5 ms·
For Apple Laptops, more like 7-8, at least in the old days. Typically you would only replace them when they (gradually) became annoyingly slow for daily use.
by bipson 5y ago
For Apple Laptops, more like 7-8, at least in the old days.
Typically you would only replace them when they (gradually) became annoyingly slow for daily use.
Agreed, I had to upgrade all of of my PowerBooks/MacBooks at some point with RAM and larger HDDs/SSDs.
And my last Apple Laptop is from 2012 and I learned that Apple now drops support by the OS considerably earlier than in the old days (i.e. unecesarily early, most 8-10 year old MacBooks would be perfectly fine for daily use, but now unsafe) - at least that was my impression.
And installing Linux on them is always a mixed bag (fans, trackpad, etc.), even though it sure is better with Intel Macs.
- asddubs 5y agoI bought a macbook air in ~2012 and it was unusably slow after a year. bought a thinkpad to put linux on after that that I'm still using today (although admittedly it's a bit of a wreck now - still, it lasted for 8 years)
- bipson 5y agoThe MacBook Air was not really a "high performance" machine to start with though - you can't compare that with a ThinkPad :) And it was seldomly updated, so you could get very aged specs. If you bought a MacBook 2011/2012 you would typically get an HDD and between 4 and 8GB RAM. Software requirements/demands sky-rocketed shortly after that. On a non-Air you could at least upgrade this yourself, which gave the machine new life ("just like new")
- asddubs 5y agoit did have a 128gb ssd. The thinkpad was also an x1 carbon (also 4gb of ram), so it had a similar form factor, not sure about cpu specs, I probably should have mentioned that.
- unfunco 5y agoI bought the 2011 MacBook Air 11" and it still performs really well for everyday tasks, probably the best computer I've ever owned.
- asddubs 5y agoInteresting, I wonder why mine slowed down so much then. From what I remember it was after an OS upgrade, it was my first time trying a mac, and I ended up being disappointed and going back to linux, but I also didn't do a deep dive into figuring out the reasons for it.
- sgerenser 5y agoI believe the 2011 era MacBook Air (EveryMac.com confirms only the 11”) had an entry level 2GB RAM variant. That one probably got pretty painful after just a couple OS updates.
- dagmx 5y agoAFAIK other than the 32 bit devices and some with smaller vram, all Intel Macs are still supported
- bipson 5y agoThis is not true at all.
- jtbayly 5y agoShouldn’t be unsafe. Security updates are still coming out for the older OS that runs on these machines.