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The author claims to know many people who happily run five year old machines. I guess I might know a few too, but I know many many more who jump on every new ge

The author claims to know many people who happily run five year old machines. I guess I might know a few too, but I know many many more who jump on every new generation just as soon as they can. This is especially true in the Apple world, where in pre-COVID times people literally slept on the sidewalk to get in the store first on launch day. The number of people who actually care about Apple support for a five year old product is probably pretty small. There are reasonably-debatable reasons why people should stop buying Macs. A shift to ARM is not one of them.

qubex 6y ago
I’m very satisfied with a fully maxed-out 2012 Mac Mini (quad i7, 32GB RAM, 2x 1TB SATA SSDs). It’s plenty powerful for my needs (productivity, and occasional use of Mathematica) and at any rate over the past ten years or so I’ve migrated progressively towards using iPads (having been almost compulsive in my upgrading every single generation from the very first back in 2010 to the latest iPad Pro 2020). When yesterday I saw the news of the new ARM mac, I thought “aha, OK, I want it”. Keep in mind that at one point I had a quad-G5 PowerMac. I really like power, flexibility, and expandability. I’m not much of a laptop believer either. But what I’m trying to say is that over the course of the past decade or so the Mac has been sufficiently stagnant that a 2012 Mac Mini, albeit one that is highly upgraded, is an entirely workable platform. I was thinking to myself last night (or this morning, depending on one’s perspective): “What will Apple’s Intel Epoch be known for?” and I had an instant answer for myself: “It will be remembered for stagnation. There was a switch and things were better for five years and then nothing really happened for a decade,.”
Spartan-S63 6y ago
Yeah, I think this is a totally fair take. In my personal case, I keep my personal Mac for as long as it has AppleCare. When the three years are up, it's time to replace it. I short circuited it a little when the 16" MacBook Pro came out, but it was close enough to three years from late 2016 MacBook Pro.

qubex 6y ago

I’m very satisfied with a fully maxed-out 2012 Mac Mini (quad i7, 32GB RAM, 2x 1TB SATA SSDs). It’s plenty powerful for my needs (productivity, and occasional use of Mathematica) and at any rate over the past ten years or so I’ve migrated progressively towards using iPads (having been almost compulsive in my upgrading every single generation from the very first back in 2010 to the latest iPad Pro 2020). When yesterday I saw the news of the new ARM mac, I thought “aha, OK, I want it”. Keep in mind that at one point I had a quad-G5 PowerMac. I really like power, flexibility, and expandability. I’m not much of a laptop believer either. But what I’m trying to say is that over the course of the past decade or so the Mac has been sufficiently stagnant that a 2012 Mac Mini, albeit one that is highly upgraded, is an entirely workable platform. I was thinking to myself last night (or this morning, depending on one’s perspective): “What will Apple’s Intel Epoch be known for?” and I had an instant answer for myself: “It will be remembered for stagnation. There was a switch and things were better for five years and then nothing really happened for a decade,.”

Spartan-S63 6y ago

Yeah, I think this is a totally fair take. In my personal case, I keep my personal Mac for as long as it has AppleCare. When the three years are up, it's time to replace it. I short circuited it a little when the 16" MacBook Pro came out, but it was close enough to three years from late 2016 MacBook Pro.