Because there’s nothing wrong with my laptop, other than that it’s six years old.
The only time I notice a real performance issue is playing Firewatch. My main game is Minecraft, and my main version for it is the pocket edition.
Otherwise I use my laptop for the usual Libreoffice work, but also for trying out things like Splunk server.
A laptop with the same specs as my old one except with SSD costs $300 more than my current laptop did six years ago. I’m just not impressed enough to shell out the cash.
For me, accessible hardware and drivers are the key.
None of the “need to use sunglasses to use the screen, because the minimum brightness setting is too bright and burns my eyes,” “need to wear ear protection to use the computer, because the chipset gives off a loud 22 kHz squeel,” none of that “need to install kernel patches to use the keyboard, because the Ubuntu-certified touchpad has no Linux drivers, and because Ubuntu treats it as a PS/2 mouse, and treats any hand motion within 2.54 cm as a deliberate tap if not a deliberate double-click,” none of that “you need to reconfigure everything after each update because Shuttleworth doesn’t like scrollbars and thinks gestures and tendon-rippers are enough to replace scrollbars.”
If I could test enough devices, I might find a suitable Linux machine.
If I could get a larger quiet drive, I might partition things for a Mac/Linux machine.
Unfortunately running a pure Mac machine makes it hard to avoid the default animation, impossible to widen the scrollbars, etc.
I wonder when the post-meltdown processors will be available.
Should be much quicker for ARM, and potentially for AMD.
Spectre could take somewhat longer IIUC. ARM users have at least the option of starting with a low-mid range CPU (A53) and repeating the process of adding speculative execution from scratch but this time without the problems. That might take no more than a year. It looks like the 845 is the end of an era.
But Intel’s architecture is so baked in that it may need a change of mindset as well as re-engineering.
