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I've been getting more and more life out of my Apple stuff. For example, my early 13" 2011 MacBook Pro (2.3 GHz i5, 8gb RAM) feels like a much newer machine now

I've been getting more and more life out of my Apple stuff. For example, my early 13" 2011 MacBook Pro (2.3 GHz i5, 8gb RAM) feels like a much newer machine now that I replaced the spinning disk with an SSD. For what I'm doing with it, things are great. I have the feeling that macOS Sierra will be the last OS X version that will run on it, though. At that point, I might finally do an upgrade, which I plan to keep for a 5 year cycle if at all possible.

slantyyz 10y ago
>> I've been getting more and more life out of my Apple stuff. The thing is, your next upgrade is probably going to involve a device with soldered on memory and a chassis that isn't as conducive to end-user hardware upgrades as the model you have. The upgradability gravy train pretty much ended with the 2012 unibody models. The only way you can maximize the life of your next purchase is to buy the maximum spec'ed machine. Doesn't sound like a problem, but maxing out an Apple BTO machine gets expensive fast. I thought my 2011 15" MBP would still be my main machine today (the specs still hold up today), except mine was one of the models that had the overheating GPUs and it got bricked and stopped booting. It wasn't until after I switched to a Windows laptop that Apple finally acknowledged the problem and issued a repair order. By that time, they had basically lost me as a customer of their computer products.
- jrnichols 10y ago
  That is true, but I'm seeing that spreading into the non-Apple world as well. It's as if the industry realized that people just don't do many hardware upgrades to laptops. Desktop space is a whole different story, though. Although the resale value on the Apple stuff seems to hold up a bit. I've had friends upgrade to a newer machine for the price they would have paid for a PC just by selling the old Mac. I suspect that too will slowly change as time goes on. (Was just looking at eBay for example - I could sell the Mac Mini that I have and only had about a $100 loss on it. I bought it almost two years ago now.)

slantyyz 10y ago

>> I've been getting more and more life out of my Apple stuff. The thing is, your next upgrade is probably going to involve a device with soldered on memory and a chassis that isn't as conducive to end-user hardware upgrades as the model you have. The upgradability gravy train pretty much ended with the 2012 unibody models. The only way you can maximize the life of your next purchase is to buy the maximum spec'ed machine. Doesn't sound like a problem, but maxing out an Apple BTO machine gets expensive fast. I thought my 2011 15" MBP would still be my main machine today (the specs still hold up today), except mine was one of the models that had the overheating GPUs and it got bricked and stopped booting. It wasn't until after I switched to a Windows laptop that Apple finally acknowledged the problem and issued a repair order. By that time, they had basically lost me as a customer of their computer products.

jrnichols 10y ago
That is true, but I'm seeing that spreading into the non-Apple world as well. It's as if the industry realized that people just don't do many hardware upgrades to laptops. Desktop space is a whole different story, though. Although the resale value on the Apple stuff seems to hold up a bit. I've had friends upgrade to a newer machine for the price they would have paid for a PC just by selling the old Mac. I suspect that too will slowly change as time goes on. (Was just looking at eBay for example - I could sell the Mac Mini that I have and only had about a $100 loss on it. I bought it almost two years ago now.)