My MacBook Pro died on a Tuesday. Just straight up refused to turn on. No warning, no weird noises, nothing — it was alive at lunch and dead by dinner. Apple quoted me $800 to fix it and I laughed. Not happening.

So I did what any reasonable person would do: I pulled my old 2019 ThinkPad out of the closet, blew the dust off it, and tried to pretend everything was fine.

It was not fine.

8 gigs of RAM. An i5 that was mid-range seven years ago. A battery that lasts exactly 47 minutes if you don't open Chrome. The fan sounds like a small aircraft taking off every time you run npm install.

I figured I'd survive a week on this thing before my new laptop arrived. The delivery got delayed. Then delayed again. One week turned into a month.

And honestly? That month kind of rewired how I think about development.

You don't realize how bloated your setup is until you can't run it

First day on the ThinkPad, I tried to open my usual workflow. VS Code with like 40 extensions. Docker running three containers. Chrome with 30 tabs. Slack. Spotify.

The laptop looked at me like I'd asked it to run Crysis.

VS Code alone took 45 seconds to open. Docker? Forget it. The swap file hit 6 gigs and the whole machine just... froze. Had to hard reboot.

So I started stripping things down. Disabled 30 of my 40 VS Code extensions. Turns out I actually use maybe 8 of them regularly. The rest were things I installed in 2023 and forgot about. One of them was a Bracket Pair Colorizer which VS Code has had built-in for like two years now lol.

Switched from Chrome to Firefox. Kept my tabs under 10. Brutal discipline but my RAM thanked me for it.

Dropped Docker entirely and just ran services locally. PostgreSQL native install. Node running without containers. Old school? Sure. But it uses a fraction of the resources.

The weird productivity boost

Here's what I didn't expect. After the initial pain of downsizing everything — maybe three or four days of frustration — I actually started getting MORE done.

Not because the old laptop was faster. Obviously it wasn't. But because I'd eliminated all the noise.

No Slack notifications popping up every 30 seconds. No Spotify algorithm trying to get my attention. No 30 browser tabs tempting me to "just quickly check" Twitter or Reddit. My ThinkPad literally couldn't handle the distractions, so I stopped having them.

I'd open VS Code, open the terminal, and just... code. That's it. Like it's 2012 and I'm in a computer lab again.

My git commits got smaller and more focused. I stopped context-switching between three different features. I'd pick one thing, do it, commit it, move on. The old laptop forced me into this because switching between windows took so long that I naturally stopped doing it.

Some stuff actually got better

Performance awareness went through the roof. When you're running on 8 gigs of RAM you FEEL every memory leak. That React component that was re-rendering 200 times? On my MacBook Pro I never noticed. On the ThinkPad it made the fan scream. I fixed bugs on this machine I didn't even know existed.

I also got way better at using the terminal. Couldn't afford fancy GUI tools so I learned to do more stuff with grep, awk, and bash scripts. Felt like a hacker from a 90s movie. Looked dumb, but it was faster than waiting for some Electron app to boot up.

And my deploys got smaller. I stopped shipping 400MB Docker images because I wasn't using Docker. Just simple Node apps pushed to a $5 VPS. My deploy time went from 8 minutes to 40 seconds.

Would I go back?

My new laptop arrived last week. M3 chip. 36 gigs of RAM. The thing is absurdly fast.

First thing I did? Installed about half of my old setup. Not all of it. Left Docker off for most projects. Kept my VS Code extensions minimal. Still using Firefox actually — turns out I like it better.

I wouldn't recommend using a crappy laptop full-time. Some things were genuinely painful — video calls were choppy, compiling TypeScript took forever, and I couldn't run any ML stuff locally.

But doing it for a month? Accidentally one of the most useful things I've done for my development workflow in years.

Sometimes the constraint is the feature. Or whatever. I'm not going to end this with some inspirational quote.

My ThinkPad's back in the closet. But I kinda miss it tbh.