How long do you use your personal laptop before replacing it?

In a professional setting, about 5 years. Just various office work, nothing to intense.

In personal life, currently 17 years. Lenovo T400 still rocking on. Beyond SOME web browsing there just isn't anything yet that heavy that demands anything more than this thing.

0. Engineering Manager, but I still write code.

1. I don't. I have a Mac Mini. I don't quite understand why people have laptops at home if they always use it in the same place. I spent years getting my office setup to be great so I don't need a computer I can move around.

2. Mostly dependent on what shiny new Mini is available. I had an 8GB M1 for 5 years, then moved to an 24GB M4 Pro last year because local AI looked fun. I'll probably upgrade to an M5 later this year because there are tangible improvements in the hardware.

Software Engineer, use it partially for private and professional purposes. In historical Order: Thinkpad X201, Then a Thinkpad T450s, currently a Macbook Air M2, usually in the biggest configuration. Usually I use it about 7 years. Not because it doesn't work anymore, but because it gets too slow for what I am doing with it. In one case it was the switch from C++/C# to Rust and the compile times became unbearable. The next switch might be because of LLMs.

0. founder

1. m1 max 32gb

2. i bought it used for $900, i'll use it until it no longer works for my needs (build speeds, running docker stuff locally) and then i'll get whatever future renewed macbook i can get on amazon for 900-1000 bucks

I used to change more frequently but since I got a MacBook Pro M1, the original one, I am still waiting for something significant better.

0. Developer

1. Dell Latitude 7490

2. As long as I can.

I think I've been on the Latutude for about 4 years now, but it's a second-hand device coming up on seven or eight years old. I generally don't need much oomph for the stuff I like to do at home (I don't game for example).

I had a series of XPS laptops, but the battery life in use was poor and they tended to need the battery replacing quite quickly (puffy batteries - possibly because they run quite hot).

Prior to that I'd been on second hand Thinkpads, with the X220s still kicking around somewhere in case the main device dies.

I reckon the current Dell has at least a couple more years in it for my purposes. It has 64Gb ram so until website bloat gets out of control I'm good I think.

I have a fairly fast mini-pc with oodles of ram on the network that I use as a sacrificial yolo machine for Claude, and an elderly desktop machine with a decent GPU for local running of LLMs. The latter is noisy and in practice it hasn't been turned on for months.

I hate Macs, but envy you the battery life and spiffy Arm CPU (yes, I know about Asahi, but until one can safely entirely wipe MacOS from the Mac I'm not interested).