3 ms·

I started home computing in the late 70’s to early 80’s. Over the years I’ve found that when I get to the point that I need to upgrade one part of the computer,

I started home computing in the late 70’s to early 80’s. Over the years I’ve found that when I get to the point that I need to upgrade one part of the computer, it’s almost never worth it. It’s usually time to upgrade the whole thing. When I would replace or upgrade a single part, it would extend me for maybe 6 months before I ran into another piece needing an upgrade. These days, I tend to buy higher end computers and use them for a long time. For example, I just retired my 2013 Mac Pro this last week. It was running fine, but can’t update to the latest OS and some of my critical software needs the latest OS to run, or will shortly. If it weren’t for that, I probably would have waited another year or two to upgrade.

FullyFunctional 4y ago
It took me too long to understand this, but I'll toss in one exception to your rule: storage (short term and long term). I've found that it's frequently useful and economical to upgrade long term storage; eg. the HDs/SSDs until recently were on a price curve such that you were better off postponing buying more until you needed it. And quite a few of my systems have gotten a RAM bump midlife (where prices had come down). Alas, as more as more systems now come with soldered down memory, I usually max it out for longevity.
Moto7451 4y ago
That 2013 Mac Pro can actually keep on chugging with the latest OS care of OpenCore Legacy Patcher. Thankfully Apple doesn’t seem too inclined to force these into e-waste/retro computing.