Eulogy to my old laptop

I recently purchased a new laptop and it’s been a joy. This means I’m letting my old laptop retire after 7.5 years — out of which the last 4 years or so it was already broken af.

My previous laptop was a late-2017 Macbook Pro. We started our shared journey at my job and after it was time to update the work laptop, I was able to purchase the old laptop for personal use, replacing my then ~7 year old laptop.

There’s this push in tech to be constantly replacing your devices. We are to think that after 3 years or so, an old device is useless and you should upgrade to a newer version. I think that’s absurd. While my devices haven’t quite survived to celebrate a 10 year anniversary, I’m rather happy I’ve managed to use both of them for over 7 years.

At the moment of retirement, my laptop was in a rough condition. I had lost many keys from the keyboard and even many of those still hanging on had started to have issues where they’d register multiple presses so it was completely unusable. The touch bar (remember those, thank heavens they decided to stop adding them) was in perpetual disco mode: it keeps flashing like a strobe light at a rave and I wasn’t able to find a way to turn it off. The battery lasted around 10 seconds at best. And it had gotten really slow.

It essentially spent its last years as a docked laptop at my desk and I was forced to use my iPad with a Raspberry Pi as my mobile workstation. It wasn’t the optimal thing but it was the financially responsible one.

But despite its rough last moments, we had a lot of great moments together. We traveled across Europe to speak in developer conferences and meetups. We traveled in Finland, to Sweden, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, The Netherlands and Czechia to show my presentations to many lovely software developers.

I wrote hundreds of blog posts and built dozens of hobby projects on this laptop.

I love laptop stickers and looking back at my old laptops, they remind me of so many stories and memories. Most of my stickers are from events, communities and organisations that matter to me. Some I’ve worked on and others I’ve been either speaking in or participating and enjoying.