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> Anyone who buys a Macbook Pro today, before they're updated in the fall, will be able to use it for the next 3 years without issue. It kind of depresses me t

> Anyone who buys a Macbook Pro today, before they're updated in the fall, will be able to use it for the next 3 years without issue. It kind of depresses me that three years is considered a long lifetime for a computer.

CydeWeys 10y ago
Three years is pretty long for a laptop that sees daily use. That's just the reality of having a physical device that you bring with you everywhere -- it gets beaten up. Also, don't forget that there are basically no user-replaceable parts left, including most importantly the battery. Three years of daily use is enough to significantly degrade batteries. Meanwhile, most of the components in my desktop are older than three years, and it's doing just fine.
- toothbrush 10y ago
  > Also, don't forget that there are basically no user-replaceable parts left, including most importantly the battery. That, to me, is the real tragedy/travesty. There should be some eco-EU-law or something against that, a bit like the micro USB charger standardisation. I say this typing from a 2008 (or was it 2009?) MacBook on which i've been able to replace the RAM (8GB), disk drive (SSD, single biggest improvement) and battery (lasts longer than when new from factory now), and all of those upgrades weren't expensive at all. Of course i run Linux and XMonad and pretty much the only graphical app is Firefox with NoScript, but still, i can't see myself forking out hard $$$ for a non-maintainable machine. The upgradability isn't even the big deal for me, because as someone else pointed out these days computers are "fast enough", it's the fact that certain components are just going to fail (especially the battery). And it absolutely sends sickly shivers down my spine that people are being forced to landfill perfectly okay hardware because of a battery becoming worn out. Seriously Apple, where have your holistic eco-friendly principles gone?
  - will_hughes 10y ago
    From a physical engineering perspective I don't know how you'd go about making an ultrabook's battery replaceable short of breaking the entire case open.
    - toothbrush 10y ago
      I realise that i'm probably in a vanishing minority, but give me a few mm's of extra thickness for replaceability of parts any day! The 13" 2009 Macbook i refer to is (for me) fine as far as weight and thickness go, while providing replaceable parts which makes me happy (and soothes my reuse-repair-recycle tendency).
    - khedoros 10y ago
      I've got a Lenovo T450S, which is apparently marketed as an ultrabook. It's got a user-removable battery. I assume you had some different ultrabook in mind with your comment.
    - rbanffy 10y ago
      Being supernaturally thin is not an engineering requirement. Marketing dictates that.
      - collyw 10y ago
        To be fair, I thought that its was all crap when I first saw the MacBook air. Then I acquired one through work for a couple of years. Its was nice going somewhere with hand luggage and being able to fit it in the top of my bag relatively easy compared to my other laptop (though the thinness didn't make a huge amount of difference).
IBM 10y ago
The current Macbook Pro was updated in 2015. And I was being conservative, I'd imagine you'd realistically get 6 years with it.
- rayiner 10y ago
  By then the CPU in the rMBP will be 9 years old.
  - vetinari 10y ago
    The CPUs in 2015 rMBPs are Broadwells, for example i5-5287U used in rMBP13 was introduced in Q1'15. The author of the article was writing about non-retina MBPs, which are still for sale.
    - JonathonW 10y ago
      Well, sort of. The 13" got Broadwell in 2015; the 15" rMBP didn't-- its 2015 update retained the Haswell 4[7/8/9]80HQ from the previous year's model, since Broadwell quad-core parts were late coming out and the ones that did come out weren't really an upgrade. A mid-2015 15" rMBP purchased today is running a two-year-old processor from a three-year-old architecture. And the GPU, should you get the discrete GPU option, is from a four-year-old architecture (it's a GCN 1.0 part).
      - vetinari 10y ago
        That's interesting... Good to know. Although if the Broadwell parts weren't really an upgrade, then it does not matter. The old ATI part would be more annoying. I also kind of understand why Apple didn't go with Skylake yet. Seeing all the problems with power management states in Linux and Windows land, it looks like they decided to skip this generation until that gets fixed.
umanwizard 10y ago
Tech enthusiasts (as I assume most people on this forum are) want different things out of their computers than the average person. Today's MBP can be used for three years by tech enthusiasts, which is indeed impressive. It can probably last over ten years for the average person, if good care is taken.
- chriswarbo 10y ago
  My main machine is a 10 year old IBM thinkpad, and it's still doing fine. Likewise for my 8 year old 'phone. Tech enthusiasts are the ones who can see through the marketing and upgrade-treadmill BS; the "average person" can end up buying a new machine when they fill up their hard drive.
  - vmarsy 10y ago
    Impressive. likewise my five years old Thinkpad still runs like new (with Windows 10 startup improvement over 7 it felt even faster, but even faster is Ubuntu. it runs incredibly fast). For tech enthusiast who enjoy smartphones unfortunately a 8 year old phone won't cut it. I have 4 year old Nokia Lumia that still runs fine and with an average 1.5 days of battery life (it used to live 2 days, it's aging). It works well for me because I care about basic apps, GPS, internet browser, and email. But for more apps heavy users most apps won't work if the phone isn't on the latest OS version, and most old phones can't upgrade to the latest OS version. For instance if Facebook stops maintaining messenger on windows phone 8.1, I'd loose my most used app. Fortunately the market share for 8.1 in emerging markets is still important enough for fb to keep a quality app.
    - tbihl 10y ago
      I had probably about the same Thinkpad, and I was amazed at how much faster Windows 8.1 and 10 were. Granted, I was also making a huge upgrade because some tech-illiterate person bought us 32-bit Windows licenses and 4GB RAM (2.9 usable.) I've much more often been frustrated by my phones. My last phone was at the point where I'd expect ~1 second delay for any interaction, whether that was opening an app or scrolling in a webpage. I think as the current one ages I'm going to start eliminating apps and wiping the phone more frequently than I do now, because I'd rather have all that money going toward my desktop and laptops.
TheRealPomax 10y ago
Why, though? Lifetimes are dictated by the physical processes that govern wear, and computers wear out fast: we pump a whole lot of electrons through them, and because we want them to be faster and faster have made them less and less fault tolerant under heavy load. Make no mistake: ever since the AT/XT days the useful lifetime of a computer has been in the three year range because of the nature of matter and the physics we exploit to make digital circuits do what they need to do. Can you still use a 20 year old computer that runs Word Perfect 5 on MS-DOS 6.22 and isn't really made to do much more? Of course. And of course, you'll still be able to run OSX Panther on a 2005 MacMini for years to come, but you can't use those things for anything new or modern, you've created a little time machine that can only do what we wanted to do in 1985, or 1995, or 2005, instead of in 2015 (or soon enough, 2025). Most of us want to use those new programs that rely on new algorithms that require the faster hardware, or old algorithms that massively benefit from faster hardware - we want spreadsheets to take less than seconds, not more than minutes, for ever-more complex work; we want games that run smoothly, not "not at all" or at 1 or 2 frames per second; we want our internet browser to start when we tell it to, not after a period of time that is long enough to wonder whether it even started at all. Things all have lifetimes, and for computers that lifetime's about 3 years, and has been for decades. On the upside, computers are ships of Theseus: most of the time, we can just swap out broken parts for new parts, including faster parts, so really the lifetime of a single, unadulterated, intact computer is three years, but with a few hundred bucks every three years, we can keep pulling it back into the modern age until at some point nothing of the original remains - and the lifetime of THAT computer is much, much longer.
- raverbashing 10y ago
  There's no 3 year limit. I usually get 5 years from my notebooks (batteries are an issue, of course)
- nextos 10y ago
  Why 3 years? My MacBook Air 2012 runs Linux better than some brand new machines. As a browser and a ssh machine it's good enough. My dad ran Ubuntu for a decade on my 13 year old workstation. He couldn't do anything I could do on my laptop. A Pentium IV with HT was good enough for his LaTeX and his MCMC simulations.
maxsilver 10y ago
For a device that many of us carry literally everywhere and literally every day, I think 3 years is a pretty good lifetime. I can't get a pair of shoes to last me 2 years. The fact that my 2013 MacBook Pro is still working is fairly surprising to me.
- BigJono 10y ago
  To be fair, I don't know about you but my last pair of shoes didn't cost three grand.
- ryao 10y ago
  My father once had the idea of taking my shoes to a shoe smith to have the soles repaired. That would have let me get it to 2 years, although unknown to him, I had a few years worth of spares in my closet. Anyway, if you want to make something that is made well last longer than its wearable components, replace them. I just ordered a new touchpad sticker and keyboard for my 5 year old Thinkpad. I expect to replace the batteries within the next year, but other than that, I expect it to go to 10+ years, even though my previous Dell laptops did not make it past 5 years.
- justinlardinois 10y ago
  If your laptop can only handle three years or normal wear and tear, either it's not very sturdy or you're unusually rough with it. I've personally never owned a MacBook so I can't say which. Three years is also not a long time considering the price of a MacBook. The basic model starts at $1299 [1]; $400/year for computing is a lot of money. My two year old Chromebook is definitely a piece of crap; the motherboard is warped from having dropped it on carpet (carpet!) once, and the monitor has scratches caused by the keyboard. But that's okay, because I bought a very low end model that only cost $200. [1] http://www.apple.com/mac/compare/ http://www.apple.com/mac/compare/
sargun 10y ago
You can have a computer last far more than 3 years. If you buy a desktop PC, and you upgrade it, and do maintenance on it over the course of its life, it can last 7-10 years (I have seen some of these beasts in offices), but you usually spend as much as a new computer.
- majewsky 10y ago
  Not just desktops. I'm typing this on a 2012 Asus Zenbook, which did not have any hardware problems so far (unless you count that one screw that came loose last year). Even the battery is still going strong: `acpi -V` reports "design capacity 5871 mAh, last full capacity 5070 mAh = 86%". Of course, chances are that any other notebook might fail sooner, and I assume that my careful handling has increased the longevity of the device.
- khedoros 10y ago
  I have a Ship of Theseus desktop built in 2001. Then I replaced some hard drives. Then I replaced the motherboard+CPU+RAM. Then I replaced the video card. Then the hard drives...etc, etc. Currently, it's got a 2008 CPU+RAM, a 2010 mobo, drives from 2006-2014, a 2012 GPU, and it's about to get a 2016 PSU, because that just blew yesterday. It's hard to say how old a computer like that is ;-)
behnamoh 10y ago
Yeah, tell me about it. I've been using my old laptop for 6 yrs now. The battery is completely broken now, and it's always on AC power. I had to use an SSD on it, due to its HDD failure which caused the loss of all my data. But other than that, it still is working, but only for trivial tasks, like downloading and stuff. I also replaced its broken DVD drive with a Caddy to add an extra HDD later. Oh, and there's now a bright spot on the monitor (IDK why)! This is obviously so messed up, but I figured it's "electrical" and not "mechanical", so I keep using it, esp. w/ Windows 10 which refreshed it! Although I really don't know what to do w/ the noise I hear from the motherboard (coil problem maybe.)
- khedoros 10y ago
  I'm on my 2011 laptop. Battery's pretty bad; I might get half an hour or something (last time I tested). Shortly after I bought it, I replaced the HDD with a hybrid HDD+SSD (500GB spinning, 16GB solid-state cache, or something). My kid bent something in the keyboard, so the F12 key sticks up a little bit. Everything else works like when I bought it. I sometimes get the "new tech" itch, but I haven't convinced myself that I'd get enough benefit to retire this thing, yet.
marcosdumay 10y ago
I have no problem keeping a computer for 6 or 8 years. But when I buy a new one, I don't want it to have 3 years old specs.
nickpsecurity 10y ago
I believe my Core Duo 2 laptop (Inspiron 1420) is the model Dell set up with Ubuntu. Got it on eBay for $800 from person who lightly used it but didn't want Linux. It's about 8 years old or something. Still handles about anything I throw at it from web servers to video to virtual machines. 1080p seems to be rough on it but I can't tell if it's it or Linux-related software. 720p looks great on it, though, so I question the necessity of 1080p anyway. Things run a bit slower for the apps that get unnecessarily bloated over time. Including some websites. Still fast enough day to day to not really matter. I was used to it about 3-4 years ago. Thanks to software improvements, my laptop actually got better over the years. ;)
mgkimsal 10y ago
I've got a 2011 macbook pro which is now used for basic work around the house (media center, etc). It will likely last for several more years, because the needs for it won't change, and the specs it has meet the needs just fine. For newer work - as needs change, specs change, it's advantageous to get new equipment to meet changing needs (generally faster processing in my case).

CydeWeys 10y ago

Three years is pretty long for a laptop that sees daily use. That's just the reality of having a physical device that you bring with you everywhere -- it gets beaten up. Also, don't forget that there are basically no user-replaceable parts left, including most importantly the battery. Three years of daily use is enough to significantly degrade batteries. Meanwhile, most of the components in my desktop are older than three years, and it's doing just fine.

toothbrush 10y ago
> Also, don't forget that there are basically no user-replaceable parts left, including most importantly the battery. That, to me, is the real tragedy/travesty. There should be some eco-EU-law or something against that, a bit like the micro USB charger standardisation. I say this typing from a 2008 (or was it 2009?) MacBook on which i've been able to replace the RAM (8GB), disk drive (SSD, single biggest improvement) and battery (lasts longer than when new from factory now), and all of those upgrades weren't expensive at all. Of course i run Linux and XMonad and pretty much the only graphical app is Firefox with NoScript, but still, i can't see myself forking out hard $$$ for a non-maintainable machine. The upgradability isn't even the big deal for me, because as someone else pointed out these days computers are "fast enough", it's the fact that certain components are just going to fail (especially the battery). And it absolutely sends sickly shivers down my spine that people are being forced to landfill perfectly okay hardware because of a battery becoming worn out. Seriously Apple, where have your holistic eco-friendly principles gone?
- will_hughes 10y ago
  From a physical engineering perspective I don't know how you'd go about making an ultrabook's battery replaceable short of breaking the entire case open.
  - toothbrush 10y ago
    I realise that i'm probably in a vanishing minority, but give me a few mm's of extra thickness for replaceability of parts any day! The 13" 2009 Macbook i refer to is (for me) fine as far as weight and thickness go, while providing replaceable parts which makes me happy (and soothes my reuse-repair-recycle tendency).
  - khedoros 10y ago
    I've got a Lenovo T450S, which is apparently marketed as an ultrabook. It's got a user-removable battery. I assume you had some different ultrabook in mind with your comment.
  - rbanffy 10y ago
    Being supernaturally thin is not an engineering requirement. Marketing dictates that.
    - collyw 10y ago
      To be fair, I thought that its was all crap when I first saw the MacBook air. Then I acquired one through work for a couple of years. Its was nice going somewhere with hand luggage and being able to fit it in the top of my bag relatively easy compared to my other laptop (though the thinness didn't make a huge amount of difference).

IBM 10y ago

The current Macbook Pro was updated in 2015. And I was being conservative, I'd imagine you'd realistically get 6 years with it.

rayiner 10y ago
By then the CPU in the rMBP will be 9 years old.
- vetinari 10y ago
  The CPUs in 2015 rMBPs are Broadwells, for example i5-5287U used in rMBP13 was introduced in Q1'15. The author of the article was writing about non-retina MBPs, which are still for sale.
  - JonathonW 10y ago
    Well, sort of. The 13" got Broadwell in 2015; the 15" rMBP didn't-- its 2015 update retained the Haswell 4[7/8/9]80HQ from the previous year's model, since Broadwell quad-core parts were late coming out and the ones that did come out weren't really an upgrade. A mid-2015 15" rMBP purchased today is running a two-year-old processor from a three-year-old architecture. And the GPU, should you get the discrete GPU option, is from a four-year-old architecture (it's a GCN 1.0 part).
    - vetinari 10y ago
      That's interesting... Good to know. Although if the Broadwell parts weren't really an upgrade, then it does not matter. The old ATI part would be more annoying. I also kind of understand why Apple didn't go with Skylake yet. Seeing all the problems with power management states in Linux and Windows land, it looks like they decided to skip this generation until that gets fixed.

umanwizard 10y ago

Tech enthusiasts (as I assume most people on this forum are) want different things out of their computers than the average person. Today's MBP can be used for three years by tech enthusiasts, which is indeed impressive. It can probably last over ten years for the average person, if good care is taken.

chriswarbo 10y ago
My main machine is a 10 year old IBM thinkpad, and it's still doing fine. Likewise for my 8 year old 'phone. Tech enthusiasts are the ones who can see through the marketing and upgrade-treadmill BS; the "average person" can end up buying a new machine when they fill up their hard drive.
- vmarsy 10y ago
  Impressive. likewise my five years old Thinkpad still runs like new (with Windows 10 startup improvement over 7 it felt even faster, but even faster is Ubuntu. it runs incredibly fast). For tech enthusiast who enjoy smartphones unfortunately a 8 year old phone won't cut it. I have 4 year old Nokia Lumia that still runs fine and with an average 1.5 days of battery life (it used to live 2 days, it's aging). It works well for me because I care about basic apps, GPS, internet browser, and email. But for more apps heavy users most apps won't work if the phone isn't on the latest OS version, and most old phones can't upgrade to the latest OS version. For instance if Facebook stops maintaining messenger on windows phone 8.1, I'd loose my most used app. Fortunately the market share for 8.1 in emerging markets is still important enough for fb to keep a quality app.
  - tbihl 10y ago
    I had probably about the same Thinkpad, and I was amazed at how much faster Windows 8.1 and 10 were. Granted, I was also making a huge upgrade because some tech-illiterate person bought us 32-bit Windows licenses and 4GB RAM (2.9 usable.) I've much more often been frustrated by my phones. My last phone was at the point where I'd expect ~1 second delay for any interaction, whether that was opening an app or scrolling in a webpage. I think as the current one ages I'm going to start eliminating apps and wiping the phone more frequently than I do now, because I'd rather have all that money going toward my desktop and laptops.

TheRealPomax 10y ago

Why, though? Lifetimes are dictated by the physical processes that govern wear, and computers wear out fast: we pump a whole lot of electrons through them, and because we want them to be faster and faster have made them less and less fault tolerant under heavy load. Make no mistake: ever since the AT/XT days the useful lifetime of a computer has been in the three year range because of the nature of matter and the physics we exploit to make digital circuits do what they need to do. Can you still use a 20 year old computer that runs Word Perfect 5 on MS-DOS 6.22 and isn't really made to do much more? Of course. And of course, you'll still be able to run OSX Panther on a 2005 MacMini for years to come, but you can't use those things for anything new or modern, you've created a little time machine that can only do what we wanted to do in 1985, or 1995, or 2005, instead of in 2015 (or soon enough, 2025). Most of us want to use those new programs that rely on new algorithms that require the faster hardware, or old algorithms that massively benefit from faster hardware - we want spreadsheets to take less than seconds, not more than minutes, for ever-more complex work; we want games that run smoothly, not "not at all" or at 1 or 2 frames per second; we want our internet browser to start when we tell it to, not after a period of time that is long enough to wonder whether it even started at all. Things all have lifetimes, and for computers that lifetime's about 3 years, and has been for decades. On the upside, computers are ships of Theseus: most of the time, we can just swap out broken parts for new parts, including faster parts, so really the lifetime of a single, unadulterated, intact computer is three years, but with a few hundred bucks every three years, we can keep pulling it back into the modern age until at some point nothing of the original remains - and the lifetime of THAT computer is much, much longer.

raverbashing 10y ago
There's no 3 year limit. I usually get 5 years from my notebooks (batteries are an issue, of course)
nextos 10y ago
Why 3 years? My MacBook Air 2012 runs Linux better than some brand new machines. As a browser and a ssh machine it's good enough. My dad ran Ubuntu for a decade on my 13 year old workstation. He couldn't do anything I could do on my laptop. A Pentium IV with HT was good enough for his LaTeX and his MCMC simulations.

maxsilver 10y ago

For a device that many of us carry literally everywhere and literally every day, I think 3 years is a pretty good lifetime. I can't get a pair of shoes to last me 2 years. The fact that my 2013 MacBook Pro is still working is fairly surprising to me.

BigJono 10y ago
To be fair, I don't know about you but my last pair of shoes didn't cost three grand.
ryao 10y ago
My father once had the idea of taking my shoes to a shoe smith to have the soles repaired. That would have let me get it to 2 years, although unknown to him, I had a few years worth of spares in my closet. Anyway, if you want to make something that is made well last longer than its wearable components, replace them. I just ordered a new touchpad sticker and keyboard for my 5 year old Thinkpad. I expect to replace the batteries within the next year, but other than that, I expect it to go to 10+ years, even though my previous Dell laptops did not make it past 5 years.
justinlardinois 10y ago
If your laptop can only handle three years or normal wear and tear, either it's not very sturdy or you're unusually rough with it. I've personally never owned a MacBook so I can't say which. Three years is also not a long time considering the price of a MacBook. The basic model starts at $1299 [1]; $400/year for computing is a lot of money. My two year old Chromebook is definitely a piece of crap; the motherboard is warped from having dropped it on carpet (carpet!) once, and the monitor has scratches caused by the keyboard. But that's okay, because I bought a very low end model that only cost $200. [1] http://www.apple.com/mac/compare/ http://www.apple.com/mac/compare/

sargun 10y ago

You can have a computer last far more than 3 years. If you buy a desktop PC, and you upgrade it, and do maintenance on it over the course of its life, it can last 7-10 years (I have seen some of these beasts in offices), but you usually spend as much as a new computer.

majewsky 10y ago
Not just desktops. I'm typing this on a 2012 Asus Zenbook, which did not have any hardware problems so far (unless you count that one screw that came loose last year). Even the battery is still going strong: `acpi -V` reports "design capacity 5871 mAh, last full capacity 5070 mAh = 86%". Of course, chances are that any other notebook might fail sooner, and I assume that my careful handling has increased the longevity of the device.
khedoros 10y ago
I have a Ship of Theseus desktop built in 2001. Then I replaced some hard drives. Then I replaced the motherboard+CPU+RAM. Then I replaced the video card. Then the hard drives...etc, etc. Currently, it's got a 2008 CPU+RAM, a 2010 mobo, drives from 2006-2014, a 2012 GPU, and it's about to get a 2016 PSU, because that just blew yesterday. It's hard to say how old a computer like that is ;-)

behnamoh 10y ago

Yeah, tell me about it. I've been using my old laptop for 6 yrs now. The battery is completely broken now, and it's always on AC power. I had to use an SSD on it, due to its HDD failure which caused the loss of all my data. But other than that, it still is working, but only for trivial tasks, like downloading and stuff. I also replaced its broken DVD drive with a Caddy to add an extra HDD later. Oh, and there's now a bright spot on the monitor (IDK why)! This is obviously so messed up, but I figured it's "electrical" and not "mechanical", so I keep using it, esp. w/ Windows 10 which refreshed it! Although I really don't know what to do w/ the noise I hear from the motherboard (coil problem maybe.)

khedoros 10y ago
I'm on my 2011 laptop. Battery's pretty bad; I might get half an hour or something (last time I tested). Shortly after I bought it, I replaced the HDD with a hybrid HDD+SSD (500GB spinning, 16GB solid-state cache, or something). My kid bent something in the keyboard, so the F12 key sticks up a little bit. Everything else works like when I bought it. I sometimes get the "new tech" itch, but I haven't convinced myself that I'd get enough benefit to retire this thing, yet.

marcosdumay 10y ago

I have no problem keeping a computer for 6 or 8 years. But when I buy a new one, I don't want it to have 3 years old specs.

nickpsecurity 10y ago

I believe my Core Duo 2 laptop (Inspiron 1420) is the model Dell set up with Ubuntu. Got it on eBay for $800 from person who lightly used it but didn't want Linux. It's about 8 years old or something. Still handles about anything I throw at it from web servers to video to virtual machines. 1080p seems to be rough on it but I can't tell if it's it or Linux-related software. 720p looks great on it, though, so I question the necessity of 1080p anyway. Things run a bit slower for the apps that get unnecessarily bloated over time. Including some websites. Still fast enough day to day to not really matter. I was used to it about 3-4 years ago. Thanks to software improvements, my laptop actually got better over the years. ;)

mgkimsal 10y ago

I've got a 2011 macbook pro which is now used for basic work around the house (media center, etc). It will likely last for several more years, because the needs for it won't change, and the specs it has meet the needs just fine. For newer work - as needs change, specs change, it's advantageous to get new equipment to meet changing needs (generally faster processing in my case).