Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
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Great episode, but I couldn’t help but notice there were zero advertisers. Hope it’s just a fluke!
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I’m a bit behind on my WW. Just came in to slowly applaud “guilt as a service” which is brought to you by mothers around the world and gives your “GAAS”. 
Furthermore, I’d like to point out that TEAMS across organisational boundaries feels as broken as always to me. If there is anyone on god’s green earth (who is already in this forum) who knows how to make TEAMS more useful as a single entrepreneur, please fill me in. No-one can chat with me, except for video calls. It’s … a pity of a software if you’re not in a corporation, in my eyes.
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Really looking forward to the Intel guests next week. Great booking Paul!
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Once again, Paul and Mary Jo have failed to properly represent… JK (seems like we’ve been getting at least one of these each week lately) 
great show!
Yea that’s weird! Incidentally, I just signed up for Privacy this week after seeing the SN advert. Marketers take note, treasure trove of technology influencers within the TWiT viewership. Don’t sleep on that.
Ugh. Teams. I’m 100% with Paul, I should love it but there’s just something about it that irks me. Personally I think it’s the poorly coded Electron app. It’s SO heavy, resource-wise and also UX-wise. I was in the camp of “Electron is terrible/bloated and it’s not possible to make a decent Electron app” until I found out that Discord is Electron-based, which I’ve always found to be extremely usable.
Microsoft either needs to figure this out or jump ship to a different codebase. I understand the extensibility and cross-platform nature of Electron is super alluring but the UX is just so frustrating and interruptive to a workflow right now.
Paul’s description of Panay’s fireside chat had me rolling 
Also looking forward to the quad panel next week!
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The desktop won’t go away entirely, I don’t think, because there’s a limit of what you can put in a laptop in terms of powerful hardware. Laptops seem to have got thinner in the past five or so years, which means that there’s no, or very little, air flow inside the case. I also refuse to use a laptop for my streaming audio machine or my primary editing station
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Intel is soon releasing their next generation of CPUs (well they’ve already leaked and aren’t looking great) so I am concerned that it will turn into a purely Intel marketing event.
I read a review (paper magazine) of the new Lenovo workstation with Threadripper Pro chip. It ran the Blender classroom test 2.5 times quicker than a Ryzen 9 5000 series and 5 times quicker than a Core i9 10th Gen. Intel really needs to start pulling something out of its hat of tricks.
For sure, especially since none of the hosts really specialize in computer hardware. I die a little inside every time Paul acts like a computer from 5 years ago is ready for the scrapheap.
There should be plenty to talk about with the on-prem Exchange exploit so maybe that will help keep the Intel conversation in check.
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A five year old computer is not ready for the scrap heap, per se, but your typical Haswell or Broadwell i3/i5 is going to be noticeably outperformed by a 10th or 11th gen model. As someone who just got a new work-issued laptop after six years I can tell you the difference is noticeable. That said, I tend to think of Paul as leaning towards the side of being thrifty rather than profligate, so I’ll have to listen for this from now on.
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I question this, to be honest. I have a number of machines from this era, a 4770K, a 4790K and a HEDT 5320. They’re all well supplied with RAM (32G or more) and I have never found them wanting for speed. I use the 4790K machine to run 3 Windows 10 virtual machines at the same time (so that’s 4 machines if you include the host OS.)
I guess my thinking is faster is truly faster, but I sincerely doubt that the average Windows user browsing the web a bit and doing some word processing or other light duty tasks is ever going to find a 4th gen Intel slow.
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The average user also doesn’t have the i7 or 32GB of RAM.
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The average modern computer doesn’t have 32GB of RAM either.
My experience matches PHolder’s. As long as you have enough RAM (8GB+ depending on needs) and an SSD, pretty much any i5 or i7 system (that’s healthy) will be surprisingly capable to this day. I support a lot of older machines (2nd and 3rd gen i5s) so I spend a fair bit of time with them. Since we upgraded everyone to SSDs a few years back it’s become underwhelming when a machine does reach end of life because the new machine isn’t noticeably faster.
My guess would be that Paul is largely speaking from a place of being surrounded by new technology all the time and being required to pay attention to it. Even for a cynic it can be hard not be affected by that much hype exposure when he really has no reason to revisit older tech.
@PHolder @andythrasher I think we can all heartily agree that a five year old computer is perfectly usable. I have an Atom-based Surface 3 I still use. I think we can also respectfully agree to disagree about whether a new computer will be a noticeable improvement over one from five years ago.
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I didn’t realize Atom-based devices were considered usable at any age. 
I’m curious if you’ve used a 3-5th gen i5 recently with plenty of RAM and an SSD (cheap upgrades)? Not trying to be argumentative but you might be surprised what it’s capable of. A lot of people associate those machines with 4GB of RAM hard drive storage.
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I have not recently used one with plenty of RAM and an SSD. The Dell work laptop I just sent back was an i7 (maybe 4th or 5th Gen?), with 8GB RAM, a spinning hard drive and a painfully low res 768p screen. I was very happy with that laptop when I first got it as a replacement for my 2010 work-issued device. And now again, the latest replacement I got in October is a noticeable improves in all aspects over my prior machine. Could IT have stretched that out another few years with a RAM upgrade and an SSD drive? Absolutely.
Public Service Announcement: If anyone out there is listening, by all means consider a simple RAM and SSD upgrade if you’re otherwise happy with your machine. Consider a new battery while you’re at it. Also, find someone to hand down a gently used device to, or consider donating to a local non-profit, or to a Maker Space that can come up with a creative use for it.
Now, for me, I am glad that I have a new machine and not my old one. It is faster, lighter, has a larger and better screen, a better trackpad, improved WiFi and webcam (both great for when I have to do a video call away from my desk), and support for my new 3440x1440 ultrawide monitor (a little treat purchased with a one-time work from home bonus).
Glad you’re enjoying your new system. I remember how stoked I was when I got a an X1 Carbon a few years ago at work.
I’m not anti-upgrading, and especially with laptops there are lots of reasons other than performance to upgrade. Touchpads started getting massively better about five years ago, speakers have been getting good (for a portable device) recently and we’re in the midst of a transition away from 16:9 screens. Those are all justifiable reasons to upgrade.
I was originally just trying to focus on how easy it can be to dismiss older processors when they’re perfectly capable, especially in a desktop, like Mary Joe’s old i7 machine that just needed another 4GB of RAM and an SSD to be a beast for her needs. From a consumer advice perspective, and in the context of an Intel rep coming on this week, I think it’s a point worth making from time to time.
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Aha. Perhaps we’re talking past each other. I’m CERTAIN that low power (laptop) class CPUs have seen marked improvements in power efficiency, and if your laptop throttles less, it will be more performant. I’ve never owned a Laptop since the crappy Compaq AMD64 laptop I had 15+ years ago. I was referring to desktop PCs… and I still stand by my opinion that “full power” desktop CPU’s haven’t really increased in power enough in the last decade that most people would notice (if they had comparable equipment otherwise… no fair trying to compare a HDD based machine against a SSD based machine.)
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We have a 6 - 10 year replacement cycle at work. When the old PC gets too slow to be usable, it will be replaced. A lot of our older desktops and laptops went through a mid-life upgrade to SSDs, which extended their lives.
I have a 2009 Sony Vaio, which now has an SSD and is a fine Mint Linux machine for experimenting with - certainly faster than my current Raspberry Pi 400. Likewise, my home laptop is a 2016 HP Spectre x360, which is still more than fast enough for what it is needed for. My main workstation at home is a 1st generation Ryzen 7, which, again, is more than fast enough for the photo editing and virtual machine testing I do with it.
I am glad that the discussion in here came to a common denominator of: “yes, old CPUs remain usable”.
Now, please go to a modern and reasonably complex web app with a modern browser and see any CPU fall over and cry.
Just kidding. But kinda not. At least they did not know how to throttle aggressively, yet, and bring on their best impression of their CPU granddad. They just burned with pride through the tasks they were given like an unpaid intern. There are rock song lyrics in here somewhere.
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