange of money between the two is completely non-intuitive.

Ha. I did something similar on my C64. Made a battery backed 8K RAM cartridge mapped to the Autorun vector that would load some BASIC extension commands when I powered it up. I never had to LOAD "$",8 again for a directory listing. Native DIR, DELETE, and RENAME commands FTW!

When I was a teenager back in the 80's, I was into computers, electronics, and blowin' shit up. In the summers my cousin and I would sit at his mom's kitchen table and cut up packs of firecrackers for the powder. We'd then "supercharge" weaksauce firecrackers and large bottle rockets. Long story short, we eventually started making ones powerful enough that we were afraid to get close enough to light them because of the potential for shrapnel (We were also doing stuff like seeing how high we could make a bucket or a dog dish fly.) before we could achieve cover. I was also playing with model rocketry at this time and realized that we could probably use model rocket igniters instead of fuses. My cousin mused about being able to do it by remote control and that got the gears turning. I had an old Radio Shack remote controlled car that was broken some way or another. So I worked out a way to use a relay and a size-J camera battery to provide the current necessary to fire the igniter. Packed it all in one of those Radio Shack project boxes with a power switch and an alligator clip pigtail. We'd hook up the firework and go back to the other end of the cable and hook up the detonator and "arm" it. Then we'd go behind the stairs or sometimes even INSIDE, push the right turn lever and *BOOM*. A small crater and a dog dish 30 feet into the air. Good times.

Lately the most adventurous thing I've done was to [heavily] modify a Commodore A520 RF modulator for component output so I could hook my old Amiga 1200 to a modern TV.