Comment by shoo
8 days ago
> enough Thinkpads on Earth to probably stretch end-to-end around the moon and back
LD, average distance between Earth and Moon = 384,399,000 m [1]
C = circumference of moon = 10,917,000 m
R := approximate round trip distance = 2LD + 0.5*C = 774,256,500 m
n = total number of thinkpads on earth <= total number of thinkpads ever manufactured = 250 million [2][2a][2b]
W = width of thinkpad = 0.3366 m [3]
T = total thinkpad distance = n * W <= 84,150,000 m
Alas, T / R, the ratio of total thinkpad distance T to our lunar round trip distance R, is at most about 0.11 .
This is with the optimistic assumption that the total number of thinkpads on earth equals the total number of thinkpads ever manufactured. A more conservative estimate might be something like n = total number of thinkpads manufactured each year * mean lifespan of a thinkpad = (12 million thinkpads / year) * (5 years lifespan) = 60 million thinkpads in good working order for a lunar round trip.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_distance
[2] IBM sold 25m thinkpads before selling product line to Lenovo. By 2022, Lenovo had sold 200m thinkpads. With linear extrapolation to 2024 that gives approx 250 million thinkpads manufactured.
[2a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinkPad
[2b] https://www.forbes.com/sites/timbajarin/2022/10/05/celebrating-thinkpads-30th-anniversaryan-insiders-perspective/
[3] assume every thinkpad is a T480. https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkPad/ThinkPad_T480/ThinkPad_T480_Spec.PDF
It won't get you to the moon, but you can squeeze out a little more distance by arranging them corner to corner.
We must either increase the production rate of T480-size thinkpads by around 9x or get Lenovo to release at least one special edition extreme widescreen thinkpad specialised for lunar round trips
Or move the moon closer.
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The widescreen is just one of the things the people buying old computers are trying to get away from!
Corner to corner with their hinge opened to 180°
Exactly. We can also win a tiny bit of the distance by assuming the Moon in the perigee, where the distance to the Moon is about 363000 km. I also assume that these distances are measured between the centers, so we can perhaps subtract twice the Earth radius (about 2*6400 km).
Call that tip to tip efficiency ;)
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmwYxLaaQ5s (reference - which really fits this whole thread)
Comment on the comments.....it sure looks like moores law is loosing relevance and that going forward the possibility for durable, stable, device implemtations, that can last for generations is inevitable. Manufacturers may be resistant, but with 8~9 billion customers, and the inevitable losses and damage to devices, it will take a generation to get one in everybodys hands
Video editing and animation already require modern kit. And AI is adding significant processing requirements. We are not off the treadmill yet.
I say this as somebody the regularly uses laptops as old as 2009 (like, I will spend most of today on one). A lot of real-world, everyday computing barely taxes modern hardware on a decent OS like Linux. Old hardware will let you do a lot more than people think.
Yeah, my needs are simplistic enough (light coding, 2D drawing, programmatic 3D modeling using OpenPythonSCAD) that I'm seriously considering switching to an rPi 5 paired w/ a Wacom Movink 13 and a second display and a battery pack as my main computer.
Almost terrifying that the two length scales are only an order of magnitude apart…
opening the thinkpads will add ~ 38% to the effective area of stacking thinkpads, if edge-to-edge (0.2325m depth closed, assuming doubling for opened = 0.465m opened) [0].
if opened and touching corner-to-corner (~0.574m), will add ~ 71% to effective area.
[0] https://www.lenovo.com/content/dam/lenovo/pcsd/north-america...
Well not the moon, but about 100 times back and forth to ISS Average distance of ISS 370-460km, let's take 415km, back and forth so 2x 415km= 830km 84 150km/830=~101
brilliant comment. dont forget theres also thinkpads like that W700ds that had secondary displays that extended out from the side haha
W700ds is such an oddity. I love it. One day in high school, my dad asked "what's the difference between RAID 1 and RAID 0?", which led to me sitting down next to him to spec this monster laptop out. A week later he purchased it.
At ~10.9 lbs + 2.2 lbs for the charger, it was not terribly practical to travel with, so it ended up effectively as a desktop in the office.
It now sits in my closet, and periodically I turn it on. The dual screen was a bit too small to do much with, but it was great for notepad or a chat window. Being a 32 bit system limited to 4 GB of RAM, it's not terribly useful today.
Yeah I had a P51 at work. The name was the only cool thing about it. It had a quadro card that was completely useless for my VR stuff (Lenovo refused to sell them with GeForce back then) and it was basically a brick for no good reason. Even the charger weighed a ton. I so hated travelling with that thing.
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